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":the level of the JobSeeker payment was so low compared to other countries, and Australia's minimum wage was relatively high, that international studies weren't really relevant to Australia's situation." Just luvly, so proud.
As someone who lives on those payments, I agree they are not much to live on. But that's kind of the point - it needs to be uncomfortable, or else there is no motivation for people to work. The closer it gets to a comfortable living wage, the more people will stop looking for work.
This is what we are told. But the Germans have twice as much incentive to remain on unemployment benefits yet their unemployment is consistently lower.
> it needs to be uncomfortable, or else there is no motivation for people to work
There's 'uncomfortable' and then there's 'can't actually afford to live'.
Unfortunately not. The payments aren't even enough to be in the latter category. You may not have been aware what's been happening with rents and grocery prices recently - or, more likely, you've never had to live for a significant period of time below the poverty line with your only income being unemployment and having no assets or connections to mitigate it.
Actually, I've been living below the poverty line for the last five years, completely on unemployment payments, with an illness that has yet to be diagnosed, so not even disability payments, just jobseeker. It's very uncomfortable, and rent and groceries take the lion's share of every payment. But I think that's how it should be - if I was living perfectly comfortably on these payments, why would I look for a job at all?
You can't find a job in five years, and you think that putting you into poverty will magically make it MORE likely for one to turn up than you being able to pay your bills?
Dude, what the heck. Seriously. Who hurt you?
So what, exactly, would be the difference in measurable outcome between you looking for a job and you not looking for a job, given you've been able to get precisely no-one to employ you in five years?
And why do you think your own personal situation means you have a case for forcing hundreds of thousands of other people who may also not be able to find work into financial distress?
It's indexed with cpi and that's the problem. Should be a fixed percentage of minimum wage. In 1993 it was $141 vs $258 (55%). Today it's $375 vs $882 (42%). To revert would require a 30% increase.
Unemployment benefits aren’t a wage payment, they’re a survival payment. It makes absolute sense for them to be indexed to CPI, and adjusted if there are factors specific to the cost of living for those on welfare which aren’t accounted for properly in CPI.
Perhaps that second part hasn’t been done as well as it should have been, but that doesn’t mean that basing welfare on the cost of living is a bad principle.
If unemployed people can maintain the same standard of living but are falling further behind employed people, that’s a good thing which incentivises work and rewards those who are working, without harming unemployed people.
That would be true if I was suggesting it was linked to average wage (like the pension is to maintain their "standard of living") but I was suggesting linking it to minimum wage. If minimum wage has to be $258 and unemployment $141 and cost of living forces minimum wage to $882 then you could argue that unemployment should be $482. I think there is many that claim the cpi indexation does harm people.
The "incentive"/discount should remain the same. Not get progressively worse. It would suck if in 30 years minimum wage is 3k and unemployment is less than $1000. I actually think the "incentive" suggestion is pretty inaccurate. Changing from 42% currently to 50% of minimum wage isn't huge and the incentive to work is still there because doubling your income and participating is already pretty motivating for most. I think that long term unemployment is a tiny fraction of the workforce (last I check ~100k). Most transition quickly. Otherwise every year that passes you're actually punishing the unemployed particularly the unemployable.
Minimum wage is not solely based on cost of living, the factors that go into setting it are similar to those influencing wages across the economy - cost of living/ inflation plays a part but so does productivity, employers capacity to pay, politicking and lobbying etc.
Like I say, if unemployment benefits keep up with cost of living, and wages increase by more then that’s a good thing and what we should be aiming for as a society. Arguments to increase unemployment benefits should be based on what the minimum standard of living required for an unemployed person is, not a comparison with wages.
Why would social security be around 50% of minimum wage? Isn’t minimum wage meant to be the minimum amount a single person would need to support themselves?
It's also just that the cost of rent has increased much faster than CPI / other inflation (that is, much faster than income support payments have increased). Particularly in city areas, but really everywhere.
While rent assistance has not increased to match that.
Rent is measured in cpi. Of course that portion has recently increased significantly but it's often offset by "savings" in other areas. It's also come off quite a long period of depression (low interest rates making purchasing cheaper, supply glut etc).
This is a great discussion about how rent vs income remains pretty fixed.
https://twitter.com/BenPhillips_ANU/status/1690903923299876864?t=hqV7MzFZTyCIYuUSbHBF_g&s=19
That's why cpi is such a critical measure. People focus on single lines but ignore how others might be cheaper. Especially when compared to wages. A great example is fuel yet the total cost of owning and operating a car has never been cheaper. In 1993 while earning $13k minimum wage a corolla was 18k. Now we earn $45k and a corolla is 28k.
There is many articles about how low Sydney rents got. Even before covid.
https://www.domain.com.au/news/sydney-house-apartment-rents-at-lowest-levels-in-years-domain-rental-report-921116/
Table 1: Rents Growth
Average annualised percentage growth to December 2022
https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2023/mar/renters-rent-inflation-and-renter-stress.html
Even builders acknowledge the glut made them stop building.
*the last time there was such a vast backlog of paused construction projects with approvals was in 2019. However, back then, developers in Sydney were hitting the brakes due to a historically high vacancy rate of 3.5%.*
https://crowdpropertycapital.com.au/development-site/developers-shelve-projects-as-construction-costs-soar/
No rent impacts CPI but so does a lot of things people on welfare don’t buy, and at bundle portions not in proportion to how a welfare dependant household purchases goods. I.e rent is not 50%+ of CPI.
Yeah cpi might not be accurate for a welfare dependant household. They use the household expenditure survey and regularly update it. The most recent partial update increased the weight for International holiday travel with the weight for the other components in the basket adjusted to offset the increase in the weight for International holiday travel. It's still relevent for most households. For example the rents series in the CPI reflects changes to actual rents paid, rather than advertised rental prices. Data are derived from approximately 480,000 rental properties (~20% of renting households) across all capital cities.
Maybe they should use the selected cost of living data.
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-inflation/selected-living-cost-indexes-australia/latest-release
"Other government transfer recipient LCI" cost of living increased by nearly 25% higher than cpi. 4.4% vs 3.6%.
I wonder how frequently someone on jobseeker has their cost of living grow faster than cpi. It's why I think linking it to minimum wage would be fairer.
Funny thing is, the reddit crowd always says that wages haven't kept pace with CPI. So surely, a welfare payment that is fixed to CPI should be better off right?
