Saturday, October 23, 2004
This challenging paradox
“We do have this challenging paradox in Australia of low unemployment but also very low participation rates in certain age cohorts”*.
- Prime Minister John Howard, 22 October 2004
Err, those putatively selected cohorts would be Australian men in their late-20s, 30s, 40s and early-50s – if you go by the stats Howard himself was citing a few weeks ago, that is.
Alternatively, you may prefer the curious transliteration, elsewhere in today’s Oz, of the above quote, in which “certain age cohorts” become a singular, denominated cohort of 55 to 65-year-olds (seemingly of both genders).
These two versions of the same story can’t both be simultaneously true (especially now with Derrida dead, n’stuff). The one that circumscribes a major, if still largely nascent, economic calamity was made at the height of the election campaign. The post-election victory alternative formulation is of much more soothing proportions – convenient in more than one way, it will only require a few hundred million dollars thrown at baby boomer home-owners for the problem to presumably go away completely.
* Samantha Maiden “Welfare culture spurs minister to tackle jobs” The Australian 23 October 2004
“We do have this challenging paradox in Australia of low unemployment but also very low participation rates in certain age cohorts”*.
- Prime Minister John Howard, 22 October 2004
Err, those putatively selected cohorts would be Australian men in their late-20s, 30s, 40s and early-50s – if you go by the stats Howard himself was citing a few weeks ago, that is.
Alternatively, you may prefer the curious transliteration, elsewhere in today’s Oz, of the above quote, in which “certain age cohorts” become a singular, denominated cohort of 55 to 65-year-olds (seemingly of both genders).
These two versions of the same story can’t both be simultaneously true (especially now with Derrida dead, n’stuff). The one that circumscribes a major, if still largely nascent, economic calamity was made at the height of the election campaign. The post-election victory alternative formulation is of much more soothing proportions – convenient in more than one way, it will only require a few hundred million dollars thrown at baby boomer home-owners for the problem to presumably go away completely.
* Samantha Maiden “Welfare culture spurs minister to tackle jobs” The Australian 23 October 2004
