You know, the Government may actually have gotten the point. Early days, and we haven’t seen the budget yet, but these are positive straws in the wind. This is good: Budget 2015: rewards for seniors to stay at work. I don’t know whether keeping me around will be like getting an ARC grant, but nonetheless:

Older Australians will get new ­rewards for finding work and strong incentives to put off their retirement as the federal government recasts its controversial pension savings in a wider budget reform aimed at boosting the workforce at the same time it helps to cut the deficit.

Federal cabinet has agreed to make faster payments of up to $10,000 to employers who hire older Australians as part of an overhaul of job programs to help tens of thousands of people back into the workforce.

A separate budget measure will give people approaching ­retirement a new incentive to stay at work for a few more years in the knowledge they could collect a bonus when they choose to claim the Age Pension.

The budget will also spare about two million retirees from an unpopular change to pension ­indexation, making the savings instead from fewer than 400,000 people with substantial private ­assets.

Yesterday, or maybe the day before, it was childcare payments that were redirected towards supporting women at work, not to support those on maternity leave which was the original plan last election. Instead, the need to make employment grow and people in jobs secure seems to be the underlying theme. Supply-side economics comes in many forms.

Jobs growth in a market economy just happens. The question, where will the jobs come from, an ever-present idiocy of those who have no feel for market outcomes, is answered by the fact that jobs just seem to come, almost from nothing. The more public spending that could be pared back the better, but with the active promotion of the private sector merely to get on with it, the funny thing is that it will do just that.