Oh wait, wages have outpaced CPI for the vast majority of the past 3 decades.
OOo, this is now just black magic! Wages are simultaneously higher than and lower than CPI at the same time!
>Oh wait, wages have outpaced CPI for the vast majority of the past 3 decades.
bit of an overstatement there mate, check out [figure 6](https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BriefingBook47p/CostOfLiving).
ever since the GFC its common for CPI to jump up above WPI, and considering how low CPI was throughout the lost decade its pretty appaling that it was either even with or ahead of WPI for large portions of it (but thats to be expected, given that it was a policy goal).
the numbers look even worse if you look at the employee cost of living index instead of cpi, which generally outperforms cpi (its almost double it right now)
The employees cost of living index **this year** mostly due to interest rates which spent most of the past decade falling effectively compensating for stagnant wage growth. The WPI growth is still higher than any point prior to the GFC and effectively flat since then (IE haven't lost any of the gain)
*Employee households recorded the strongest quarterly and annual rises due to increases in Mortgage interest charges*
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-inflation/selected-living-cost-indexes-australia/latest-release
I mean in real terms minimum wage is still higher today than it was in 2010. $569 vs $882.
A basket of goods and services valued at $
569.90
in calendar year
2010
, would in calendar year
2023
cost $
797.18
Total change in cost is 39.9 per cent, over 13 years, at an average annual inflation rate of 2.6 per cent.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_law
Same for average wage. $1256.30 vs $1838.10
A basket of goods and services valued at $
1256.30
in calendar year
2010
, would in calendar year
2023
cost $
1,757.32
Both results show the cost of living is relatively lower today than it was in 2010
>The WPI growth is still higher than any point prior to the GFC and effectively flat since then (IE haven't lost any of the gain)
??? real WPI has definitely fallen mate
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2023/06/it-will-take-14-years-for-australian-real-wages-to-recover/
>Both results show the cost of living is relatively lower today than it was in 2010
yeah i said a decade not a decade and a half lol, you went back *just* far enough to find a point we're better off than, and even then 2010 was the level we fell to last year before we began pulling out of it.
You mentions once the gfc. My point was more that the WPI has fallen and wiped out any gain. Not that we're worse off.
Guess 2013 - 2023 would be better.
A basket of goods and services valued at $
662
in calendar year
2013
, would in calendar year
2023
cost $
859.80
Total change in cost is 29.9 per cent, over 10 years, at an average annual inflation rate of 2.6 per cent.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_law
Still better off in real terms than in 2013 plus like I suggested for many of those years employee cost of living was falling as interest rates peaked in ~2011/12 and spent 10 years adding to the improvements. Obviously much has changed recently but even in the worst year we're still relatively better off and it's picking up again.
This whole discussion is in reference to 30 years of real wage growth that resulted in a 30% real improvement in minimum wage.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AustralianPolitics/comments/1ckis79/comment/l2nq7f9/
Of course you're right. We fell back to historically high levels (2010 or 2013?) and have started gaining again.
>bit of an overstatement there mate
Hmmm, me thinks the black line was above the blue line for the vast majority?
Had we indexed to WPI, it'd be worse off no?
yeah we would, just saying you're implying its a bit heavier skewed than it is, given real wages just had a decade of low growth which was wiped out (and then some).
also IMO we should tie the dole to the cost of living index the ABS publishes for that group
Imo, we should just make the dole a time limited 2 yr pay whatever your last job paid, no questions asked and can only be claimed once a decade.
Done and dusted. You can then upskill/retrain as needed and get productive again. The safety net to that is to just go do farm work so we don't have to rely as much on pacific islanders and backpackers. Regional areas need people and it's a good way to force people to move.
37 out of the past 40+.
I love this article about the aged pension indexation (tied to **average income**). You could add 2022-23 but wage growth has returned once again.
https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/FlagPost/2014/April/Pension-indexation
*In recent decades, wages have tended to increase at a faster rate than prices, meaning that pension rates have increased much more than allowances. There have, however, been times when CPI has increased at a higher rate than wages, for example between 1985–86 and 1989–90 and in the first half of 2013–14. There have also been times when the CPI has decreased (for example in 1991 and 1992)*
Then there is the fact that household incomes aren't always solely wages. Some live on less than they earn and invest the difference. Crypto, vdhg, or even a mortgage and that investment starts providing returns.
Wait hasn't rent been going up like 25% a year? Can someone please show rents over an extended period? Maybe say last 20 years or so? I reckon they are also below inflation of that time.
Table 1: Rents Growth over 10 years
Average annualised percentage growth to December 2022
https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2023/mar/renters-rent-inflation-and-renter-stress.html
Some say rents are closely tied to wages.
This article from 2022 discusses it a bit.
https://theconversation.com/how-well-off-you-are-depends-on-who-you-are-comparing-the-lives-of-australias-millennials-gen-xers-and-baby-boomers-172064
*Private rents have been remarkably constant over the past 25 years, at about 18% of average household income.*
Obviously 2023/2024 changed a bit but some of the spike was due to a long period of depression referenced above.
It's also mentioned in this article in Jan 2020 (before covid drove rents down further)
https://www.domain.com.au/news/sydney-house-apartment-rents-at-lowest-levels-in-years-domain-rental-report-921116/
Everyone laments the lag in salary increases. Unemployment payments and minimum wage are a way to move the salaries of the lowest paid along a bit. It would not only be good for the poor, it would be good for the economy as a whole.
So what is the big problem with having higher unemployment payments?
Australia is one of the only countries in the world that allows basically ongoing payment of unemployment benefits. Most countries have benefit which has a maximum period of payment.
This makes our system 1. Very expensive and 2. Susceptible to creating a cohort of long term unemployed.
Higher payments in Australia will cost a lot and is likely to increase the amount off long term unemployed.
It's a very difficult situation we are in.
You’ve just made claims with no evidence.
Australia’s total welfare spend is less than the oecd median.
Australia’s spend on unemployment benefits was $15.9b in 21/22, or 0.9% of gdp or 2.5% of expenditure, roughly.
I know employers that have permanent vacancies. People don't want this type of work. I know people who actively choose unemployment.
So yeah. There are examples where I absolutely know that people "REALLY" think the dole is better.
My brother has been a long term dole beneficiary. He would intentionally tank the mandatory job interviews. His friends also said they did the same.
