Greetings from College Park, Maryland (pronounced Marrilynd! in Australian). It is near Washington (DC) and I have work here (at the UMD) and in the capital for the next 2 days. Weather is hot but we are 189 kms or 2.8 hours from the nearest surf according to Google maps, which is equivalent to being landlocked to me! So no quick surf before work! Losers! I came down here late yesterday (5 hour drive) after a workshop at the Levy Institute jointly hosted with the United Nations Development Program, which was held in upstate New York. No summer up there at the moment but the Catskills Mountains are very beautiful – it is near to Woodstock. Anyway, I left the workshop thinking – bad luck if you are poor!

Today the ABS published its Average Weekly Earnings, Australia data which gives us some information about how workers are faring in the recession from the perspective of their wage returns. It also allows us to compare the trajectory of wage movements over this downturn (so far) against the 1991 downturn. Some interesting results emerge from that comparison.

I must have just woken from a bad dream. Did I read this week that the Australian Government will record a deficit of $A58 billion or 4.9 per cent of GDP but are forecasting unemployment will rise from its present parlous level of 5.4 per cent to 8.5 per cent by the middle of 2012? It must be a joke. If it is serious then this lot deserve to be a one-term government not that I have any hope that the alternative (conservative or green) would do any better. They are all caught up in this neo-liberal straitjacket which has been increasingly tightened over the last 30 years and now ensures that our national government will not use its economic policy capacity responsibly. Our current Federal Government not only continues to abandon full employment but is also abandoning the unemployed. What a place!

I am currently researching (again) long-term unemployment and how it behaves. Neo-liberal economists typically consider long term unemployment to be highly obdurate in relation to the business cycle and thus a primary constraint on a person’s chances of getting a job. This was the assertion that underpinned the neo-liberal approach to labour market policy and which in Australia culminated in the privatisation of the public employment service and the establishment of the (failed) Job Network. It is one of the most disappointing aspects of current federal policy that the Government is intent of keeping this ideologically-driven supply-side approach going. While the Prime Minister continually claims that he wants to introduce evidence-based policy, his decision to retain the supply side neo-liberal approach to labour market policy fails the facts test outright.

Today I released a major new research report Red alert suburbs: An employment vulnerability index for Australia’s major urban regions which was the result of a collaboration with Scott Baum (URP, Griffith University) who I share a large ARC Discovery Grant with. The Report and its findings has already received front page coverage in the large Australian dailies – The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald.

Senior journalists often do more harm than good when they write about technical issues that they clearly do not understand. In many cases, they rely on the technical knowledge of their favourite economist or the flavour of the month economist and they are not skilled enough to know when their “economist” is also talking rubbish.