Well Kev, you're getting the unemployed to predict the future on penalty of fraud charges and imprisonment, so why not do the same to your ever so un-prescient economists?

The latest thing to come to my attention is that the unemployed are now forced to accurately predict their own economic future and sign an affidavit to the effect. If they get it wrong, it leads to monetary penalties and possible imprisonment.

If they unemployed can be expected to predict the future, why not your over-employed regulators and economists? Perhaps if they get it wrong they get some prison time or at least lose a fortnights pay, if not their jobs?

For example Kev, you get sacked from government and have to go on the dole for short stint until the smile gets you another gig.
You rock up to the dole office and sign on. Thereafter you have to take your claim form in every two weeks (in the 21st century you have to go to the office in person and hand the form in - Doh! #1).

Your form  requires the claimant to declare their earnings into the future. Yes the future. The unemployed are supposed to be able to predict accurately their economic circumstances into the future. Kev, your form has to be in on a certain day. The office is open from say 9.00am till 5 pm (except if you go anywhere near lunchtime it's open but there is no-one home so it's a three hour wait, but hey, you're on the dole and have nothing better to do, like look for a job).

Kev we know you're pretty prompt and will be there as the doors open at 9am.  When you sign your form, you are expected to know in advance if you will earn any income during that day, up until midnight that night, even though the latest you can hand your form in to the office is 5pm. Doh! #2

Kev, we know you can see the future and won't have your casual employer call you up at 5 past nine after you've handed in your form, asking you to do a few hours work that day.
You might be able to see the future and those cretins you employ to control the unemployed can all see the future through their crystal balls, but the average banker, economist and journalist can't so why let the cretins expect the unemployed to?

Perhaps it's just a plot to waste more of my taxpayer dollars when the unemployed person has to come into the office and tell you about the money they earned after the fact that they failed to predict before the fact. Waste precious staff time and penalise unemployed people who get it wrong?

Is it even legal? I don't suppose that matters, if you make it stupid and difficult enough to frustrate reasonable intelligent people they'll just go away and that lowers the unemployment figures. The subdued will just cop it sweet because they have no choice. I can't escape the vision of cretins in charge.

Either way I want you to do something about it, because Kev, selling the very dirt we stand on isn't going to get us out of this mess you and your experts failed to predict, but making things more efficient will. I'd start by sacking whichever idiot thought of the idea of those forms and the idiots up the chain who approved it. I'd then start working on some efficiencies. Ever heard of the internet? Perhaps web submitted forms?

It might just save a few hundred thousand car journeys (or subsidised bus journeys), millions of printed forms, pens and the money you pay those cretins, especially if you replace them with the some unemployed person. Just pick a random, how could they do the job any worse than the current idiots?

Why not replace those incompetent economists with some of those long-term unemployed who have been successfully predicting the future and have escaped being penalised by your stupidly conceived unemployment system. After all it is only going to get worse and the costs and the amount they are wasting will just contribute to breaking us.

And yes, Kev, I wouldn't be taking it to where the buck stops if the government you control wasn't the least transparent and least accessible 'democracy' on earth. With cretins in charge you get them at every level, ensuring that  you'll never hear of any systemic problems unless they sell newspapers or someone like me gives you a wake-up call. I doubt the average unemployed person could risk complaining because the cretins no doubt have their 'methods' to discourage them.
Apparently it took an Act of Parliament(ary idiocy)to pass that form, but I wouldn't take that as gospel, after all, it was what I was told by one of the Centrelink staff, and going on their current performance, you'd be better asking the average post.

I'm happy to hear from the responsible cretin at Centrelink, I doubt we will.
Perhaps we could privatise Centrelink and save the government a few billion, and the rest of the economy and environment a lot more. I'm sure HP or IBM could help me come up with a figure.

Kev, the only thing that is going to get us out of this mess is efficiency, innovation and action. So Kev, how about a little action close to home?

I tried to think of a more appropriate way to describe the faceless idiots responsible but I'm not in the habit of mis-describing anything and I'm not about to start right now. They should know better and are taking our taxpayer's money under false pretenses. Sack 'em. I'm sure you can find a diplomatic way to tell them they're being fired for stupidity. And that's only the tip of the iceberg of government waste.

Kev, just make sure you don't forget about efficiency, innovation and accountability because that is the answer to your problems, not throwing good money after bad, rewarding incompetency, wasting taxpayers money or selling the very dirt we stand on without at least a value-add. The maths just don't work out, the dirt runs out faster than you can re-import that value-added dirt as cars and consumables, unless of course you have endless credit, and we are all a wake up to that fact that we don't.

And yes call me out Kev, I'll do it for 1% of what I can save you, so long as you show the deadweight the door.