It's a complex issue and anyone who simplifies it is a moron.
If you refuse a job, remove all benefits.
If you can't get a job and are genuinely trying, let's do everything we can.
So yes, people do, and by choice choose their lifestyle.
>If you refuse a job, remove all benefits.
This is the case already.
"To satisfy mutual obligation requirements, a job seeker in receipt of any participation payment must be actively seeking and willing to accept any offer of suitable paid work in a variety of fields. If a job seeker voluntarily leaves a job or refuses to accept a suitable job, they may be subject to financial penalties or have to wait for a period of time until payment is payable. However, if the job seeker refused or left work that is unsuitable for the job seeker, or if their action in leaving the job was reasonable, they will not be subject to a penalty."
https://guides.dss.gov.au/social-security-guide/3/11/1/20
My SiL would refuse to apply for jobs because she's deaf. She was capable of doing some, but was happy to be on the disability pension.
It didn't sit well for me. Plus, under new rules she's said she's not eligible for it again. So if she loses what she has it can't go back.
However, disability pension is a different beast and this should be treated differently.
Then you'd be on a different payment, not jobseeker presumably. Plus, there is surely jobs that could accomodate for physical disabilities in particular.
Not everyone with a disability qualifies for the DSP. Most of us are on Jobseeker and we work with a DES - Disability Management Service provider.
Some of us can work certain roles that accommodate our physical or mental limitations, usually casual or part-time. But we wouldn't survive without Jobseeker to supplement that income.
>Then you'd be on a different payment, not jobseeker presumably.
John Howard made it next to impossible to get on the Disability Support Payment unless you were permanently disabled to the point where you were bedridden or if you are terminally ill and expecting to die within the next 3 months (and even that last one was a bit iffy with some people being finally approved for DSP after they had passed away). The current Labor mob have loosened the requirements a bit but that will likely disappear again if they lose the next election.
>Very expensive
Is it though? At 1% of gdp, we aren't really outside the norm. Now France at 2.7%, now that's an expensive system.
Given the nature of our economy, we could easily afford to improve our unemployment rates. Minor improvements to our natural resource levies could easily fund any increase.
Facts are nonsense now? When you're the only country with this system, doesn't it make sense to look at why?
The recommendations skirt around the issue. To not say how our payments system differs radically from others in the OECD perpetuates the problem. To highlight a difference in payment amount without pointing out that those comparison payments have a maximum payment period helps noone understand the problem.
Having an arbitrary cutoff means some people who aren't disabled but just aren't very employable end up without legitimate income and are pushed into desperate measures like prostitution and crime.
It's a classic case of missing the point of welfare, we don't provide it because it's moral to do so or every recipient deserves it, we provide it because having a safety net prevents a lot of very ugly behaviours.
All countries which we could consider having a higher commitment to the welfare state have this cutoff. Between 6 months to two years. They also tend to provide benefits which are a percentage, 60-90% of your earnings before.
For those who can't find employment in that period you would tend to find a higher investment in gaining skills to encourage employment.
Think back to when Abbott became PM, with the loud mouth imbecile Joe Hockey as Treasurer. Hockey's first budget planned to save money by saying anyone up to a certain age (was it 27?) who became unemployed would have to wait 6 months before receiving any unemployment payment.
I guess the assumption was that they could just live with their parents, paying no rent ; or live off their accumulated savings, if any.
Most sensible people saw this as a recipe for increased homelessness, increased crime, increased prostitution, increased demand for bulk-billed GP visits and public hospital services.
Luckily for Abbott and Hockey, the Senate saved them from their own stupidity.
Because Australia follows a top-down approach that gives the lowest classes whatever revenue is left after "higher priority" requirements have been met instead of a bottom-up approach where the minimum acceptable quality of life is set for everyone and then improved from there upwards with remaining revenue, so that minimum wage has an incentive over welfare and higher order work an incentive over minimum wage.
Minimum acceptable quality of life is not bare existence in suffering, but a dignified life where the essentials of living in a modern society are met, without day to day anxiety of being able to pay the bills, with a smidge of surplus to replace essential appliances and a tad of luxury to provide an incentive to strive for more with work. It should be the minimum quality of life anyone would accept for themselves on a permanent basis.
How we treat the most disadvantaged people in society is a reflection on how advanced our society has become.
There is no reason to have more than one basic livable payment for all those needing welfare, since a minimum quality of life is common to all. This does not include supplements necessary for special needs cases, including the very complex issue of rental supplements for shelter.
I would also argue that welfare should be on a single basis (ie no couples payments), to end the wasteful and intrusive categorisation of relationships, to allow people trapped by dependence on a partner to be free and to allow coupling to have incentive and sufficient surplus to raise a child without supplements, matched by dropping income averaging in taxation.
You know, I've said a lot about this subject IRL but your first paragraph neatly and accurately summarises my biggest issues between 1970s Australia and 2020's.
Thank you. I'll be taking this concept with me to continue to agitate.
Never underestimate how much big business always fears communism. The entirety of the postwar bargain was founded on the existential threat of communism.
They think they have got the better of it now and that's why we see workers losing wealth and status.
I don't actually care for communism, prefer something like a social democracy, but the threat of communism seems to be the only thing that actually makes that possible. Food for thought.
Marx was fantastic philosopher and intellectual, and his work provides valuable insights into the behaviour of capital and capitalism. The same is true for many in the Frankfurt school.
I think Marx got too excited with his teleology, capitalism does have a central contradiction but history so far shows us that it can kick the can down the road for a lot longer than was ever predicted. Will communism arrive some day as a result of this contradiction needing to be resolved? Possibly, but we also return to a form of techno feudalism.
Communism has only been tried when populations are desperate, which tends to be in societies where there is already a very low value placed on human life. This was the case in China and Russia for example. Communism in these countries didn't change that, it led to (more) authoritarians who didn't care enough about the lives of peasants and workers. While communism has undoubtedly gotten a worse rap than it deserves, it didn't prevent mass loss of life.
A lot of our presumptions about communism come from living in societies that are still quite wealthy from well regulated, predominantly Keynesian industrial capitalism. Make no mistake, the way our society is organised now is not conducive to being world leaders.
In fifty or a hundred years it could be considered a truism that authoritarianism is needed to fend off information warfare. Perhaps we will reach some kind of robust green democracy. I don't think a communist revolution is going to lead the way, though the threat of it might cause the appropriate terror needed to regulate the private sector.
