Welfare

A controversial policy from the Northern Territory intervention has managed to get through the atrocious congestion on the M4 to arrive in Bankstown, in Sydney’s south-west. And some locals aren’t feeling particularly welcoming.

“Income management” is coming to the suburb - a cultural melting pot - in July. It basically means that the Government will give some people on welfare assistance a “Basics” card that contains a significant percentage of their allowances (ie Newstart or the Family Tax Benefit). The card can only be used to pay for “essentials” like food and rent, not to squander hundreds on the Queen of the Nile pokie at Bankstown Sports.

Bankstown is one of just five places where the Federal Government has chosen to roll the program out to a thousand people, the others being Logan and Rockhampton in Queensland, Playford in SA and Shepparton in Victoria. But the opposition to it is particularly making a racket about it in Bankstown.

Continue reading "An NT intervention policy coming to a suburb near you" »

This weekend one of the country’s biggest fundraisers, the Salvation Army Red Shield Appeal, was in full swing targeting $80 million. I have been a healthy skeptic of them and other faith-based charities.

I learned recently while doing research that little old ladies from the Salvos stay up all night manning the needle exchange on St Kilda’s infamous Grey St. When not reducing the risk of HIV infection, Flo and Dot are next door at the battered women’s shelter. There are thousands of other examples that show Christian workers doing good deeds without prejudice.

My research also took to me to Centrelink. They provide “welfare referrals” for those in crisis. I covered half of Sydney. In nearly every case, the only groups accepting those referrals were Christian. So while church-based charities may offend some people with their contribution to public policy, when it comes to what they do on the ground, it is hard to be offended. I haven’t seen too many secular groups driving the mobile soup kitchens.

Continue reading "Our churches should not be a law unto themselves" »

The worship of ‘working families’ is a bipartisan affair – all sides of politics fall over themselves to appeal to this valuable voting pool.  It’s enough to make the childless feel like drones, labouring to feed the reproducing queens.

First there was Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s cash splash for parents of schoolkids. Then, in his Budget reply speech, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said: “My values are the product of an Australian life, a real life much like yours with Margie, raising three daughters in suburban Sydney, paying a mortgage, worrying about bills.”

Sorry, Mr Abbott, but that’s not a real life much like mine. Never mind living in suburban Sydney or having three daughters, even if I fell in love with a Margie I couldn’t marry her.

Continue reading "Welfare for breeders is a bonus for everyone" »

Once upon a time, in a land called Australia, the average person could actually afford to rent a house or a flat.

They could even pay this rent with a part-time job, working behind the bar or stacking shelves at the local supermarket. It was usually enough for a little on the side, too. You know, for stuff like food and paying the electricity and gas.

Here in 2012, that fairytale is over. Three million Aussie households are forced to live in rental properties they are struggling to pay for, and most people are coughing up more than 30 per cent of the average wage to do so.

Continue reading "Rental as anything: our national crisis" »

When Tony Abbott went to London last year, he talked up the Australian economy against that of Britain, other European economies, and the US, noting our low level of public debt as a proportion of GDP.

“On the face of this comparative performance, Australia has serious bragging rights,” he said in a major speech.

“Compared with most developed countries, our economic circumstances are enviable.’’

Continue reading "Middle-class welfare will test Australia’s means" »

There was a chilling line in a Daily Telegraph piece on girl gangs back in 2008. Reporter Lauren Williams had a 2.30am chat with a Glebe teen called “Carson” in the article.

“Carson” explained why she and her friends stole.

“If the government gave us more money then we wouldn’t have to rob people,” she said, apparently satisfied she had delivered an impregnable justification for purse snatching, shop lifting and mugging.

Continue reading "You’re not meant to be comfortable on the dole" »

Please stop calling it welfare. It’s not welfare.

Getting a government rebate because you pay for private health insurance out of your own pocket is not welfare.

Getting a government rebate because you spend after-tax income on sending your children to a non-government school is not welfare.

