Government marketing

Scotty from marketing has been at work in finding names for the government packages to deal with COVID-19. First we had JobSeeker, a renaming of the unemployment payment, and then we had JobKeeper, the new subsidy the government paid to businesses to keep their staff employed instead of laying everyone off.  Now we have JobMaker, the name of the proposed transformation of TAFE, an institution which used to operate well until its last reformation and privatisation.  The name that will be on everyone’s lips in a few months is JobLoser when all the jobkeepers come to the end of the government subsidy.

 The government has also decided it is time to switch imagery.  We were introduced to the idea of the economy as a bear in a cave, slipping into hibernation as the COVID winter descended on it.  But now we have a medical analogy.  The economy is a patient in the intensive care unit, one who must strip off the ventilator and stride out of hospital to find good health again.  I’m not sure how far this image can be pushed without appearing to trivialise the real experience of COVID patients in ICU.  Also I feel that most metaphors try to find likenesses between two images.  No real ICU patient would leap out of bed to find the exit door to become a well person again. The economy as an ICU patient is bound to come a cropper as the government works to extend the analogy.

Not only is the government playing around with its Job series. The media has added its own contribution in JobBlooper, the name given to the wildly incorrect estimation of the cost of the JobKeeper program.