In sport, teams go to great lengths to paint themselves as the underdog. It’s a tired old tactic designed to lull the other team into unwittingly going a bit easier on them, and it rarely works.
The same principle has been eagerly adopted by families in the wake of this week’s budget, and the decision to freeze the indexing of family payments to families earning in excess of $150,000. And to some extent, the tactic appears to be working.
The logic of families at or just above the $150k threshold is pretty simple, and can be loosely summarised like this: We’re not rich. In fact, we’re struggling to get ahead. Gimme gimme gimme!
That’s not how most of the papers see it today. Both The Australian and The Daily Telegraph have splashed with the Swan/Gillard “attack” on families, and no doubt the papers look similar where you live.
The stories make some valid points, not least the fact that housing costs in major cities like Sydney turn $150k into confetti quicker than a shredding machine – a point made on The Punch last week.
All the same, the thing about these self-professed “battlers” is that they never really look like their life is such a battle. Sure they work hard, and maybe commute long distances, but they always seem to have a house full of stuff, a nice backyard with a freshly-mown lawn, jewellery on their wrists and healthy-looking kids drinking orange juice.
The capping of “Family Tax Benefit B” means there will be 40,000 such families whose welfare lifeline is severed this year. No doubt there’ll be a few more along the way over the next four years, as their incomes edge over the frozen $150k limit.
For having the temerity to introduce this measure, Gillard and Swan have been labelled as class traitors straying from Labor’s True Believer values. Well, boo-bloody-hoo for the families. How many do you think are really going to hit the wall over this? My guess would be none.
Look, obviously life is expensive these days. Housing unaffordability aside, there are rising power costs, fuel costs, food costs, and a childcare system where it’s almost cheaper to employ a nanny if you’ve got more than two kids.
But life has always been expensive, hasn’t it?
As we all know, one of the legacies of the Howard years was the rise of the aspirational battlers. Well, many of those people have now battled, successfully aspired and risen. And you know what’s become of them? They’ve become whingers, that’s what.
Now that they enjoy a comfortable middle class lifestyle, they quite rightly continue to aspire yet further upwards, to get their kids in the best private schools, buy even larger house and more.
But they’re still trapped in the old mentality. They’re drawing a line under their current income, just as they did when they were genuine battlers a decade ago. And they’re again saying “help us, government. Take us another step up the socio-economic ladder.”
Well, at some point the help has to stop and it’s probably at the point where you still drive a Holden but it’s not a beat-up old Torana.
Swan and Gillard know this and so too, in their heart of hearts, do the families crying poor despite earning over 150k. But hey, you can’t blame them for trying. After all, the government has backed down on just about every other promise in three years in power.
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