Force young single jobseekers to relocate or lose welfare benefit

Don't know in regards to other countries but I do know in the US for example, that they effectively send you the bill every week or fortnight and you have to pay up much like any other bill (electricity etc) and if you don't pay well you get shunted hard.

At least in Australia HELP repayments get taken out automatically once you are above the threshold and is done in a way that doesn't impact on you too heavily, that and you can always make voluntary contributions.

If you earn't 50k and had that kind of 48k debt, paying it off in a year would be impossible due to Gross Income being a lower than the debt, not to mention every other every day cost that its involved in just being alive (food, water, rent, electricity etc).

I don't think lowering the threshold to minimum wage is a great way of going about it.

-PB

Why don't they instead lower the income threshold and repayment rate (currently starts at 4% of income). For example if someone earns $51,308 they don't have to pay anything towards their debt but if they earn a dollar more they have to pay back $2052.36, which for many people in that income bracket would be close to their return amount. If the repayment rate increases by .5% with each income bracket then those earning less than the current threshold could pay 3.5%, 3% etc . This would condition people to paying off their HELP debt rather than slowing their earnings or manipulating their tax returns to avoid the repayment.

We always knew the Commission of Audit would produce a small government, low spending, neoliberal report.

Why? Because that’s what the government set it up to do.

The Commission of Audit was announced as a supposedly independent body. But the people doing the auditing are mostly rusted-on, hardline conservatives. Tony Shepherd, a former chairman of Transfield, is also the former boss of big business lobby group, the Business Council of Australia. Peter Boxall is a former chief of staff to Peter Costello. Howard government minister Amanda Vanstone is there too. This is a political body, set up to do a very political job.

The giveaway is there in black and white, in the Audit’s terms of reference. These give it “a broad remit to examine the scope for efficiency and productivity improvements across all areas of Commonwealth expenditure, and to make recommendations to achieve savings sufficient to deliver a surplus of 1% of GDP prior to 2023-24.” Top of the list: to “ensure taxpayers are receiving value-for-money from each dollar spent” and “eliminate wasteful spending.”

Framing an exercise like this as delivering value for money and cutting waste ensures that the debate is all about government spending. There is no acknowledgement that the real cause of the current deficit is a shortfall in revenues, not a blow-out in expenditures. Nor is there any mention of the fact that the Commonwealth’s spending is low by OECD standards, and in fact is broadly consistent with spending levels in the later years of the Howard government.

The Audit ignores all this. “We have spent beyond our means for too long,” it complains, bemoaning the “sixth consecutive budget deficit.”

It’s as though that minor event known as the global financial crisis never happened. This is truly the “autistic” economics that a group of French university students protested about in June 2000.

The prescriptions advocated by the Audit are stock-standard 1980s-era neoliberalism. Privatise government assets. Cut red tape. Abolish or amalgamate government agencies. Charge citizens more for government services, like visits to the doctor. Slash government benefits, especially for the most vulnerable. Make students pay more for their education. Reduce foreign aid. Abolish national protections, like a national minimum wage. Halt Commonwealth support for the homeless.

This is a recipe for a poorer, nastier and more brutish Australia. If implemented, it would mark the beginning of the end of the Australian fair go.

By far the most radical proposal is to junk a century of federal-state relations and return huge swathes of the Commonwealth’s functions to the states. This is cloud cuckoo stuff. The states are struggling to fund the services and functions they currently provide. It is absurd to believe a tiny state like Tasmania can provide the kind of advanced public services that all citizens demand. Australians should not be condemned to lower standards of living and poorer public services just because they live in a small state.

The idea to give the states a 10% income tax tells you all you need to know. Despite a mania for reducing complexity, the Commission of Audit wants to cut federal tax rates, only to increase them again with an extra income tax for the states. At the same time as it complains about duplication, the Audit wants to take single, federal programs and devolve them to eight separate states and territories. Go figure.

We don’t need to ask ourselves what Australia would look like if this radical plan were implemented. Just look across the Pacific. The United States has a small federal government as a share of GDP, and devolves many public services to its states. It has a vestigial or non-existent social safety net. It has low taxes and many social services are privatised. In other words, it is exactly the sort of country the Commission of Audit would like to see Australia become.

How is the small government, market-is-best ideology working for the US? America has endemic intergenerational poverty, massive inequality, crumbling infrastructure and lower life expectancy that Australia. America’s public finances are much worse than Australia’s, with huge deficits and a growing public debt. Its economy has grown much more slowly than Australia’s over the past decade; its middle classes have actually shrunk since the mid-1970s.

You’d have to be a certain sort of person to want this future for Australia. You’d have to be driven by ideology, not evidence. You’d have to have internalised a certain type of economic theory that tells you that markets are always better, and that governments are always worse. You’d have no fear of cuts to government benefits or services, because your large personal fortune ensures you can always pay the best for everything.

Needless to say, no one who worked on this Audit was a homeless person, a worker on minimum wage, or someone with a permanent disability. Instead, an unrepresentative and partisan group has used shoddy arithmetic and junk economics in an attempt to destroy a century of Australian social welfare

There is no acknowledgement that the real cause of the current deficit is a shortfall in revenues, not a blow-out in expenditures.

Every man for himself, work your arse off and get ya white picket fence.

Living the American Australian dream.

-PB

Or... Remove negative gearing and super co-contribution.

Don't buy this garbage. It's like getting fired from your job and going on benefits but continuing to max out your credit card and when the creditors come calling blaming your employer.

If revenues fall shouldn't spending be wound back as well? Otherwise you get the current Labor deficit, billions of dollars and billions in interest repayments every year, money down the toilet.

Didn't they do that already?

And who is that debt to? The people of Australia?

If it's not international debt, then it could be wiped at any given time. It's not a great practice but it can be done.

People tend to forget that a government surplus is akin to a private sector deficit.

-PB

I have no idea how cheap/expensive degrees currently are in context, so have no idea whether increasing the cost is a good thing or not. And while I don't think the threshold repayment should be minimum wage, I do like the idea of decreasing it from its current value. I know a few people who have had the chance for a few pay upgrades over the years but have said no to it because they would go over the HELP threshold - it should be lower so more people are encouraged to pay the loan off IMO.

Edited by pv4: 2/5/2014 08:26:56 AM

Even if Australians owned the bulk of the debt it doesn’t really insulate us from crisis. Can you imagine if the government wiped the debt it owed to its own citizens? No one would ever buy bonds again. That means the country wouldn't be able to borrow again. Cue financial crisis, banking system collapse, etc.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/abbott-to-crack-down-on-dole-but-will-avoid-harshest-recommendation-20140503-zr3t8.html

It's another brilliant plan from Abbott.

Raise the retirement age so an already huge youth unemployment rate blows out further, then punish youth for not having a job by extending the age that they can apply for Newstart.

How about reducing the corporate tax rate so businesses can expand operations and employ more young and old people? Raising the retirement age to 70 in 2035 isn't going to have a short term impact on youth unemployment.

Perhaps Pete will re-skill or find another job in manufacturing.

lol at the interruption.

-PB

They weren't socialist they were wankers . But protest is a right