Supporting the System

Wednesday, 6 November 2002

I've been thinking about those Centrelink ads that have been apearing on the TV for a while. You know the ones - two young guys are shown hanging around at a coffee bar. The conversation turns to their friend Robbo, who got "busted" by Centrelink and "by the way, how's that Pizza job of yours going?". In the final shot the young man with the pizza job is shown calling Centrelink to dob himself in before he too gets busted. There was another one on the theme of single mothers with live-in boyfriends but that it disappeared from sight fairly early in the campaign.

I'll admit that I am slow on the uptake sometimes - it wasn't until my friend Zeppo Bakunin pointed out that Carly Simon didn't know me from a bar of soap that I realised that the song You're So Vain wasn't about me. So I'm probably the last person in this country to have noticed the double message in these little vignettes of life on the dole. I certainly hope so.

The first message obviously, is the surface one - if you're a dole bludger with a part time job, it's your responsibility to "Support the System that Supports You". But there's an underlying message here for the rest of the TV audience - this is what's really going on in "unemployed" Australia, young people are skiving off the tax payer to supplement their part-time earnings. I'll admit that I'm no Roland Barthes but I'm embarassed that it's taken me so long to work this out.

It's the sort of thing that Joseph Goebbels would heartily endorse, although he'd probably add that a little more trouble could have been taken to make it quite clear that the two young men were Jewish.