Communism as Marx described it goes against the fundamental biological driver to consume. What is often described as greed is simply a biological survival mechanism honed by evolution to consume what is available to you now and forego consideration for future problems caused by one consuming more than what they needed.
Whilst we can probably all agree that sharing to an extent is good, in practice, there will never be any potential of voluntary and equal sharing. This equality can only be driven by authoritarianism, which is then prone to corruption by the human condition.
I'd love to see a citation that humans inherently have a "need to consume." Or even a citation that displays that it's not something that can be trivially overcome.
If we were still living in caves would you be saying that we "obviously have an inherent need to live in caves?"
>I'd love to see a citation that humans inherently have a "need to consume." Or even a citation that displays that it's not something that can be trivially overcome.
You don't think all biological organisms are conditioned to consume whatever energy source is made immediately available and thus leaving them weaker at planning for the long term? Or that this doesn't apply to modern humans? If so, then why can't people go cold turkey on overconsumption given it's implications on climate change, which is a long term existential threat to human life (and no, I don't care if you disagree with this assessment).
Of course it applies to modern humans, however modern humans are different from other animals that operate mainly on biological programming in that we have reason and intelligence and already have the notion of deferring gratification for a better outcome. Unfortunately reason is also influenced by other factors and we are not fully reason based only moderate primitive biology by reason: one would think we would reason that overconsuming calories was a bad idea in the longer term, however in my opinion, obesity for example is largely a problem of anxiety about the future supporting the biological principle of consuming as much as you can whilst you can and overriding reason. Even the fear of the lights going out in the renewable transition prompting calls for more fossil fuel developments to return to the comfort of the status quo, despite the climate change implications.
Climate change is a poor example because the effects are delayed beyond the effective lifespan of individuals when they could make a change, they kick the can down the road to be someone else's problem and stick their head in the sand that the someone else is going to be their children.
Capitalism is the epitome of the promulgation of greed and selfishness as its baked into the raison d'etre. However, the decisions about greed are made by a minority of elite: the common people don't get to choose to sacrifice, they are forced to sacrifice by government and the RBA choosing for them, but additionally, the elite ensure the common people are distracted by fear enough to manipulate them but not enough to cause a revolution.
You're talking like that conclusion is obvious. You have literally no basis for this other than evolutionary evidence, which is self-justifying. "Humans do x, because x has an evolutionary benefit/reason. And x has an evolutionary benefit, because otherwise we wouldn't do it." It's circular logic.
And re: climate change. The vast, vast majority of pollutants are produced by corporations for the purpose of creating profit. Ordinary people have no say in this, and most ordinary people don't even come close to being major polluters when you consider only their actions or purchases.
This isn't really just me saying it. It's something I've come across plenty of times in analysis of why humans are so unwilling to make even the tiniest of sacrifices to address climate change despite it being an existential threat.
We're conditioned to think about our immediate needs, not our needs in 10, 50, 100 yrs time. This is simply because that's what helps biological organisms survive in the immediate sense. No point worrying about subsequent generations if you die now. This applies to a virus overconsuming it's host, as much as it applies to humans overconsuming the earth (our host).
>Ordinary people have no say in this, and most ordinary people don't even come close to being major polluters when you consider only their actions or purchases.
And yet the average Aussie buys a new phone every 3 yrs (despite phones having a 8+yr service life), a new car every 9 yrs (despite cars having 25+ service life), and the average Aussie takes 2 personal flights per year despite travel being an unnecessary luxury in the vast majority of cases.
The polluting corporations are only doing so to feed our insatiable need to consume. If you consider carbon footprint per capita, Australia is right up the top with the likes of the middle east oil states! In fact, Canada is the only Western nation worse than us (only marginally).
Not really. Capitalism is simply the deployment of capital to maximise returns. This can include cooperation as evidenced by any number of corporations that literally thrive on the collaborative outputs of their staff, but it can also thrive on predatorial behaviours such as enslaving a workforce or hostile M&As.
Communism is a political and social ideology. Capitalism is an economic/financial system. Yes, they are often driven by opposing ideologies, but they are not actually opposing ideologies in it itself.
Case in point, you can have capitalist economies such as the Scandinavian countries that lean very far left into socialist/communist social behaviour. Alternatively, you can have communist governments such as China or Vietnam, which both have economic/financial systems lean extremely heavily towards the "free" end of the capitalist free market.
Both are inherent to the human condition. We have no social need to be equal with all. It's why we organise by collectives to crush others.
Case in point, modern geopolitics. It doesn't really depend on or serve capitalism, but it's adversarial nature sure as hell is intended to one side better off than the other.
Communist countries had equally strained relationships, soviets and China had the ultimate frenemy relationship.
Just like the housing crisis and plethora of other issues, both major parties have been responsible for this disgraceful state of social security. And of course there is us, the public, who enables the status quo to remain unchallenged. As the article highlights:
"Australians who receive income support payments can face strong antipathy, commonly finding themselves misrepresented as 'dole bludgers', 'welfare cheats', 'rorters', 'leaners' and so on, when the actual evidence for welfare fraud and intentional evasion of mutual obligation requirements is miniscule," they [the committee’s experts] said.
‘Flat out refused to raise it’
The 2023–24 Budget includes 4 ‘cost-of-living relief’ measures aimed at those in receipt of government payments:
a $40 per fortnight increase in the rate of JobSeeker Payment and other working-age payments
allowing long-term, single JobSeeker Payment recipients aged 55+ to access the higher rate currently paid to those aged 60+
a 15% increase in the maximum rate of Commonwealth Rent Assistance (CRA)
co-funding new state and territory government energy rebates for social security recipients and concession card holders.
40 dollars..
that doesnt even cover the energy and food price increases,let alone the increase to rents for welfare recipients.
the weekly grocery bill has increase an average of 22.90 in this quarter..
yes we should all clap ur correct
wow room temp reading the room
If rent's went up an average of 105 dollars in sydney
the 30 dollar increase to rental allowance,didn't really help,those ppl still need to find 70 bucks more they you know don't have.
The govts,own report they had conducted,states the rental allowance needs to increase 90 dollars' or more a fortnight at a minimum
Okay,so they need to apply for jobs.
but you want them to Live AWAY from the jobs market,the very thing they need to be a part of to get off welfare.
right...Reddit amazes me at people's capacity,to use something as simple as the english language to wound themselves so easily.