Continue reading "Please stop calling it welfare" »

Another year; another Closing the Gap Prime Minister’s report. More statistical improvements at the margins but the core issues evaded and unaddressed. For the next ten years we could deliver the same speeches with little material change on the ground.

That’s because three things remain unaddressed. Australia fails to apply activity requirements for work in remote Australia like we do everywhere else. We also fail to apply state law and prosecute parents who refuse to send their children to school. Last, our welfare reforms have hobbled into the third wave of ‘trials and pilots’ because Canberra prefers talking tough over being tough on welfare.

Australia has struggled for decades with Aboriginal exceptionalism; the argument finessed by John Altman which casts any move to stimulate a real economy as a western assault on the romanticised traditional life. This view insists on an impossible world of welfare without work, on the grounds that First Australians are fundamentally different to the rest of us.

Continue reading "Stop the welfare to start closing the gap" »

Your task is simple. Here is $115.50. It must last one week. You have no savings, no assets, but thankfully you’ve already paid your rent. That’s about $16 a day to cover food, bills, transport, entertainment and hygiene products.

We hope you like never going out, watching television and that none of your loved ones ever require a birthday present. Hopefully you’re not someone who requires much medication or needs to go the Doctor. We do hope you like basic carbohydrates or can cope with the embarrassment of having to ask a charity for a food parcel.

Welcome to the world of Australia’s depressed, stigmatised and disempowered Newstart recipients.

Continue reading "La dole cheque vita is not so sweet on $16 a day" »

When the Snowtown murder trial concluded in 2003 a prominent criminologist scandalised the good people of Adelaide by saying there was nothing surprising or remarkable about the case.

New Yorker Allan Perry, a lecturer in criminal law at the University of Adelaide, blamed what he called a subculture of degeneracy in the city’s most depressed and dysfunctional suburbs, defined by inter-generational welfare dependency, the daily abuse of alcohol and drugs, shocking levels of child abuse, child neglect and family violence.

Dr Perry said the only thing which shocked him about Snowtown was that people were shocked by it. And he really cut loose in his description of my hometown, sending talkback and the letters pages into meltdown, and prompting the then Attorney General Mick Atkinson to tell him to move back to Brooklyn.

Continue reading "A horror movie about poverty and welfare" »

You were always going to hear a lot about disability insurance over the next few years and Tony Abbott today made sure you will hear a lot more. There are some one million disabled Australians and the Opposition Leader told them that under an Abbott government their insurance scheme would be deferred.

In addition, pensioners and low-income families were told that their welfare increases and tax cuts were on the way, but please don’t ask when because Mr Abbott doesn’t know.

In his speech to the National Press Club he logged the disability insurance and a significant number of other economic elements under ``aspirations’’ column, rather than as imminent certainties.

Continue reading "Abbott downgrading promises to aspirations" »

Thanks to an ageing population, Australia is facing a budget black hole. We must cut social spending to plug the gap and more Australians need to move from welfare into work, tax expert Greg Smith told this week’s Tax Forum.

But as the media and welfare lobby were quick to point out, unemployment is relatively low by world standards. The dole is already lean and mean, leaving little room for cuts.

Instead, reforms should focus on a much more intractable issue: Disability Support Pension.

Continue reading "We must crack down on the Disability Support Pension" »

Teenage mums in Adelaide’s northern suburbs will soon lose their welfare payments if they don’t go back to school.

Local federal MP Nick Champion asked for his electorate to be included in the Federal Government’s tough-love trial. As he says: “We are not doing anyone any favours if we do not help teen mothers finish school.”

I’m sure many of you are nodding in agreement. It’s hard to argue with a program designed to empower kids with knowledge and skills, instead of cursing them to a life of welfare dependency in the blind belief that they’ll rise up from entrenched disadvantage when they’re good and ready. But if conditional welfare is acceptable for white girls in the northern suburbs, why is the State Government so squeamish about the issue in SA’s Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands?

Continue reading "They’re not faring well and the answer’s not welfare" »

In trying to identify the causes of the London riots, we could start by reflecting on the comments from former Greater London Council police advisor Lee Jasper in analysing the mindset of the youths on the streets.

