Well, time for a little comment on Costello’s tenth budget announced last night, largely centred around the so-called “welfare to work” measures, and $21.7 billion in tax cuts, which will mostly end up in the pockets of higher income earners. Now I know that $21.7 billion sounds like a lot of money, and it surely is. But someone earning $50K will get an extra $6 a week in their pocket. Even for those earning $100,000 the bonus will be worth just $41 per week certainly nothing to sneeze at but when you consider that someone earning that amount grosses $1923 a week, it is not exactly a huge amount.

The thing that I find remarkable about the budget commentary is the suggestion that anyone is going to be jumping up and down over the extra money in their pay packets thanks to tax cuts. I will barely notice the difference. But, as I said, $21.7 billion is a lot of money. And it could in fact be used to enhance a number of key areas in need of additional spending. In particular, the welfare to work plan in the budget seems to be premised on the idea that people with disabilities don’t wish to work. By cutting disability support pension to anyone who is able to work 15 hours per week

The move is particularly targeted at people with bad backs, who the Government says may not be able to perform manual labour but could perform non-manual jobs.

Mr Costello says 6.5 per cent of the work force is on the Disability Support Pension, many of them because there is no requirement to look for work. He added: “6.5 per cent of the work force is not disabled.”

But according to this measure, the most that people will be able to do is work 2 days per week, assuming that they can find unskilled non-labouring work which is suitable. So this category of people will never be out of the welfare system and will continue having to comply with the tougher welfare requirements. The stick aimed at older unemployed people seems to suggest that older people don’t want to get back into the workforce, when I suspect the problem is that employers don’t wish to employ them.

I don’t mind making a contribution to our society through my taxes, and I resent that $21.7 billion is being used to fund people like me buying a couple of magazines a week rather than making substantial impact on public education (including tertiary education), genuine tax reform, health and ballooning household debt. Why can’t we use extra money for real migration solutions or for improving the deplorable health and living conditions of many indigenous communities?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 11th, 2005 at 2:11 pm by dan and is filed under oz politics and society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.