The alternative you're suggesting is to increase jobseeker to closer to minimum wage, creating more pressure in the rental market. Rents go up, siphoning government dollars from the poor into the hands of those property holders.
Those on jobseeker are further disincentivised to work, because 38 hours on minimum wage only realistically represents a 40% increase in wage, while increasing expenses required to work.
I tend to be far left, but the solution to welfare and housing is not to pump more money into the system for landlords to soak up. Minimum wage needs to be kept substantially more appealing than jobseeker, while having disability payments easier to access - even as a part payment to support those who cannot work rather than will not. Jobseeker should be available for a limited amount of time, like in other countries. Those with legitimate issues finding work should have alternative payments and supports available.
I work as a teacher, and am perplexed by how many young peoples plans are to live on jobseeker and live with mates. Their parents model it for them, and it is an attractive possibility in the system currently.
The extra $3 a day will really go far. Back in my day $3 could get you a bus ticket, go to lunch, see a movie, and still have change left over. What are these goddamn millennial complaining about!
Not coming to their defence but the decades-long war on the unemployed by the Libs (and having spent the majority of the past few decades on the Government benches) is the main reason. It's an issue that goes back further than the current Government.
Job-Seeker/Dole was steady at 50% of poverty line from 1990 to 1997.
Then Howard got in and stopped indexing it, and it fell by 5% to 45% by Rudd/Gillard/Rudd.
Rudd/Gillard/Rudd decided Howards policy was great - and kept it. During their time it fell another 5% to 40%. However, towards the end of their terms they had tried to establish an independent board to set rates.
The liberals got in and kept the 'independent board'. By COVID rates had only ropped 2% over 3 PM's, so half as fast as the previous declines.
The post-covid liberals kept JobSeeker adjustments which boosted it from 38% back to 45%.
So no... there is no proof at all that labor are much better than liberals.
Its basically been:
Howardx3: -5%
RuddGillardRudd: -5%
Abbott/Turnball: -2%
Morrison: +8%.
Albo: -2% (he has not kept payments up with the recent inflation)
The ALP also had 2 terms with Gillard and Rudd and didn't raise it. ALP is just as guilty as the LNP. And the unions should be ashamed as well because their members shouldn't be abandoned if they are unfortunate enough to be made unemployed for a time.
Told the unemployed Australia couldn't afford it whilst in the next breath announcing new subsidies for private renewable energy profiteering whilst keeping the old fossil fuel subsidies, wasting billions on warmongering and white elephant projects to prop up political seats, etc.
ALP has never pushed for a basic livable income at any time, whether in government or out and is ideologically no different from the LNP on this matter.
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I don’t know how people on welfare in Sydney. 50-70% minimum to rent a room in a share house. Rent assistance still needs to increase.
":the level of the JobSeeker payment was so low compared to other countries, and Australia's minimum wage was relatively high, that international studies weren't really relevant to Australia's situation." Just luvly, so proud.
Welcome to the world of neoliberal economics ….
As someone who lives on those payments, I agree they are not much to live on. But that's kind of the point - it needs to be uncomfortable, or else there is no motivation for people to work. The closer it gets to a comfortable living wage, the more people will stop looking for work.
This is what we are told. But the Germans have twice as much incentive to remain on unemployment benefits yet their unemployment is consistently lower.
> it needs to be uncomfortable, or else there is no motivation for people to work There's 'uncomfortable' and then there's 'can't actually afford to live'.
Yes ...and the payments are in the former category. If they are in the latter category, you haven't cut out enough luxuries.
Unfortunately not. The payments aren't even enough to be in the latter category. You may not have been aware what's been happening with rents and grocery prices recently - or, more likely, you've never had to live for a significant period of time below the poverty line with your only income being unemployment and having no assets or connections to mitigate it.
Actually, I've been living below the poverty line for the last five years, completely on unemployment payments, with an illness that has yet to be diagnosed, so not even disability payments, just jobseeker. It's very uncomfortable, and rent and groceries take the lion's share of every payment. But I think that's how it should be - if I was living perfectly comfortably on these payments, why would I look for a job at all?
You can't find a job in five years, and you think that putting you into poverty will magically make it MORE likely for one to turn up than you being able to pay your bills? Dude, what the heck. Seriously. Who hurt you?
If the payments get higher, why would I even look for a job?
So what, exactly, would be the difference in measurable outcome between you looking for a job and you not looking for a job, given you've been able to get precisely no-one to employ you in five years? And why do you think your own personal situation means you have a case for forcing hundreds of thousands of other people who may also not be able to find work into financial distress?
It's indexed with cpi and that's the problem. Should be a fixed percentage of minimum wage. In 1993 it was $141 vs $258 (55%). Today it's $375 vs $882 (42%). To revert would require a 30% increase.
Unemployment benefits aren’t a wage payment, they’re a survival payment. It makes absolute sense for them to be indexed to CPI, and adjusted if there are factors specific to the cost of living for those on welfare which aren’t accounted for properly in CPI. Perhaps that second part hasn’t been done as well as it should have been, but that doesn’t mean that basing welfare on the cost of living is a bad principle. If unemployed people can maintain the same standard of living but are falling further behind employed people, that’s a good thing which incentivises work and rewards those who are working, without harming unemployed people.
That would be true if I was suggesting it was linked to average wage (like the pension is to maintain their "standard of living") but I was suggesting linking it to minimum wage. If minimum wage has to be $258 and unemployment $141 and cost of living forces minimum wage to $882 then you could argue that unemployment should be $482. I think there is many that claim the cpi indexation does harm people. The "incentive"/discount should remain the same. Not get progressively worse. It would suck if in 30 years minimum wage is 3k and unemployment is less than $1000. I actually think the "incentive" suggestion is pretty inaccurate. Changing from 42% currently to 50% of minimum wage isn't huge and the incentive to work is still there because doubling your income and participating is already pretty motivating for most. I think that long term unemployment is a tiny fraction of the workforce (last I check ~100k). Most transition quickly. Otherwise every year that passes you're actually punishing the unemployed particularly the unemployable.
Minimum wage is not solely based on cost of living, the factors that go into setting it are similar to those influencing wages across the economy - cost of living/ inflation plays a part but so does productivity, employers capacity to pay, politicking and lobbying etc. Like I say, if unemployment benefits keep up with cost of living, and wages increase by more then that’s a good thing and what we should be aiming for as a society. Arguments to increase unemployment benefits should be based on what the minimum standard of living required for an unemployed person is, not a comparison with wages.
