COULD you imagine Paul Keating or Malcolm Fraser making the following the core of their New Year speech (take a deep breath and wade through to the end of the three paragraphs please):
‘Thousands of new mums are now benefiting from paid parental leave every year, and from New Year’s Day dads will get two weeks of paid leave just for them, so they can spend more time with their new baby too.
“We are also investing more money than ever before in helping families with their childcare costs and because the costs keep coming when children go to school, in 2013, for the first time, families will get the new School Kids Bonus.
“A typical family is $720 a year better off than under the old system.
“This on top of $4000 in extra payments for teenagers.”
That was Julia Gillard in her New Year speech this week.
To be fair, John Howard started the rot – ramping up direct payments from the government to people who on any reasonable standard have the wherewithal to look after their families themselves. Provided, of course, they do not feel entitled to the instant gratification of the latest electronic gizmos for themselves and their children and a McMansion with at least one bedroom and bathroom for every two occupants, a car for every adult, designer clothing and the rest of the unnecessary and expensive dictates of the advertising industry.
Labor has had no choice but to keep it up.
“Oh, a nice cheque from the Government. What a good Government. I must vote for its re-election.”
It is almost like drug addiction – for both the dealer handing out the cheques and the addicts receiving it. It is bad for both, and once started very difficult to get off. Demand for government hand-outs is almost limitless. Withdrawal pain for both supplier and recipient is intense.
Gillard’s words were those of a kitchen-knife television advertisement in their detail of price and quantity. She even said words to the effect of “and there’s more”.
Governments seem terrified on any reform of middle-class or business welfare. Their terror is accentuated by the classic media question: “Can you guarantee that no one will be worse off?”
This is usually followed by media stories finding someone who would be badly affected by the policy and beating up the story as if it were commonplace – thus distorting the true picture, even if the individual story might be true.
No wonder we have democratic paralysis.
Nonetheless, that an Australian Prime Minister cites handouts – and middle-class handouts at that — as a point of pride in her Australia Day address should be alarming.
Worse, it suggests that grasping two other big-ticket reform items seems hopeless: tax and industrial relations.
Raising and widening the GST so inefficient taxes can be removed is off the agenda. Someone, somewhere might be worse off. Allowing employers and employees to make sensible arrangements that suit their workplaces is out of the question because you could not guarantee that some individual might be worse off – presuming they are employed at all, of course.
Removing business welfare is now impossible because industry groups seems totally geared to the selfish pursuit of their own sector irrespective of the national good.
Governments seem paralysed against acting for the overall good just in case a few individual whingers make a meal out of the policy change in front of the TV cameras.
There was a time, of course, when the middle class was self-reliant and would be insulted by the proposition of a government handout because it would imply they could not look after their families themselves. They would be too proud to take it. That’s the difference.
DOT DOT DOT
The ACT’s no-plastic-to-landfill policy looks like collapsing under the weight of bountiful thick bags.
The aim was to cut the amount of plastic going into landfill. Fine aim. So all thin plastic carry bags were banned. In theory, everyone would shop with reusable cloth bags. But a little more than a year after the ban, at virtually every super-market you find “reusable” thicker plastic bags which are allowed under the regulations.
No doubt most of the “reusuable” thick plastic bags get only one use. The upshot is more plastic going into landfill.
The road to the supermarket is littered with good intentions. I am sure the intentions would have more effectively converted to action by a 10c fee on every bag.
DOT DOT DOT
There was an unspoken message this Christmas-New Year to those waiting in traffic banked up to Nelligen from the Pacific Highway roundabout at Batemans Bay. And also to other motorists on the NSW North Coast who waited for hours in traffic on the same highway.
It will get worse for the simple reason that the Federal Government, which controls immigration, seems determined to continue to allow high numbers of people to come to Australia without any reference to the capacity of the states to provide for the infrastructure to service the higher population.
Very simply, the states need to spend 2 per cent of the total value of the infrastructure every year just to maintain it – the average piece of public infrastructure lasts about 50 years. If you add 2 per cent of population every year you have to double your infrastructure effort. No state is doing it, or can do it. The Feds have set them an impossible task.
The stress on the infrastructure at Batemans Bay this holiday season is just a portent for everywhere all the time in Australia on present population projections.
Happy New Year.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 5 January 2013.
Brilliant. Why has no one else said these things?
I trust that in your lectures to journalism students, you stress as you do here that finding one person who is disadvantaged by a particular policy and then building a tearful case on that individual is the ultimate betrayal of journalism. Hard cases make bad law.
Totally agree with your stand on middle-class welfare and the culture of entitlement: it is the epitome of vote buying directed at a demographic which largely determines election outcomes. As you rightly say, its prejudices are constantly fed by the media, who likewise rely on the advertising revenue generating by the purchasing power of this same demographic. Further, the modern day religion of neo-liberalist economics also panders, not to say gives self-righteous justification to, the comfortable middle class. Economics enshrines “efficiency” and ignores equity. The GST might be efficient but it is inherently regressive hence requiring compensation to lower income groups, which because the middle class hates means testing, has crept into middle-class welfare.
Your second example – industrial relations reform – generally has a nice middle class bias also: the workers, save ourselves of course, are basically a bunch of bludgers who ought to be grateful to have a job at all and will skive off if paid too much, such as penalty rates for weekends which we ourselves deserve to have off. My challenge to well paid office workers complaining about expensive child care, the burden of the mortgage payments and private school fees, mental stress etc is to spend a day (just as a spectator) on a building site in mid-winter or mid-summer, a shearing shed anytime or with a long-haul truck driver.
Except those middle class families DID take their welfare back then. It’s just that it was delivered in the tax system instead – eg, rebates for dependent spouses, rebates (or tax deductions) for dependent children.
We once had a system that attempted to adjust the tax take from a household by reference to family size. Nowadays we have an almost completely individual tax system (ie, ignores family composition) and do the adjustment via transfers (but not for everyone, as was the case in your good old days).
Trouble is, transfers become tagged as welfare. So, while it’s quite true that the amount of the transfers is a valid issue, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.