Archive for the 'poverty' Category
Disarming the fat bomb
Australian’s got fatter. Well done. We can be proud knowing, as 080808 looms, that our Olympic athletes are not really like us. We’re more like Belinda Neal, only fat and lethargic.
It was only a few weeks ago that we were chastened into thinking the obesity epidemic was a myth (unless you are poor. For those folk it is all too true but maybe they don’t really count). For reasons unknown, a fat bomb recently went off and everyone got infected.
We are sitting before a fork in the road. We can do nothing and continue as a nation on a path to metabolic syndrome or try something different to avert this ‘national health crisis’. I think I’ve figured out at least part of the solution.
Health bureaucrats need hard stats to base policy changes on. Every Australian’s Body Mass Index should be the marker with which we, as a nation fight the obesity epidemic.
The Medicare Levy should be adjusted according to each taxpayers BMI. Imagine the clamor of an entire nation trying to lower their BMI leading up to 30 June! Continue Reading »
Tags: Uncategorized , environment , health , kevin rudd , poverty , tax Comments (1)
To those who have, even more will be given
Perhaps our Christian Prime Minister has been reading Luke 8:18. I suppose we’re lucky that those who have little won’t find even the little they have taken away from them, but Andrew Leigh and Peter Martin are surely justified in asking why a fairly dodgy election promise to start with is being implemented in such a way as to disproportionately reward those who are already well off.
The redesigned scheme, due to come into effect on July 1, works like this: Every dollar that first home savers put into an account - up to a maximum of $5,000 - will be matched by a government contribution of 15 cents.
Except for Australians earning more than $80,000 per annum. They will get a government co-contribution of 25 cents for every dollar they invest. Really. …
Unless they earn more than $180,000 per annum in which case they will be blessed with a government contribution of 30 cents per dollar they invest.
That’s right.
Wayne Swan’s made much of creating incentives to save. I can’t for the life of me see why high income earners need public incentives. I thought we’d had enough middle class welfare under Howard. Now it seems we’re to get upper class welfare under Rudd.
Tags: coalition , economics , housing , interest rates , john howard , kevin rudd , labor , liberal party , lindsay tanner , peter costello , poverty , tax , wayne swan Comments (0)
Homelessness
One of the things the 2020 Summit is supposed to encourage is long term policy thinking. That’s something, arguably, that was consistently absent from John Howard’s style of governance - as demonstrated well by Nicholas Gruen in this essay. Note that I’m not arguing that right wing regimes per se lack the ability to plan ahead - Thatcher certainly had it, as mendacious as many of her measures were. But Howard and his government appeared to be a very particular style of political beast - electorally driven beyond belief. When we weren’t told that we were living in an earthly paradise, any problem that reared its head was instantly fixed - and ideally through a highly ideological announcement that would serve a double purpose as a “wedge”. Most of the time, the media moved on the next rabbit in the spotlight and the ensuing hat trick, and the issue went back underground. Consider - for instance - the Howard government’s response to homelessness. The only post-war government to lack a housing minister, the Coalition never did a thing, apart from occasional exhortations from Peter Costello about the virtues of voluntarism, until Mal Brough came along. Brough announced some sort of PPP for community housing, which, as far as I can tell, never got beyond the headline stage. He had bigger fish to fry.
It’s interesting, then, to consider the response of both the Rudd government and the media to the National Youth Commission’s homelessness report. Continue Reading »
Tags: coalition , housing , john howard , labor , media , poverty , youth Comments (0)
Central banker in bizarre love triangle with Chelsea Clinton and Angelina Jolie!
Not exactly, but Possum Comitatus has hit the mark with his remarks on the tabloidisation of the coverage of Glenn Stevens’ ruminations to the House Economics Committee. (Though, parenthetically, Alan Greenspan used to encourage coverage of his lerve interests…) Possum’s right that the sort of confected outrage Daily Terror editor David Penberthy sought to stir up is no substitute for serious analysis of the economic conundrums facing us. And it’s interesting to see Penberthy’s colleague Glenn Milne doing the lockstep thing in his column today, and perhaps giving away the game - the actual source for these sort of stories is big business, worried more about falling sales than any deep compassion for teh battlers. And there’s a suspicious resonance between these themes and those being pushed by the currently compassionate conservatives in the Liberal leadership, who’ve taken populism to their collective (ist?) hearts to the degree that they’re now rather shamelessly pushing a campaign to increase the aged pension, again in cahoots with their meejah mates.
