Australia

This is the best summary I could come up with:

On the opening page, the commission notes “the initial period of the pandemic saw an unprecedented fall in income inequality”.

These increases “included the Coronavirus Supplement, which was paid to income support recipients, such as those receiving JobSeeker and Youth Allowance”.

The Productivity Commission states with a misguided certainty that only comes from a lifetime of adherence to the God of small government and market forces that these payments were “not fiscally sustainable in the long term”.

Next year the government has budgeted to provide $10.2bn in fuel tax credits, the vast majority of which goes to mining companies – hardly those who are doing it tough.

This choice is even more stark given that the Productivity Commission’s report reveals that, while inequality fell during the pandemic, it has risen quickly since then.

And this is not a natural order of things – governments since around 1996 have chosen to make life relatively harder for the unemployed than in other rich economies:

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