The RBA’s policy deliberately creates unemployment. So why do we treat the jobless so badly?

The guy replying to you is right. Having significant “structural” unemployment is a bad thing for the economy, but “frictional” unemployment is always going to be there and represents people moving between jobs or entering the job search.

Russia having low unemployment isn’t a great measure because all it is actually highlighting is 1. No one wants to lose their job in Russia so if they get one they hold onto it for dear life and 2. If they lose their job or don’t have a job they don’t look for employment because they know they can’t get it (ie they exit the workforce). 3. The jobs are more low tech, labour intensive work, so it is easy enough to swap one person out for any other because they need limited knowledge or training (and I think 4. probably also applies too - wtf would you trust Russia on economic statistics?)

Of course Australia had low unemployment post war - they had massive public works program designed for everyone to “pitch in” so there was an element of duty in being employed even though you would have been doing something no one would put up with now like digging ditches and the like. Again, it’s not representative of good things, quite the opposite, it’s a function of low paying, low skill jobs prevailing significantly and a lack of choice for employees (employees with no choice don’t leave jobs).

Unemployment below the NAIRU indicates lots of likely skills shortages and gaps, so it’s not good for productivity and technology advancement, and while pushing up labour force competitiveness is a good thing, it also likely indicates more people are working significant overtime, the need for importing significant labour from overseas is higher, and also a likelihood prices are going up at a speed faster than wages.

It’s good to have a frictional rate that’s higher as it indicates choice and higher educated, more technical jobs

An economy isn't just distribution... it's efficient distribution, or more precisely efficient allocation of scarce resources to their most productive uses. We use price as an imperfect proxy for productivity. Full employment is where the market clears: every unit of labour willing to work at offered prices (equilibrium price, where supply and demand curves meet) is matched, minus the structural and frictional barriers.

With that out of the way

​Pushing unemployment below full employment (the NAIRU) forces employers to compete for a depleted labor pool. This drives up wages without increasing productivity, and employers' fiduciary passes increased labor costs onto the consumer. Higher prices force workers to demand higher wages, triggering a wage-price spiral and runaway inflation. There are social arguments for riding closer to NAIRU, but they're not economic arguments. Inflation hurts everyone long-term.

Also, an advancing economy expects some structural unemployment because of creative destruction. When Australian industries innovate, old skillsets become obsolete. Look at the Pilbara, where driverless haul trucks have displaced traditional drivers but created a massive shortage of remote robotics technicians. Or look at IT infra moving to the cloud. We no longer need server techs in-house, and cloud economies of scale minimizes the demand for server techs. It takes time to reskill those redundant workers for the new, specialized jobs. An economy with zero structural unemployment has stopped advancing

Europe has ways to fast track reskilling, so their structural unemployment is lower than ours, so I think Australia should copy their policies. But that is irrelevant to this conversation, and to Russia's low unemployment, which is driven by military conscription, brain drain, and an unproductive consumption-based war economy - not good for the long term health of their economy. If the war machine produced infrastructure instead of missiles and drones with a small unproductive lifespan then it'd be a different story.