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.
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.
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.
And also because they’re entirely complicit evil cunts. Just slightly less evil than the Dutton button.
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.
Didn’t Labor bring in things like Medicare, Superannuation, NDIS (Not the crappy version it is now) as well as attempt to do various other ambitious projects but failed. But no they are evil /s