In a finger-pointing monologue on The 7.30 Report on Tuesday, Mr Jasper argued that the one group of people who should definitely not be blamed for the riots were the rioters themselves.

“We’ve seen huge levels of austerity cuts in many inner city areas that are leading to a great deal of anxiety and concern,” stated the one-time advisor to former London Mayor “Red” Ken Livingstone. “Unemployment continues to rise and there is a sense of anxiety but also a sense of moral crisis in the country. I think because of the MPs scandal, the corporate tax dodging issue of huge multinational companies, the News International corruption cases with the metropolitan police and phone hacking, there is a kind of failure really of people in power to uphold the kind of moral standards that we all aspire to. And as such, this has had an effect around the country.”

Continue reading "London: Doling out excuses for the inexcusable" »

With Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin in the Northern Territory last week consulting on “what’s next?” for the Northern Territory Emergency Response, it’s timely to throw the concept of ‘exit strategies’ into the mix.  In particular, how do people exit the Government’s income management program and take control of their finances?

It’s a very real dilemma for governments at all levels.  Teetotalers and drunks, spenders and savers, good and bad parents - it makes no difference.  If you’re an Aboriginal person receiving welfare payments in the NT, you live under the Emergency Response and half your welfare must be spent on the priority goods like food, clothes, rent and health care. 

You can’t use the money for alcohol, tobacco, pornography or gambling – well at least not the quarantined half anyway…

Continue reading "NT Intervention: Guilty by geography" »

Irony of ironies. In a time of unprecedented communications control where political statements are workshopped to death, both sides of politics are struggling for clarity.

What for weeks had been slated as a tough Budget softened greatly as the day approached and eventually emerged as a “Labor Budget”. In name anyway.

Indeed, Wayne Swan, Julia Gillard, and Penny Wong said so often as they ‘executed’ their media plan - a dizzying blitz of interviews across the land. Yet in reality, it was perhaps more of an old-style Liberal budget, winding in spending, lowering welfare payments and attaching tough new strings to disability support payments, the dole, and other supports.

Continue reading "Budget 2011: We’re all liberals now" »

I was delighted to learn this week that in yet another display of moral courage, the Gillard Government has decided to crack down on unemployed old people.

After lamenting the lack of leadership and intellectual rigour in recent months, the news that the ALP was going to kick jobless senior citizens in the nuts made my heart swell with national pride.

Everyone knows there has long been a bunch of lazy semi-retirees who were just waiting to get themselves fired so they could rake in $227 a week. That’s why they staged the global financial crisis.

Continue reading "New ways for the Govt to screw you slowly" »

Sue O’Reilly, who has guest written today’s column on The Angry Cripple is a freelance journalist and the mother of a 21-year-old son with cerebral palsy. She co-founded Australians Mad as Hell last year with Fiona Porter to campaign for an NDIS and established a charity called Fighting Chance to help people with disabilities pay for essential therapy services.

The president of South Australia’s Council on Intellectual Disabilities recently stated that all people with disabilities have “a right to live in an ordinary home in an ordinary street”.

But what if some people with disabilities don’t want to live in “an ordinary house in an ordinary street”?

What if they want to live in something like the manicured villages that have sprung up everywhere for people over 55, or an apartment complex with 24/7 care facilities?

Continue reading "Disability advocates ignoring what’s best for disabled" »

“GET a job!” It was the response to a protester from Prime Minister Paul Keating during his ill-fated 1996 election campaign that epitomised the “dole bludger” tag.

The nation’s unemployment rate had spiked during his previous term and many school leavers were seen as aimless, finding it easier to rely on government welfare than to look for paid work.

More than a decade on, the jobless figures have done an about-turn. In some areas there are more jobs than willing workers. But it seems the legendary dole bludger is alive and well.

