I gave a keynote presentation at a recent conference where I showed that public sector employment contractions in Australia were a significant part of the rise in unemployment in Australia since the late 1980s. Had the public maintained its scale (proportion) with the underlying growth in the population then unemployment would have remained low throughout that period. The neo-liberal onslaught and the fiscal surplus fetishism has been a major reason why persistent unemployment occurs. All the nonsense about structural reform and the need to cut workplace protection overlook this fact. The government made a political decision to significantly cut its own employment and quite apart from the fluctuations in the private sector and the increased precariousness in private employment, that decision by government has had devastating consequences. The same situation arises in many advanced western nations under the spell of neo-liberalism. The thing about the current pro-market orthodoxy is that it has lost all sense of proportion. Mass unemployment involving billions of dollars of lost income is deliberately created by policy makers in search of a few pennies (relatively) in making ports work more quickly etc (microeconomic reform). In Europe, all sense of proportion has been lost. Read on …