As the jobs of the past disappear across Australia, there is little comfort to be taken from the Prime Minister's vision for the jobs of the future ... in road construction, writes Mungo MacCallum.

Even with the official unemployment rate already rising rapidly, Tony Abbott is determinedly optimistic about the fate of workers retrenched by the now extinct motor industry; from a political point of view he can't afford to be anything else.

There are already more people out of work than at any time since 2003 - when Abbott was Employment Minister, in fact - and all the signs are that things will get worse before they get improve. So we have the Prime Minister bravely predicting that those who have lost good jobs will find better jobs.

But, he adds at once, the government will not create them; it is not the task of government to create jobs, that will happen through the market economy. What the government can do is create a climate in which the market can best act, and here, he says, rebutting the opposition's accusations that the government has simply given up and has no idea what to do next, his government does indeed have a plan. And we know what it is, because we have been told by none other than The Australian's Dennis Shanahan, reporting from his privileged position right next to Abbott's "suppository of all wisdom".

"We have a plan for Australia," insists our leader. "It means stopping the boats. It means fixing the budget. It means building the future. It means creating an Australia where everyone can expect a fair go and everyone is encouraged to have a go. That is the kind of Australia we are creating."

He went on to list a few policy prescriptions, none exactly new, which he said were specifically designed to make it easier for business to create jobs: taking off the carbon and mining taxes, restoring the Building and Construction Commission, giving environmental approval to new projects and working towards a free trade agreement with South Korea.

But perhaps strangely, he omitted one which was a key election pledge. For the last three years and longer, Abbott's promises were effectively limited to the big four: abolish the taxes, end the wasteful spending, pay off the debt and stop the boats. But as the election campaign got under way, apparently desperate to inject a note of the positive, he added a fifth: build the roads of the 21st century.

He had always said that he wanted to be known as the Infrastructure Prime Minister, but now he told us just what he actually meant by infrastructure in the 21st century: roads. Not a global information network or national broadband, not the airwaves, not even ports, harbours, railways and air terminals, but roads.

Roads, those things cars run on, the cars that won't be made in Australia anymore. Roads, that were last at the cutting edge of innovation about 2,000 years ago when the ancient Roman Emperors were planning their future economies. And it is this kind of vision, or the lack of it, which makes suspect Abbott's broad promise to build the future.

If his government can be said to have an underlying philosophy, it appears to be Luddism - a deep distrust of new technology, and of the science behind it. Abbott started by abolishing the science ministry as a separate entity and attacking such new-fangled ideas as renewable energy, and while not actually rejecting the science of climate change, he has certainly rejected the measures recommended by scientists and economists to combat it. And just last week he yet again squibbed making a decision on a second Sydney airport.

Instead, he has made it clear that coal remains king; this is one area where ports and railways - as well as roads, of course - are to be encouraged at the expense of all long-term environmental risks. And while some entitlements may be threatened, there is no suggestion of cutting down on the massive subsidies available to the mining industry as a whole, especially the provision of cheap diesel fuel.

So where are the jobs of the future going to come from? Well, almost certainly not from new discoveries in science and technology; those capable of making them are unlikely to hang around in Australia when it has been made clear to them that their specialties are considered superfluous to the government's program.

The service industries will probably continue to expand, but these are unlikely to offer many opportunities to those who have spent the better part of their working lives in factories. And this is the catch: there will be new jobs - there always are. But those sacked from their old ones won't be the ones taking them.

Studies suggest that about one third of those car workers who have recently been cast adrift will find another job in the same industry, while another third will find work in different industries and the rest will drop out of the work force altogether (due to age, sheer disillusionment or another reason).

And few of those "liberated" from the assembly lines, as Tony Abbot enthused, quoting Paul Keating, are rejoicing at the prospect. They have been trained tradesmen and women, proud of their skills and told that gaining them was not only an achievement in itself, but a guarantee of lifetime employment. Many of them have actually enjoyed the factory life, its routine, its predictability, its egalitarian atmosphere.

They are losing not only their jobs but their lifestyle, almost their culture. And sloganeering about the government's plans to stop the boats and pay off the debt is unlikely to be of much comfort. Bill Shorten is right: Abbott and the government do not have a plan, they have a Micawberish faith that something will turn up.

It probably will, but by the time it does there will be a new generation and a new government to deal with it. One, perhaps, that looks a little beyond roads as the be-all and end-all of a vision for the future.

Mungo Wentworth MacCallum is a political journalist and commentator. View his full profile here.