Continue reading "Yep, most people still really hate dole bludgers" »

hy·poc·ri·sy (h-pkr-s) n. pl. hy·poc·ri·sies

1. The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness.

2. An act or instance of such falseness.

Continue reading "How do you spell hypocrisy?" »

Sue O’Reilly, who has guest written today’s column on The Angry Cripple is a freelance journalist and the mother of a 21-year-old son with cerebral palsy. She co-founded Australians Mad as Hell last year with Fiona Porter to campaign for an NDIS and established a charity called Fighting Chance to help people with disabilities pay for essential therapy services.

The other day, amid all the reactions to the Productivity Commission report recommending a radical new national disability care and support scheme, a reader of this column made what struck me as a
most intriguing comment.

Somebody calling him/herself NEFFA wrote: “Why don’t you all move to Cambodia and see how much government support you get there? Sometimes you need perspective to understand just how good you have it.”

Personally, I can see the appeal of this notion for all those many Aussies who fail to understand why their hard-earned dollars should help fund decent care and support services for fellow citizens with profound disabilities and their families.  Put all us whingers and ingrates on rickety boats and push us off to sea, heading north! Problem solved.

Continue reading "The worst of both worlds" »

When it comes to waste and mismanagement, Julia Gillard’s Building the Education Revolution debacle is recognised as the gold standard, but it has a new challenger in the form of the Labor government’s Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program (SIHIP).

However, federal Labor – like its state Labor counterparts who gave themselves glowing reports for their management of the BER – has insulted our intelligence by their boasts in early January that it has exceeded its 2010 targets for building houses in remote Indigenous communities.

The reality is the government has blown the same amount of taxpayers’ money on administration costs and inflated salaries for consultants under SIHIP as the disastrous schools halls project, in relative terms.

Continue reading "The next BER debacle: indigenous housing" »

Across the nation, bins are ringing with the sound of discarded contraceptives as women prepare to embrace motherhood for the princely sum of $570-odd a week.

Well, that’s what Australians opposed to the Government’s paid parental leave scheme seem to think. There is a perception that this is just welfare, another baby bonus, a bribe to have children.

It’s not.

Continue reading "Parental leave is more about the welfare of the ageing" »

There was a fiery exchange between two readers in the comments section of one of Australia’s news websites this week which provided a handy snapshot of the generational fault line in the debate over interest rates and the cost of living.

It’s a battle which is being fought between older Australians who have paid off or almost paid off their homes and who have a vested interest in the banks jacking up rates, and younger Australians who are mortgaged to the hilt, with both partners working to cover the mortgage, the bills and childcare, for whom every single-point increase in interest rates is a body blow to the family budget.

This divide has been widened by the actions of the Commonwealth Bank and the ANZ in overshooting the Reserve Bank’s official cash rate and stumping for controversial interest rate hikes. It has also been fuelled by the stated intention of the Reserve Bank itself, in trying to encourage more Australians to save, rather than getting themselves saddled with debt. As a result, for every angry 30-something or 40-something mortgagee who is fuming about the bastardry of Ralph Norris and Mike Smith, there’s a guy in his late 60s who’s planning a fortnight away in the caravan with his wife, saying: “Thank you, fellas.”

Continue reading "Selfish boomers -v- stroppy Gen-Xers in bank wars" »

Andrew lived with mental illness and died in 2005.

Andrew had schizophrenia, but he did not die from this – he was stabbed to death by his flatmate, who was subject to severe paranoid schizophrenia. The Victorian coronial report found various processes had failed Andrew, putting his life in danger.

A community worker had placed Andrew in this situation, despite the risks.

Continue reading "The economics of mental health systems needs review" »

Update 11.30am: Julia Gillard has been tinkering again. Read about it here.

Back in June 2004 I interviewed the director of obstetrics at Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred hospital, who said women due to have labor induced in the last week of June for medical reasons were begging their doctors to delay until at least July 1.

It’s a weird thing to do, but the tantalising prospect of the then-$3000 Baby Bonus stood on the other side of the end of the month. John Howard might have announced the Baby Bonus in the May Budget, but instead of starting it that day delayed until the beginning of the financial year, turning it into a biological lottery.

