Gordon Campbell: On The Government’s Epic Fails In Jobs And Housing

Through its austerity measures, the coalition government has engineered a rise in unemployment in order to reduce inflation while – simultaneously – cracking down harder and harder on the people thrown out of work by its own policies. To that end, Social Development Minister Louise Upston this week added two new punitive measures to her already draconian “traffic light” system of welfare management. Meanwhile back on Planet Earth, the reality is that the government’s economic policies are (a) generating more, not fewer beneficiaries at a time when (b) jobs ads and job openings are falling.