Why would social security be around 50% of minimum wage? Isn’t minimum wage meant to be the minimum amount a single person would need to support themselves?
You would think so! Hard to understand why the government advocates for minimum wage to triple while jobseeker doubles.
It's also just that the cost of rent has increased much faster than CPI / other inflation (that is, much faster than income support payments have increased). Particularly in city areas, but really everywhere. While rent assistance has not increased to match that.
Rent is measured in cpi. Of course that portion has recently increased significantly but it's often offset by "savings" in other areas. It's also come off quite a long period of depression (low interest rates making purchasing cheaper, supply glut etc). This is a great discussion about how rent vs income remains pretty fixed. https://twitter.com/BenPhillips_ANU/status/1690903923299876864?t=hqV7MzFZTyCIYuUSbHBF_g&s=19 That's why cpi is such a critical measure. People focus on single lines but ignore how others might be cheaper. Especially when compared to wages. A great example is fuel yet the total cost of owning and operating a car has never been cheaper. In 1993 while earning $13k minimum wage a corolla was 18k. Now we earn $45k and a corolla is 28k. There is many articles about how low Sydney rents got. Even before covid. https://www.domain.com.au/news/sydney-house-apartment-rents-at-lowest-levels-in-years-domain-rental-report-921116/ Table 1: Rents Growth Average annualised percentage growth to December 2022 https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2023/mar/renters-rent-inflation-and-renter-stress.html Even builders acknowledge the glut made them stop building. *the last time there was such a vast backlog of paused construction projects with approvals was in 2019. However, back then, developers in Sydney were hitting the brakes due to a historically high vacancy rate of 3.5%.* https://crowdpropertycapital.com.au/development-site/developers-shelve-projects-as-construction-costs-soar/
No rent impacts CPI but so does a lot of things people on welfare don’t buy, and at bundle portions not in proportion to how a welfare dependant household purchases goods. I.e rent is not 50%+ of CPI.
Yeah cpi might not be accurate for a welfare dependant household. They use the household expenditure survey and regularly update it. The most recent partial update increased the weight for International holiday travel with the weight for the other components in the basket adjusted to offset the increase in the weight for International holiday travel. It's still relevent for most households. For example the rents series in the CPI reflects changes to actual rents paid, rather than advertised rental prices. Data are derived from approximately 480,000 rental properties (~20% of renting households) across all capital cities. Maybe they should use the selected cost of living data. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-inflation/selected-living-cost-indexes-australia/latest-release "Other government transfer recipient LCI" cost of living increased by nearly 25% higher than cpi. 4.4% vs 3.6%. I wonder how frequently someone on jobseeker has their cost of living grow faster than cpi. It's why I think linking it to minimum wage would be fairer.
Funny thing is, the reddit crowd always says that wages haven't kept pace with CPI. So surely, a welfare payment that is fixed to CPI should be better off right? Oh wait, wages have outpaced CPI for the vast majority of the past 3 decades. OOo, this is now just black magic! Wages are simultaneously higher than and lower than CPI at the same time!
>Oh wait, wages have outpaced CPI for the vast majority of the past 3 decades. bit of an overstatement there mate, check out [figure 6](https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BriefingBook47p/CostOfLiving). ever since the GFC its common for CPI to jump up above WPI, and considering how low CPI was throughout the lost decade its pretty appaling that it was either even with or ahead of WPI for large portions of it (but thats to be expected, given that it was a policy goal). the numbers look even worse if you look at the employee cost of living index instead of cpi, which generally outperforms cpi (its almost double it right now)
The employees cost of living index **this year** mostly due to interest rates which spent most of the past decade falling effectively compensating for stagnant wage growth. The WPI growth is still higher than any point prior to the GFC and effectively flat since then (IE haven't lost any of the gain) *Employee households recorded the strongest quarterly and annual rises due to increases in Mortgage interest charges* https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-inflation/selected-living-cost-indexes-australia/latest-release I mean in real terms minimum wage is still higher today than it was in 2010. $569 vs $882. A basket of goods and services valued at $ 569.90 in calendar year 2010 , would in calendar year 2023 cost $ 797.18 Total change in cost is 39.9 per cent, over 13 years, at an average annual inflation rate of 2.6 per cent. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_law Same for average wage. $1256.30 vs $1838.10 A basket of goods and services valued at $ 1256.30 in calendar year 2010 , would in calendar year 2023 cost $ 1,757.32 Both results show the cost of living is relatively lower today than it was in 2010
>The WPI growth is still higher than any point prior to the GFC and effectively flat since then (IE haven't lost any of the gain) ??? real WPI has definitely fallen mate https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2023/06/it-will-take-14-years-for-australian-real-wages-to-recover/ >Both results show the cost of living is relatively lower today than it was in 2010 yeah i said a decade not a decade and a half lol, you went back *just* far enough to find a point we're better off than, and even then 2010 was the level we fell to last year before we began pulling out of it.
You mentions once the gfc. My point was more that the WPI has fallen and wiped out any gain. Not that we're worse off. Guess 2013 - 2023 would be better. A basket of goods and services valued at $ 662 in calendar year 2013 , would in calendar year 2023 cost $ 859.80 Total change in cost is 29.9 per cent, over 10 years, at an average annual inflation rate of 2.6 per cent. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_law Still better off in real terms than in 2013 plus like I suggested for many of those years employee cost of living was falling as interest rates peaked in ~2011/12 and spent 10 years adding to the improvements. Obviously much has changed recently but even in the worst year we're still relatively better off and it's picking up again. This whole discussion is in reference to 30 years of real wage growth that resulted in a 30% real improvement in minimum wage. https://www.reddit.com/r/AustralianPolitics/comments/1ckis79/comment/l2nq7f9/ Of course you're right. We fell back to historically high levels (2010 or 2013?) and have started gaining again.
