Green jobs and a red scheme

In an earlier “greatest economic crisis since the great depression”, 1975, I found myself happily and productively unemployed (I have never read so many novels so quickly ever again, sigh) in Hobart after a season of apple-picking in Huonville, a few pleasant weeks hitch-hiking around this delightful isle and a truly inspirational week walking through the Crade Mountain-Lake St Clair wilderness (including staying on for a few extra days at a lake-edge hut called Narcissus, I kid you not).

Then, the Whitlam Government came up with something called the Regional Employment Development (RED) scheme. News of this clever piece of policy innovation came to me from a very stern chap at the Hobart C.E.S. (then government owned but since sold off to well-meaning socialists like Therese Rein) who, having spotted me as a malingering mainland hippy, told me that it had been decided (by whom and for what reasons were never made clear) that I was to be sent to the Hobart Botantical Gardens for a six week stint. He cautioned me that if I refused this offer, or failed to show up or otherwise breached my employment contract, my benefits would be declined for a certain, and probably lengthy, period.

The Hobart Gardens was actually a pretty good outcome, some of my friends were sent to weed highways and collect firewood. It all had a slight echo of the convict heritage, stronger here than anywhere else in Australia.

But it was clear immediately on my arrival that the Gardens, attractively located near a modest house later used by Richard Butler for an unfortunately brief period, had not planned for this sudden influx of untrained and largely useless employees. I was assigned to a ‘gang’ which included two members of a local bikie group and a draft dodger from the USA (who said he was saving some money prior to telling the Aussie officials he was here illegally and getting deported to Hawaii, well that was the plan).

Although, and unlike the current NSW Premier, I have never envisaged horticulture as a career option, it was extremely pleasant heading off from my student accomodation (therein lies another tale) on my sparkling new peugeot ten-speed bike (bought with the proceeds of my apple-picking) to the Gardens each morning.

We were first assigned to some general weeding duties but then the fun started. The head guy decided we should build a trench along a path where at some future time, depending on the availability of RED scheme funds, a decorative feature wall would be built. There was a problem here because the RED scheme seemed to pay for labour only not the actual bricks and stones and so on but he held hopes that this would change.

For days we toiled away. Then the head guy turned up and decided the trench needed to be deeper and narrower. This shocked the bikers, one the son of a current inmate of Risdon prison, who loudly declaimed that this was a scandalous waste of their time and taxpayers’ money. The head guy returned fire by telling them that landscaping was an ‘art’ not a science and that he was an artist whereas we, by implication, were composed of far coarser material. This only inflamed the bikers’ working-class sensibilities even further.

By this time several of us long-haired hippies were convulsed with laughter and the head guy turned on us and accused us of having “LSD flashbacks”, something I think he had read about in a magazine somewhere. Our mirth was not diminished by these suggestions and he headed off no doubt to do some more conceptualising about the shape and size of his beloved wall. The bikers’ instinct was to resign in protest, but we spent an hour reminding them of the possible implications for their benefits and managed to get them to stay on.

These pleasant memories flooded back when I heard Kevin Rudd announce his green jobs initiative yesterday. Of course, it will be much more sensibly run now. After all, the CES has been privatised and is now run by very sensible chaps.