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Outrage as multimillionaire calls for 200k to lose jobs to put workers in their placeThe business mogul previously went viral for telling millennials to save up for a house by avoiding

eating avocado toast. By Charles Harrison, News Reporter 13:56, Thu, Sep 14, 2023 | UPDATED: 15:06, Thu, Sep 14, 2023 Share Article Share Article Facebook X LinkedIn Reddit Bluesky Email

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A multimillionaire has apologised after crudely suggesting that there should be a jump in unemployment in order to improve the attitudes of workers.

Tim Gurner said there needs to be "pain in the economy" to galvanise the workforce.

Videos of his comments quickly went viral and have racked up millions of views.

The gym-owner-turned-real-estate-mogul claimed that the covid pandemic had changed workers' attitudes and work ethics for the worse.

He has since apologised and said he "deeply" regretted the comments.

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Speaking during a property summit this week, the 41-year-old said productivity in the construction sector had suffered as a result of the new attitude.

He claimed this, alongside tighter regulations, was fuelling Australia's housing shortage. His solution to "arrogance in the job market" was for the 3.7 per cent unemployment rate in

Australia to jump by 40-50 per cent.

The bizarre strategy would see more than 200,000 people lose their jobs.

The business mogul had previously gone viral for the facetious claim that the way for young people to afford a home would be to stop eating avocado toast.

He said in 2017 that when he was saving for his first home, he "wasn't buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each".

The BBC calculated that at that time in London, youngsters would have to not eat 24,499 avocado toasts in order to save a deposit on a home in the midst of soaring house prices not matched

by wage growth.

Commenting on the job market, Mr Gurner said: "There's been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them. We need to remind people they work for the

employer, not the other way around."

He added there were "important conversations to have in this environment of high inflation, pricing pressures on housing and rentals due to a lack of supply, and other cost of living

issues".

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His comments were "deeply insensitive" to employees, tradespeople, and families "across Australia" who are affected by cost of living pressures and job losses, he admitted.

Australian Council of Trade Unions president Michele O’Neil slammed his comments as "incredibly offensive" and "just not factually true" while appearing on the ABC’s RN Breakfast on Thursday

morning.

"I thought it was a spoof," she said. "When I first saw it, I thought: ‘This is a sketch’.

"This is an uber-rich guy who is saying the quiet part out loud ... he was basically advocating that you should make working people suffer to bring them under control.

"And he was talking about it being a good thing to increase unemployment by 50 per cent ... saying that workers had got lazy, that people hadn’t been working hard enough."

Australian MPs of various political persuasions criticised the ill-judged remarks. Labor MP Jerome Laxale said they were "comments you'd associate with a cartoon supervillain", while Liberal

MP Keith Wolahan said they "could not be more out of touch".

Mr Wolahan told the AFR: "The loss of a job is not a number. It sees people on the streets and dependent upon food banks."

Minerals Council of Australia chairman Andrew Michelmore defended him, claiming employees "have got used to earning the same amount of money but not putting in the same hours".

Despite rampant inflation wage growth in Australia has been slow, with a paper from the country's Treasury finding that Australian workers earned only $18 (£9.33) per week more in November

2022 than they did in November 2012, a statistic they attributed to employers holding too much power.