From Ross Gittins today:
…Young parents, carers and students will be the target of a major shake up of the welfare system.
Specifically, single parents with four children can get welfare payments of more than $52,000 a year if they don’t work, but less than $50,000 after tax if they work and receive the median full-time wage.
Small problem with this appalling news. It’s a cock and bull story.
…For a start, it’s a contrived example. How many people do you know with four dependent children? There must be some single parents with four kids, but they’d a small fraction of all welfare-dependent single parents and an infinitesimal fraction of the 5.2 million recipients of federal “income support”.
Worse, it’s a false comparison. If the sole parent took the job they’d still be eligible for the $32,000-odd in family tax benefits per year. By supposedly preferring to accept the “parenting payment single” of less than $20,000, they’d be passing up the median full-time wage of almost $50,000 after tax.
What Porter doesn’t seem to know is that family payments are specifically designed to be the same whether parents are working or not, precisely to ensure they don’t discourage parents on benefits from taking a job.
He avoids admitting that apparently we can continue to borrow money to cover a tax cut for people earning more than $80,000 a year, hugely expensive cuts in company tax, a much-delayed crackdown on multinational tax avoidance and a massive increase in spending on defence.
These penny-pinching cost cuts aimed mainly at the socially disadvantaged and politically defenceless – if roughing up asylum seekers and their kids goes down so well with voters, why not extend the attack to bottom-of-the-pile Aussies? – are far from sufficient to make much impact on the budget deficit.
…It wants us to believe the federal budget is close to bankruptcy but, in truth, it’s this government that’s nearer to being morally, politically and economically bankrupt.
Actually, it is both. Do-nothing continues to spend like a drunken sailor while pretending at Budget repair by kicking the vulnerable.
The weirdest part about it all is that this is also political suicide. Do-nothing has learned nothing from his near death electoral experience. Because these policies do not fit his history of policy prowess, liberalism and fiscal progressiveness the polity will smell a political rat and his polls will crater accordingly.
