A plan to tackle unemployment
A, worryingly, overlooked aspect of Atlasian politics is unemployment. Our national unemployment has, once again, risen - now sitting at 7.6%, placing us in the worst 40% of OECD countries. Atlasia needs a strategy to overcome this problem and fast.
A vicious cycle can emerge where high unemployment causes consumer demand to drop. This holds corporate profits down, leading to redundancies to cut costs. This only increases unemployment, making the problem worse for the average citizen. The Federal Government needs to take action to reduce employment and, if elected as President, I will make reducing unemployment one of my key objectives.
You may be wondering, how can the Federal Government assist in bringing unemployment down? An important policy that I have is to offer reduced cost training for sectors our economy that are suffering from skills shortages. This will enable people to train (or re-train) to receive the qualifications and knowledge required to work in that specific industry. At the moment, a large amount of skills shortages are filled through immigration, which fails to solve the long term problems of skills shortages within that industry - despite being a good short to medium term option. This proposal will have an impact on reducing the long term skill shortages within our economy; giving people the opportunity to work in a new industry or find work for the first time.
To assist with this, I will seek to make university education cheaper, particularly in key areas, to encourage more people from lower income backgrounds to advance their education. Many people who have the knowledge and skills to go to college may are put off by the high costs and miss out on an important route to a good career as a result. I previously created a bill for the Lincoln region that reduced the cost of university education for people from lower socio-economic groups and I would like to expand this to the whole country. It's not just the cost of tuition fees, but the living costs that many students require help with. I believe that any bill that seeks to make further education cheaper, should also cover the living costs for students. A system similar to the UK's structure would be a good start, where loans are provided to students and they don't start paying anything back until they start earning over a certain amount of money. This ensures that people are in a stable job before they are required to pay money back towards these loans.
I've talked before about my plans to provide tax reliefs to small business to enable them to grow and this is an important way that this bill will have an impact on our economy. If people are given tax relief to start their own businesses, it will make people more inclined to do just that. This policy encourages job creation within the private sector and may be a reasonable route out of unemployment for people who have a clear idea of a business plan which they would like to put it to practice. This will also help diversify our economy, creating more jobs in different industries. Creating jobs in areas where there are job shortages, will reduce unemployment.
Additionally, the Federal Government should expand the number of public sector workers. A number of really important services that have a great impact on lives across our great nation. They include teachers, fire fighters, the police, the military, the security service and the transport industry. Training up and employing more teachers will lead to smaller class sizes, and hopefully better education as a result. More people working in the emergency services will make our neighbourhoods safer. People shouldn't be employed for the sake of employment - I don't want to see more people in unnecessary roles, but having more teachers in the classrooms and more police on the streets is a positive thing for Atlasia.
This is by no means the end, just the start. Something has to be done to tackle Atlasia's high unemployment rate and I believe that these policies will start to move the country in the right direction.
