Rail is great. Trees are great. But Work for the Dole? ... not so great. Good thought, but bad package.
Why? The name, for starters. "Work for the Dole" immediately conjures up grim Depression-era images.
Nothing wrong with "make-work" as long as it's constructive. All public service occupations - teachers, doctors, nurses, police, judiciary, the public service itself, even politicians - are essentially make-work schemes.
These positions don't drop out of the sky. Society, as a whole, decides these type of jobs are necessary, and so we "make" them possible through public funding.
Given the private sector can't provide the range of lower-skill, entry-level jobs it once did, then government intervention is similarly required.
If we - as a society - decide it's not healthy to have people permanently disenfranchised, then we have to "make" alternative job opportunities. But they must help build genuine skills, be constructive, appropriately incentivised, and available to successive intakes.
First off, change the name. Many Work for the Dole schemes crash and burn, but an Australian one came up trumps simply by giving the programme a positive name - from memory, something like "Labour Solutions".
Then, its team was treated not as dole workers, but as real employees doing meaningful work in authentic work situations.
The participants' self-esteem immediately rose. They lost the deadbeat doler connotations, had an occupational identity that fostered self-confidence and pride in themselves, their work, and their team, as well as learning valuable skills.
Such programmes need only be for, say, three days a week, but on the minimum wage, so there is a palpable financial incentive to participate as opposed to just passively collecting a shoestring benefit.
As bona fide "workers", they have reciprocal responsibilities - set numbers of sick days and holidays, deductions for unexplained absences, appropriate performance requirements, and the like.
In education sector jargon, it becomes an authentic learning experience, spring-boarding eventual private sector employment.
Specialist skill tuition such as for literacy and numeracy, vehicle or heavy machinery licencing, and so forth, can also be embedded into the programme. As with the American New Deal experience in the 1930s (in essence social welfare programmes), the "jobs" can also be in diverse areas such as the creative arts, hospitality or entertainment.
A range of unfilled basic private sector jobs are already available. We know because we've scandalously used as a pretext for immigration the notion that we supposedly can't train enough drivers, builders' labourers and shelf-packers (let alone harvesters or farm workers), despite having about 90,000 youth not currently in education, employment or training.
We also know there are those quite happy to be permanently parked on their nono. But the tragedy is that there are still plenty busting to get a foot on the employment ladder if only they had basic entry-level work-ready skills. You don't have to be a trained carpenter to help build kit-set houses.
Many pooh-pooh these programmes on the grounds they're "too expensive". Whatever the price, it's dirt cheap compared to the eventual cost of NOT having them.
It is the bottom-of-the-cliff collateral damage of a relatively small sector of disengaged and disenfranchised - seriously shut out of wider society - which mainly consumes the billions of dollars now disappearing down the maw of multifarious social dysfunction agencies.