But there’s a couple of other things going on here. Continue Reading »
Tags: brendan nelson , coalition , economics , interest rates , kevin rudd , labor , malcolm turnbull , media , newmatilda.com , poverty , wayne swan Comments (0)
Tangled up in blue
Brendan Nelson’s been at one of the regular talkfests organised by The Australian and the Melbourne Institute - the “New Agenda for Prosperity Conference” - having his say on industrial relations.
The day after Julia Gillard buried AWAs (or did she?), Dr Nelson’s taken time out from his compassionate crusade to resurrect the Coalition’s support for statutory individual workplace agreements:
The proposition is for an AWA with a different name and a better safety net. “The Coalition has heard the message from the electorate about AWAs and we no longer support them,” he said.
“Having said that, it is important for Australians to understand that we continue to support individual statutory agreements with a fair no-disadvantage test.”
Nelson, meet Labor trap.
Given that even mining companies were being quoted in the Fin Review yesterday as being “relaxed” about the absence of individual statutory agreements after 2009, this can only be about pure ideology. Which is, of course, what got Howard into so much trouble. The Coalition’s inability to paper over the cracks of the Howardian legacy just ensured Labor gets to run the scare campaign it wants to run at the next election.
This folly was perhaps predictable. What’s more interesting is one of the other themes from Nelson’s speech The Australian decided to highlight in advance of its delivery. Continue Reading »
Tags: brendan nelson , coalition , economics , industrial relations , john howard , julia gillard , julie bishop , kevin rudd , labor , malcolm turnbull , media , polling , poverty , workplace relations Comments (0)
Largesse for all Australians
Federal Parliament has gone into recess for seven weeks, and won’t meet again until 13 May when the Budget is delivered. That might be a good thing - insofar as it will give less opportunity for irresponsible and blatant beatups about budget horrors to get legs. Although it’s interesting to observe that after their compassionate frenzy of last week (and isn’t Brendan Nelson an angry little emo?), the Opposition spent the week in Question Time on the unpromising territory of Kevin Rudd’s connections with Ian Tang’s corporate ventures, an attack that proved to be something of a damp squib. Perhaps those tactics were intended to distract attention from yet another indictment of the Coalition’s record as fiscal managers - the astonishing 547% blowout in discretionary grants given away by Ministers in the last term - an astounding $9.1 billion, including $4.5 billion in the election year itself.
But Lindsay Tanner wasn’t going to let this slip by.
Tags: brendan nelson , coalition , economics , interest rates , john howard , kevin rudd , labor , lindsay tanner , malcolm turnbull , peter costello , poverty , tax , wayne swan Comments (0)
Of carers, caring and media cycles
On Friday, An Onymous Lefty penned a post on his blog:
Finally, a decent, progressive government, committed to ensuring that wealthier Australians don’t have to pay as much tax to support carers living in poverty. I mean, really - Tax cuts; or government helping people in dire need put food on the table? A freaking easy choice, say Kevin and Wayne. Screw those poor people!
You can imagine the rest.
On Saturday on the open thread at Larvatus Prodeo, there was a vigorous discussion of the abolition of one off bonuses to pensioners and carers - which had never been budgeted for, but were paid directly on an ad hoc basis by the Howard government from surpluses.
After having intervened from overseas on the weekend, Kevin Rudd yesterday sought to lay the issue to rest, telling a post-Cabinet press conference that carers and pensioners would not be worse off as a result of the budget and that the government intended to provide recipients of benefits with greater financial certainty. Today, the opposition are jumping up and down demanding certainty - appearing to want a pledge signed in Rudd’s blood or something - while trying to spread uncertainty as widely as possible for their own political purposes.
Tags: brendan nelson , coalition , economics , julia gillard , kevin rudd , labor , lindsay tanner , media , poverty Comments (4)
