Skilled immigrants increase wages by like ~10%. It's unskilled immigrants and refugees that can cause problems, generally among high-school dropouts and existing immigrants.
I'm fully willing to accept that the net effect of all skilled immigration is wage positive due to synergy effects / greater collaboration potential and the increased opportunities that opens up.
The thing is that unemployment benefits are terrible methods of welfare. They distort the labour market, destroy long-term skill acquisition and harm more than help recipients. Long-term unemployed especially are harmed by unemployment benefits.
People who spend long periods of time unemployed live far less time, have far lower long-term wages, and have lower qualitative outcomes. The LNP want people in employment because short and long-term outcomes are massively, massively improved by every single quantitative and qualitative measure.
Yes, but punitive measure like work for the dole etc, are equally ineffective because they aren't jobs that develop sought after skills, decreased the time for actual upskilling and real employment searches. They also rarely lead to permanent positions because there's an ongoing stream of (from the employers perspective) underpaid labor to use.
I don't see how struggling to live for a month or competing with a backpacker to pick fruit or do casual hospitality (generally not actually possible since cooking the books in those industries to pay under minimum wage is rife) is going to help on that front. Upfront training in areas the person has some interest in that are in demand would be far more effective (but also far more costly), including relocation aid where possible.
Theres also the minor issue that it's hard to separate the social causes (Protestant work ethic, get a real job, you lazy bludger, and the resulting socialisation and mental effects etc) , from the economic consequences of joblessness (ie insufficient money for healthy lifestyle, regular checkups, treating conditions early, regular dental work, lack of funds for mobility etc) from the actual effects that are inherent to being a human without a job.
I think my real problem with the left at the moment (and why I've been arguing more with Young ALP than LNP this week) is that we can't separate policy intentions from outcomes. Many well-meaning policies actually hurt far more than they help (my favourite example of this is the anti-disabled discrimination law in the US, which was designed to help disabled employees in the US, but ended up having no effects on the wider population while lowering both wages and employment levels for the disabled).
Sure. I'm still not sure it's a net social benefit to provide subsidized labor (ie below living cost) to employers to save the state money since as you're fond of saying the ability to hire below the cost of living distorts the market. Admittedly a strong redistributive system can ameliorate that. But highly profitable corporations and those drawing large pay from them are generally inclined to fight such (i.e taxes) using the power their profits and market position provides.
But we don't exactly have an alternative planet to test these things on. You can argue we have other states / countries but race to the bottom parasitism that wouldn't be possible in a vacuum is entirely possible between states / countries (the world economy would go down in flames if everyone took the Singapore / Ireland approach).