“We would always suggest that the baby comes first,” Dr Andrew Child warned prospective mothers. “It is not worth $3000 to put your baby’s whole life at risk.’’ Thus started a run of uncertainty, competitiveness and anxiety for women and their partners planning a family, as successive leaders have played financial politics with their reproductive systems. There’s no end in sight.

Continue reading "How women of child-bearing age became political footballs" »

It’s the electorate where the Howard era began in triumph and ended in farce.

The electorate where “Trackie Dackie” Jackie Kelly was elected not once but twice in 1996, scoring a thumping by-election victory after being dudded out of office on a constitutional technicality. The electorate where Kelly’s dentist husband was implicated when a group of Liberal Party activists were photographed in the dead of night in 2007 distributing stooged, misspelt pamphlets reading “Alu Akbar” on behalf of a fictitious local Muslim group claiming Labor support for the construction of a mosque.

Lindsay, on the westernmost edge of Sydney at the foot of the Blue Mountains, was named after the artist, writer and bon vivant Norman Lindsay, who these days would probably be regarded as a weirdo in this proudly suburban, no bullshit seat where the biggest source of local entertainment is the Penrith Panthers Leagues Club, a venue so preposterously big that it can be seen from space.

Continue reading "Election 2010: Meet the Kingmakers" »

When it comes to illicit drugs and how our society should best deal with its impact, Ken Crispin is one man to whom it is worth listening.

Crispin has been practicing law since 1972, but more relevantly, he was the Director of Public Prosecutions in the ACT from 1991 to 1994 and a judge in that jurisdiction until 2007.  So this is why Crispin has made a bit of a splash over the past week by arguing that the US lead ‘War on Drugs’ which was debated and passed by Congress forty years this month, is failing our community.

Crispin, in his recently published book The Quest for Justice, has dared to say what many Australian judges and magistrates think privately to be the case.  That treating illicit drug use as a criminal justice problem has not worked and will never work.

Continue reading "Time we had an exit strategy from the war on drugs" »

The Government needs to come clean on what its Paid Parental Leave Scheme really means for working families, starting with its name.

It’s a great irony that an initiative called Paid Parental Leave does not actually give anyone an actual right to time off work after birth.

In fact, if an employee has been working for less than 12 months, they have no guarantee they can return to their job if they take leave.

Continue reading "Paid parental leave policy is missing actual leave" »

When rock stars Bob Geldof and U2’s Bono stomped through the United Nations a decade ago, demanding rich nations stump up billions of dollars in extra foreign aid, the world took notice.

Even John Howard signed up to this ``Make Poverty History’’ chant, determined to avoid being seen as a global Mr Scrooge.

But with Australia preparing to double annual foreign aid spending to $8 billion-plus by 2015, the time is right to pause and take account of how we are managing the current program.

Continue reading "The business of foreign aid needs a good audit" »

There is a lot of merit to Tony Abbot’s proposal to tighten the compliance rules on Youth Allowance and Newstart Allowance recipients aged under 30 that would requiring them to work in areas experiencing labour shortages.

The public is generally unaware there is a thorough suitability test on the activities offered to jobseekers on income support. One of the components of the suitability tests involves a travel time rule.

The travel time rule says jobseekers that have the capacity for full time work do not have to take up employment or training if the travel time is more than 90 minutes. As a result, there are no requirements to move to areas experiencing labour shortages. 

Continue reading "Abbott’s dole plan can work, here’s how" »

A cash giveaway to millions of pensioners last year has triggered an outbreak of crook backs. The nation has for years watched on as a growing army of pensioned-off disabled workers, many of them dispirited middle-aged blokes, has emerged. 

But it can now be revealed the Rudd Government’s generosity on September 20, 2009 in giving Australians on the Age Pension and Disability Support Pensions a one-off pay rise of to $65 a fortnight had the unintended result of adding tens of thousands of new recruits to the army disabled workers.

Centrelink documents obtained under Freedom of Information laws reveal how in the six months after the pay rise a further 43,117 new Disabled Support Pensioners joined the ranks. In October alone, in the weeks after the pension pay boost, 8,615 applicants were approved.

