CANBERRA, KOMPAS.com – Aidan Draper is a resident in the City of Sydney who recently moved to Australia last March. He has applied for various types of jobs, including to become dishwasher at the restaurant.
The 21-year-old man began to run out of his savings but did not qualify for financial support from the government amid the pandemic Covid-19.
Last week he applied for a job as a dishwasher through a job search website.
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From the email notification he got after submitting the job application, Aidan was notified if there were 6,190 other people who applied for the position.
He has also applied for other jobs with a lot of interest, as stated in the email he got:
- Job arranging and sorting items in a cosmetics factory: 695 applicants
- Cleaning jobs or ‘cleaners’: 894 applicants
- Post office jobs: 1,320 applicants
- Lifting goods at printing companies: 4,085 applicants
- Crafting and sorting job at a heavy equipment plant: 1,479 applicants
“Because I have applied for many jobs and have been rejected frequently, I can only laugh at how many have applied for dishwashing jobs,” said Aidan.
How many jobs are available in Australia today?
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From data unemployment The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) showed that the unemployment rate in August had actually fallen to 6.8 percent from 7.5 percent previously. But of course this figure is still quite high.
Starting this Monday (28/9/2020), citizens in Australia who are entitled to financial benefits from the government must find at least eight jobs per month to be able to receive this assistance.
Expert the economy and workforce from the Grattan Institute in Melbourne, Matt Cowgill, said unemployment in Australia would still be high for the next few years.
“In general we haven’t seen the peak of the unemployment rate, so conditions will worsen,” he said.
Some economists also predict that the peak of unemployment in Australia will occur in the next few months, if there is no more new Covid-19 outbreak and if the economy can recover in 2021.
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45 thousand vacancies in the interior
Meanwhile in some rural and rural areas of Australia, filling job vacancies has always been a problem, regardless of before or during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“This is always a problem outside the big cities … [untuk] bringing in people to work in fields that are actually pretty good, “said Dr Kim Houghton, Chief Economist of the Regional Australia Institute (RAI).
Using data from the Australian Government, RAI tracks job vacancies uploaded via the internet.
The RAI found that there were more than 45,000 job vacancies in rural areas last August.
This figure represents a 14 percent increase in job vacancies from the previous month.
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Even in some remote areas there are actually more job vacancies than before the economic slowdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“These areas are generally quite strong with mining and agriculture sectors,” said Dr Houghton.
Ricky Banks, is an Australian born and raised in the city of Canberra.
For him, moving to a rural area caused an upheaval in him
But when his business in Queanbeyan, near Canberra, collapsed, the 32-year-old electrician said he had no choice.
“I decided to move on with my life and go to the countryside trying to use the skills I have,” he said.
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Two weeks ago he moved to Wellington, about 50 km from Dubbo, New South Walles, to work on a solar power plant now under construction.
He works 76 hours a week, at least for the next 4 months.
“Yes, the working hours are long. But do you just want to sit at home depressed and miserable? Or do you want to make money by leaving the house?” he said.
For her, the hardest part was leaving her six-year-old daughter, who still lives in Canberra with Ricky’s ex-partner.
Encouragement for residents to move to the interior
Professor Paula Brough, a psychologist at Griffith University, said most people believed that big cities “offer more job opportunities.”
“Everything from friendship, access to sports and culture, to education, determines whether someone wants to move or not,” said Professor Brough.
“I think people are used to having so many choices around them, so much busyness, that it can become quite an upheaval to suddenly change their entire lifestyle in the interior.”
A number of farmers in Australia have previously invited Australians to work on plantations.
One of the reasons is because there are not enough workers to pick and pack the fruit, so there is a concern that next year the fruits will rot.
In West, a farmer from the Bells Creek farm in New South Wales, said if the farm workforce was still short he would have to cut 30 percent cropping next year.
“If [pengurangan itu terjadi secara umum pada berbagai komoditas, maka harga akan naik dan itu akan berdampak signfikan pada dompet orang,” kata Di West.
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