Ideas@TheCentre
Shovel ready what?
Recessions seem to be an opportunity for people to spout kooky ideas. That’s fine unless it’s your country’s senior politicians spouting them.
The central feature of the Australian budget was a ‘nation building’ plan. New railways, roads, port investment and so on, providing so called ‘shovel ready’ jobs. This term has also been used extensively in New Zealand and is an unfortunate legacy of the Great Depression – cloth capped workers digging trenches and building great public works. No such jobs exist today. Of course the government can ‘create’ any job it likes by paying people to dig holes and fill them in, but this has little to do with nation building.
The problem with the so-called ‘shovel ready’ jobs is that since the Depression, there have been great advances in technology. Roads and rail are being built with better technology using diggers, rollers and hot mix trucks – not by sweating over pickaxes and spades and puffing on PortRoyal (well, maybe still the latter). Most labourers actually involved in the construction of these roads require know-how, a swathe of expensive licences, OSH (OH&S) training, and the need to follow regulations – not to mention experience and knowledge about what they are doing. As a result, these roads are of much higher quality and are more efficiently built than they were 80 years ago.
In order to create ‘shovel ready’ jobs, a government would have to relax all licensing and OSH requirements and settle for manually built roads. This is also assuming that just anyone can wander up and help build a road, also untrue today compared to 80 years ago. It is an unrealistic, cargo cult mentality unhelpfully propagated by Keynesians and politicians. One suspects Australia will realise this over the next decade.
Many politicians wouldn’t have a clue what a ‘shovel ready’ job involves apart from a high-visibility vest. They do not realise that while some jobs require relatively few skills, the skills they do require are possessed by an ever-shrinking proportion of society – which means they do not magically create employment.
Arguing for infrastructure may have merit, but creating ‘shovel ready’ jobs has little to do with it. It is another meaningless political slogan that romanticises a bygone era.