Continue reading "Another 43,117 Aussies are suddenly disabled" »

As Prime Minister Rudd was dancing around morning television selling his health deal with the states, Opposition leader Tony Abbott remerged from wherever he’s been hiding to lob a little policy smoke bomb.

According to The Australian today, Mr Abbott told a meeting with senior resource industry executives in Perth, he would like to see dole payments stopped to able bodied people under 30, in a bid to fill skill shortages in Western Australia and other mining areas crying out for labour.

The proposal has not been endorsed as party policy, but it does signal the direction the Liberal leader may take in debates about skill shortages and welfare during the election campaign.

Continue reading "Bludger politics: the Paxtons don’t live here anymore" »

When Charles “Chicka” Dixon passed away last month, Australia lost a vigorous advocate for Aboriginal rights. Chicka was an agitator and a unionist but he was also a realist who understood that to get ahead Indigenous people needed skills and training and opportunity.

But this training had to be real and translate to actual work. Aboriginal people are among the most trained people in this country, yet they represent the highest unemployed.

Chicka Dixon and I would have disagreed on many things, but on that point he could not have been more right.

Continue reading "Chicka Dixon knew education was the key to closing the gap" »

Hidden away in most capital cities around Australia there are troubled suburbs which suffer the afflictions of social and economic breakdown.

These communities are often populated by a majority of good hearted battlers living alongside a minority of ratbags. These hidden communities are often absent from our national debate partly because the communities lack advocacy skills and partly because the problems seem so intractable.

Often the only time these troubled suburbs are noticed is when the harsh glare of the media descends upon them in response to some criminal incident or to catalogue their social dysfunction.

Continue reading "Twin revolutions to help troubled suburbs" »

Almost 10 years before he became one of the nation’s most accomplished welfare bums - living off the very parliamentary super scheme he railed against as Opposition Leader and now gloats about receiving in his newspaper column - Mark Latham was making a lot of sense about the explosion of welfare dependency in Australia.

Latham was especially energised by the surge in the number of Australians on the disability pension. He tackled the issue at length in his dour but valuable1998 tome Civilising Global Capital. The book was ridiculed as an unreadable doorstop by the Libs, run down by envious Labor non-thinkers as the showy work of an intellectual poseur who was using it only to position himself for the leadership.

But it contained a lot of provocative thinking about the (dictionary definition) incredible rate at which Australians were signing on in their 50s, 40s, even their 30s for a life on handouts as they convinced the welfare state that they quite simply could never work again.

Continue reading "Disability pension: reform that dare not speak its name" »

According to the Australian Treasury the global financial crisis is now officially ‘over’, with business booming and the unemployment rate once again beginning to shrink.

From an economic perspective, we might breathe a tentative sigh of relief, bearing in mind the fact that these boom and bust cycles are a cyclical feature of the global economy.

However, a broader social crisis still remains in the form of the persistent and intergenerational disadvantage that is preventing a significant proportion of Australians from contributing to the three national challenges of ‘Productivity’, ‘Participation’ and ‘Population’ identified in this year’s Intergenerational Report.

Continue reading "The GFC might be over but the poverty crisis remains" »

When Jennie George asked me to meet one of her constituents I was happy to oblige out of a respect for Jennie but without an expectation that it necessarily related to my responsibilities.

How wrong I was. Through the door came Michael McLeod and with him the remarkable story and passion that is his life.

Luck begins for all of us with the conditions of our birth. And from the outset it was clear that a successful life for Michael would require a triumph of will over fortune.

Continue reading "Closing the gap, all on his own" »

As of yesterday about one-million hard-working Australians discovered that Kevin Rudd’s campaign promise to stand up for “working families” came with an invisible asterisk.

The asterisk denotes - “promise does not include all working families”.

Especially those families who work a little bit too hard, who pay a higher rate of tax because they hold more senior jobs, work longer hours, have taken risks starting businesses, employing other people, and have got themselves into a position where with their super, their private health care, their choice of hospitals and schools, they are constantly taking pressure off the public system.

Continue reading "Class war budget betrays hardest-working families" »