A couple of years ago, the government changed the rules so that families on $150 000 a year or more wouldn’t be eligible to receive family payments. There were the predictable cries of ‘class warfare’, but there were also claims that $150 000 in Australia leaves you struggling to make ends meet. The Daily Telegraph found a couple on $150k who said “you can survive on $150,000 but you definitely aren’t doing well,” while in The Australian, a couple on $200 000 said “the government are making it bloody hard.”
A discussion of Australian political and economic issues and ideas, by Matt Cowgill.
Archives for posts with tag: welfare state
David Uren’s piece in the Australian today has some pretty eye-catching figures:
…nobody starts to pay tax until their earnings exceed $18,200, but the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that 60 per cent of all households receive more in cash benefits than they pay in tax.
A household in the middle 20 per cent of the earnings distribution pays income tax of $143 a week but gets cash social benefits totalling $164. Subsidised health, education and childcare deliver that average household a further $346 a week.
My last post consisted of the sort of Sisyphean snark about The Australian that I’d like to cut back on, but can’t resist writing. I was a little taken aback that the same paper that labelled a modest trim to family payments for high-income households as ‘class warfare’ would unashamedly lament that ”the old principle that welfare should exist only for those who genuinely need it appears no longer to hold.”
The Australian editorial, 11 January 2013:
Australia’s welfare system is crying out for comprehensive reform… Is it fair that a couple with one child and a household income of $160,000 a year receives a family tax benefit, or that a young couple buying, for their first home, a $700,000 apartment in Toorak are paid the first-home owners grant? The old principle that welfare should exist only for those who genuinely need it appears no longer to hold.
One of the more prominent entries into the public policy debate of late has been the Grattan Institute’s Game Changers report, which is an attempt to prioritise the various reform options that the federal government could pursue, and highlight those policies which would deliver the greatest economic dividend. It’s a worthy report, although I disagree with much of it, partly for the reasons set out by John Quiggin.
Bob Carr wrote a strange post advancing the conservative canard that the Euro crisis is a crisis of the welfare state, caused by high taxes and/or welfare spending as a proportion of GDP. He’s wrong.
