this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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42
Raising jobseeker is not 'fiscally sustainable’? Sorry, but that is flat out wrong | Greg Jericho (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Labor will never significantly increase the payment while the chance of it being used as a successful scare campaign by the Coalition remains. With our short election cycles and Labor's inability to consistently win elections, their priority will always be mitigating the "Labor cannot manage the economy" myth before helping people.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

And also because they're entirely complicit evil cunts. Just slightly less evil than the Dutton button.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I don't know about that. Portraying Labor as cartoon villains is a pretty pointless oversimplification and only increases the level of anger in the electorate. Here is a good article explaining the concept of political capital and how Keating's government "spent" theirs on controversial reforms they believed in. Albanese's government tried something similar with the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum, failed miserably, and are now concerned with limiting any further damage the Coalition can inflict on them prior to the next election. If Albanese wins a second term then I think it's possible his government might be more ambitious on social welfare than they have been to date.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

That article itself explains the shortcomings of the concept of political capital in the 2013 political environment, and I think those shortcomings have only grown over the decade since it was written.

I also think there's an additional issue at play today that wasn't present (or at least wasn't as significant) in 2013, which is a deeper sense of discomfort with the overall status quo of politics. A sense of unhappiness that may be reason that taking more bold action, accompanied with a sufficiently strong explanation, could be much more viable than it would have 20 years ago. This isn't necessarily incompatible with the theory of political capital; it could be described as a factor that significantly reduces the political cost of implementing those policies. But it does just add more on to why discussions of political capital are less valuable than they would have been in Keating's day.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

The graph comparing unemployment assistance across countries was really surprising to me. It makes me want more information about what's behind that. Do we have a smaller gap between median and average income than most of our peers (maybe from less ludicrous-income jobs in e.g., tech)? Is there a significant difference in attitude towards transfers here vs elsewhere? Is it a difference in economic beliefs (surely our economic situation wouldn't be that different though right?)?

Like what justification / reason is there for being last there?

I've known for ages that the payments are low as compared to median wage, but had honestly never even considered the possibility that we might be dead last out of OECD countries on that metric, and also way under the average.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

It's arguably easier to get and to keep than in some other OECD countries (certainly the US) and partly it's due to higher wages too. But beyond that, Australia is a country that has been infested with anti-welfare propaganda by the Murdoch family and other conservative papers, for many, many decades.

And Liberal governments since the 1990s have actively gone out of the way to prevent increases and to make welfare harder to get. It was only the Senate that prevented some truly draconian anti-welfare measures being put in place by the Abbott government in 2014, for example. Labor too haven't been particularly helpful (and at times harmful) and even if there is some sympathy from those within the party, they appear to be scared of conservative backlash.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

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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