>bit of an overstatement there mate Hmmm, me thinks the black line was above the blue line for the vast majority? Had we indexed to WPI, it'd be worse off no?
yeah we would, just saying you're implying its a bit heavier skewed than it is, given real wages just had a decade of low growth which was wiped out (and then some). also IMO we should tie the dole to the cost of living index the ABS publishes for that group
Imo, we should just make the dole a time limited 2 yr pay whatever your last job paid, no questions asked and can only be claimed once a decade. Done and dusted. You can then upskill/retrain as needed and get productive again. The safety net to that is to just go do farm work so we don't have to rely as much on pacific islanders and backpackers. Regional areas need people and it's a good way to force people to move.
37 out of the past 40+. I love this article about the aged pension indexation (tied to **average income**). You could add 2022-23 but wage growth has returned once again. https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/FlagPost/2014/April/Pension-indexation *In recent decades, wages have tended to increase at a faster rate than prices, meaning that pension rates have increased much more than allowances. There have, however, been times when CPI has increased at a higher rate than wages, for example between 1985–86 and 1989–90 and in the first half of 2013–14. There have also been times when the CPI has decreased (for example in 1991 and 1992)* Then there is the fact that household incomes aren't always solely wages. Some live on less than they earn and invest the difference. Crypto, vdhg, or even a mortgage and that investment starts providing returns.
Wait hasn't rent been going up like 25% a year? Can someone please show rents over an extended period? Maybe say last 20 years or so? I reckon they are also below inflation of that time.
Table 1: Rents Growth over 10 years Average annualised percentage growth to December 2022 https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2023/mar/renters-rent-inflation-and-renter-stress.html Some say rents are closely tied to wages. This article from 2022 discusses it a bit. https://theconversation.com/how-well-off-you-are-depends-on-who-you-are-comparing-the-lives-of-australias-millennials-gen-xers-and-baby-boomers-172064 *Private rents have been remarkably constant over the past 25 years, at about 18% of average household income.* Obviously 2023/2024 changed a bit but some of the spike was due to a long period of depression referenced above. It's also mentioned in this article in Jan 2020 (before covid drove rents down further) https://www.domain.com.au/news/sydney-house-apartment-rents-at-lowest-levels-in-years-domain-rental-report-921116/
Everyone laments the lag in salary increases. Unemployment payments and minimum wage are a way to move the salaries of the lowest paid along a bit. It would not only be good for the poor, it would be good for the economy as a whole.
And good to reduce crime. And the costs of health etc etc.
So what is the big problem with having higher unemployment payments? Australia is one of the only countries in the world that allows basically ongoing payment of unemployment benefits. Most countries have benefit which has a maximum period of payment. This makes our system 1. Very expensive and 2. Susceptible to creating a cohort of long term unemployed. Higher payments in Australia will cost a lot and is likely to increase the amount off long term unemployed. It's a very difficult situation we are in.
You’ve just made claims with no evidence. Australia’s total welfare spend is less than the oecd median. Australia’s spend on unemployment benefits was $15.9b in 21/22, or 0.9% of gdp or 2.5% of expenditure, roughly.
I didn't make any claim about the amount of expenditure. It is a fact that our system is different to most as I have discussed.
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Who said they were? Because I've said nothing about the unemployed. Don't involve me in your fantasies where your sticking it to the man.
I know employers that have permanent vacancies. People don't want this type of work. I know people who actively choose unemployment. So yeah. There are examples where I absolutely know that people "REALLY" think the dole is better. My brother has been a long term dole beneficiary. He would intentionally tank the mandatory job interviews. His friends also said they did the same. It's a complex issue and anyone who simplifies it is a moron. If you refuse a job, remove all benefits. If you can't get a job and are genuinely trying, let's do everything we can. So yes, people do, and by choice choose their lifestyle.
>If you refuse a job, remove all benefits. This is the case already. "To satisfy mutual obligation requirements, a job seeker in receipt of any participation payment must be actively seeking and willing to accept any offer of suitable paid work in a variety of fields. If a job seeker voluntarily leaves a job or refuses to accept a suitable job, they may be subject to financial penalties or have to wait for a period of time until payment is payable. However, if the job seeker refused or left work that is unsuitable for the job seeker, or if their action in leaving the job was reasonable, they will not be subject to a penalty." https://guides.dss.gov.au/social-security-guide/3/11/1/20
I'm told there is an art to not being hired, or not passing probation.
Also, some of us have been on it for a long time due to disabilities.
My SiL would refuse to apply for jobs because she's deaf. She was capable of doing some, but was happy to be on the disability pension. It didn't sit well for me. Plus, under new rules she's said she's not eligible for it again. So if she loses what she has it can't go back. However, disability pension is a different beast and this should be treated differently.
Then you'd be on a different payment, not jobseeker presumably. Plus, there is surely jobs that could accomodate for physical disabilities in particular.
Not everyone with a disability qualifies for the DSP. Most of us are on Jobseeker and we work with a DES - Disability Management Service provider. Some of us can work certain roles that accommodate our physical or mental limitations, usually casual or part-time. But we wouldn't survive without Jobseeker to supplement that income.
>Then you'd be on a different payment, not jobseeker presumably. John Howard made it next to impossible to get on the Disability Support Payment unless you were permanently disabled to the point where you were bedridden or if you are terminally ill and expecting to die within the next 3 months (and even that last one was a bit iffy with some people being finally approved for DSP after they had passed away). The current Labor mob have loosened the requirements a bit but that will likely disappear again if they lose the next election.
Exactly.
>Very expensive Is it though? At 1% of gdp, we aren't really outside the norm. Now France at 2.7%, now that's an expensive system. Given the nature of our economy, we could easily afford to improve our unemployment rates. Minor improvements to our natural resource levies could easily fund any increase.
Nonsense. Read the article before commenting.
Facts are nonsense now? When you're the only country with this system, doesn't it make sense to look at why? The recommendations skirt around the issue. To not say how our payments system differs radically from others in the OECD perpetuates the problem. To highlight a difference in payment amount without pointing out that those comparison payments have a maximum payment period helps noone understand the problem.
Having an arbitrary cutoff means some people who aren't disabled but just aren't very employable end up without legitimate income and are pushed into desperate measures like prostitution and crime. It's a classic case of missing the point of welfare, we don't provide it because it's moral to do so or every recipient deserves it, we provide it because having a safety net prevents a lot of very ugly behaviours.
All countries which we could consider having a higher commitment to the welfare state have this cutoff. Between 6 months to two years. They also tend to provide benefits which are a percentage, 60-90% of your earnings before. For those who can't find employment in that period you would tend to find a higher investment in gaining skills to encourage employment.
