Look to Edges to See Clues
If you are not living at the edge, you are taking up too much room. Welcome to the twenty-first century.
The edge is increasingly where you will find what really matters. Twentieth century talk of leading edge and cutting edge referred to that exceptional, exciting, even dangerous space where the unorthodox, revolutionary, and experimental stuff occurred. No longer.
Twenty-first century talk means edge is where you find the things that actually make sense of our chaotic everyday world. If you want to know what a contract is really about, certainly glance at the main text, but STUDY the small print. If you want to know the actual intentions of politicians or bureaucratic institutions, listen to what they say in passing, those little throw-away lines hidden in the midst of their grand promises and empty motherhood verbiage.
The latest OECD report on Australia’s economic future, released 20 December 99, has several shockwave edges.
The report slams the Aussie Government’s work-for-the-dole scheme as essentially maintaining the unemployability of our very unskilled and untrained job seekers by offering jobs that provide little useful training for employment off the scheme.
The scheme is a idead end, an unemployment trap very similar to the poverty trap whereby you are kept busy doing things that will not assist you to gain what you need, skills etc, to get out of the trap.
This is not, however, an edge of the OECD report. Neither is the report’s confirmation of Australia’s healthy economic condition, with forecasted growth expected to remain at 3-4 percent and unemployment to fall to 6.5 percent by 2001.
The edges are much more interesting.
Edge number one: the GST will likely sustain a higher level of inflation and not be the one-off price rise as predicted by the Government. Reflect on what that means for interest rates during 2000, for employment, for growth economics?
Edge number two: there are two potential major threats to Australia’s long term economic health. (Reflect on these two little throwaway lines and their impact of life as we know it in the Western world). First threat: a stockmarket crash in the United States
Excuse me? This is the OECD talking, not some loopy space cadet. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development mentions in passing that if the American stockmarket crashes this year, our economic stability might be jeopardised. Really.
Now conservative bodies driven by conservative corporate forces do not pick out any old what-ifs when discussing a nation’s economy - they choose highly possible scenarios. The report did not identify the threat of, say, a super race of androids taking over Wall Street, or the sudden disappearance of the world’s supply of petroleum this year They said the crash of the American stock market.
Second threat: The collapse of the Asian economic recovery. Now that would really rain on our boisterous economic parade, too. Make it a wash-out actually.
But these two possibilities are not highlighted for discussion by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development - just part of the edge.
Business News 13 January 2000
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