I’m not talking about hating poverty, as we all do. I’m talking about hating the poor themselves.
Ross Gittins leads us off:
…to any person with a shred of conscience, any belief in decent treatment of the less-fortunate, any care about maintaining Australia’s pride in being the land of the fair go, one issue towers above all others: our shameful treatment of the unemployed.
…Since the mid-1990s, we’ve had – not as an unfortunate oversight, but as a conscious choice – a policy of starving the unemployed. Keeping them on a payment so low that, by the time they’ve paid rent and other inescapable costs, they often have to skip meals.
…But here’s what sticks in my gullet: when the government released the committee’s report, its spin doctors did all they could to play down the report and stress the absurd notion that the government could possibly afford to do anything about it when times were so tough.
And this:
The Albanese government will increase the tax on tobacco by 5% per year over the next three years, the health minister has revealed, alongside a suite of measures to crack down on vaping.
Which gouges $4bn mostly out of one group. You guessed it:
In 2019 the percentage of daily smokers in Australia was 34% in the lowest socioeconomic group, compared to 9% in the highest.
And this:
CoreLogic’s latest Rental Pulse reports that the unprecedented lift in overseas migrants and foreign student arrivals, combined with a chronic shortage of rental listings, has resulted in the highest yearly rental increase on record for Australia’s capital cities.
And this:
The Woolworths Group says while shelf-price inflation moderated in the third quarter, it remains “frustratingly elevated” because of industry-wide cost pressures.
And this from Alan Kohler:
“The Coalition is more inclined to have high levels of immigration than the Labor Party for labour relation or industrial relations purposes.
“The Coalition doubled Australia’s immigration in 2006 from roughly 100,000 a year to 200,000 a year at the time and it was in my view largely an industrial strategy designed to suppress wages and to protect the project they had to crush unions.
And it worked. Wages growth has been extremely sluggish ever since then and the unions have got virtually no power.”
Not any more. Albo’s Labor is an immigration lunatic that puts the LNP in the dark. And it makes all of the above much worse.
Meanwhile, Stage 3 tax cuts worth $280bn almost all for the rich will go ahead.
That Albo hates the poor is pretty obvious. The more interesting question is, why is Albo mercilessly abusing the poor? Why is he killing their wages while raising all of their most critical costs? Crashing living standards in the process? Spitting on them as he strokes the rich?
All of the usual excuses can apply: ideology, politics, institutional inertia. Albo is only the PM etc, etc.
But, Albo is the leader and he can sway the party. He is its moral centre and sets its values from the top.
Albanese Government policy hostility for the economically marginalised is all the more mysterious given Albo has made so much political mileage out of his own impoverished upbringing with his single mum, in rental accommodation, with a far-flung and hidden father.
Given this apparent contradiction, we are forced to look beyond the obvious for answers. Is it too much to propose that what we may actually be seeing in national policy settings is Albo acting out unresolved rage at his upbringing?
A person who acts out rage is unaware of his own unresolved anger and so he unwittingly makes choices in life that replicate the circumstances of his own suffering. Sometimes for himself and sometimes for others in acts of serial self-sabotage.
Pop psychology, yes. And I have never met Albo so I can’t make a personal judgment.
What I can say is that it can explain a bloke who makes a constant song and dance about his poor mum, but spends his entire waking political hour foisting ever greater pain upon poor mums nationwide.