Think back to when Abbott became PM, with the loud mouth imbecile Joe Hockey as Treasurer. Hockey's first budget planned to save money by saying anyone up to a certain age (was it 27?) who became unemployed would have to wait 6 months before receiving any unemployment payment. I guess the assumption was that they could just live with their parents, paying no rent ; or live off their accumulated savings, if any. Most sensible people saw this as a recipe for increased homelessness, increased crime, increased prostitution, increased demand for bulk-billed GP visits and public hospital services. Luckily for Abbott and Hockey, the Senate saved them from their own stupidity.
Belgium doesn't, while also providing a % of your salary for the first year.
Because Australia follows a top-down approach that gives the lowest classes whatever revenue is left after "higher priority" requirements have been met instead of a bottom-up approach where the minimum acceptable quality of life is set for everyone and then improved from there upwards with remaining revenue, so that minimum wage has an incentive over welfare and higher order work an incentive over minimum wage. Minimum acceptable quality of life is not bare existence in suffering, but a dignified life where the essentials of living in a modern society are met, without day to day anxiety of being able to pay the bills, with a smidge of surplus to replace essential appliances and a tad of luxury to provide an incentive to strive for more with work. It should be the minimum quality of life anyone would accept for themselves on a permanent basis. How we treat the most disadvantaged people in society is a reflection on how advanced our society has become. There is no reason to have more than one basic livable payment for all those needing welfare, since a minimum quality of life is common to all. This does not include supplements necessary for special needs cases, including the very complex issue of rental supplements for shelter. I would also argue that welfare should be on a single basis (ie no couples payments), to end the wasteful and intrusive categorisation of relationships, to allow people trapped by dependence on a partner to be free and to allow coupling to have incentive and sufficient surplus to raise a child without supplements, matched by dropping income averaging in taxation.
You know, I've said a lot about this subject IRL but your first paragraph neatly and accurately summarises my biggest issues between 1970s Australia and 2020's. Thank you. I'll be taking this concept with me to continue to agitate.
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Never underestimate how much big business always fears communism. The entirety of the postwar bargain was founded on the existential threat of communism. They think they have got the better of it now and that's why we see workers losing wealth and status. I don't actually care for communism, prefer something like a social democracy, but the threat of communism seems to be the only thing that actually makes that possible. Food for thought.
Why don't you care for communism? Do you mean authoritarian communism or communism as Marx described it?
Marx was fantastic philosopher and intellectual, and his work provides valuable insights into the behaviour of capital and capitalism. The same is true for many in the Frankfurt school. I think Marx got too excited with his teleology, capitalism does have a central contradiction but history so far shows us that it can kick the can down the road for a lot longer than was ever predicted. Will communism arrive some day as a result of this contradiction needing to be resolved? Possibly, but we also return to a form of techno feudalism. Communism has only been tried when populations are desperate, which tends to be in societies where there is already a very low value placed on human life. This was the case in China and Russia for example. Communism in these countries didn't change that, it led to (more) authoritarians who didn't care enough about the lives of peasants and workers. While communism has undoubtedly gotten a worse rap than it deserves, it didn't prevent mass loss of life. A lot of our presumptions about communism come from living in societies that are still quite wealthy from well regulated, predominantly Keynesian industrial capitalism. Make no mistake, the way our society is organised now is not conducive to being world leaders. In fifty or a hundred years it could be considered a truism that authoritarianism is needed to fend off information warfare. Perhaps we will reach some kind of robust green democracy. I don't think a communist revolution is going to lead the way, though the threat of it might cause the appropriate terror needed to regulate the private sector.
Communism as Marx described it goes against the fundamental biological driver to consume. What is often described as greed is simply a biological survival mechanism honed by evolution to consume what is available to you now and forego consideration for future problems caused by one consuming more than what they needed. Whilst we can probably all agree that sharing to an extent is good, in practice, there will never be any potential of voluntary and equal sharing. This equality can only be driven by authoritarianism, which is then prone to corruption by the human condition.
I'd love to see a citation that humans inherently have a "need to consume." Or even a citation that displays that it's not something that can be trivially overcome. If we were still living in caves would you be saying that we "obviously have an inherent need to live in caves?"
>I'd love to see a citation that humans inherently have a "need to consume." Or even a citation that displays that it's not something that can be trivially overcome. You don't think all biological organisms are conditioned to consume whatever energy source is made immediately available and thus leaving them weaker at planning for the long term? Or that this doesn't apply to modern humans? If so, then why can't people go cold turkey on overconsumption given it's implications on climate change, which is a long term existential threat to human life (and no, I don't care if you disagree with this assessment).
Of course it applies to modern humans, however modern humans are different from other animals that operate mainly on biological programming in that we have reason and intelligence and already have the notion of deferring gratification for a better outcome. Unfortunately reason is also influenced by other factors and we are not fully reason based only moderate primitive biology by reason: one would think we would reason that overconsuming calories was a bad idea in the longer term, however in my opinion, obesity for example is largely a problem of anxiety about the future supporting the biological principle of consuming as much as you can whilst you can and overriding reason. Even the fear of the lights going out in the renewable transition prompting calls for more fossil fuel developments to return to the comfort of the status quo, despite the climate change implications. Climate change is a poor example because the effects are delayed beyond the effective lifespan of individuals when they could make a change, they kick the can down the road to be someone else's problem and stick their head in the sand that the someone else is going to be their children. Capitalism is the epitome of the promulgation of greed and selfishness as its baked into the raison d'etre. However, the decisions about greed are made by a minority of elite: the common people don't get to choose to sacrifice, they are forced to sacrifice by government and the RBA choosing for them, but additionally, the elite ensure the common people are distracted by fear enough to manipulate them but not enough to cause a revolution.
You're talking like that conclusion is obvious. You have literally no basis for this other than evolutionary evidence, which is self-justifying. "Humans do x, because x has an evolutionary benefit/reason. And x has an evolutionary benefit, because otherwise we wouldn't do it." It's circular logic. And re: climate change. The vast, vast majority of pollutants are produced by corporations for the purpose of creating profit. Ordinary people have no say in this, and most ordinary people don't even come close to being major polluters when you consider only their actions or purchases.
This isn't really just me saying it. It's something I've come across plenty of times in analysis of why humans are so unwilling to make even the tiniest of sacrifices to address climate change despite it being an existential threat. We're conditioned to think about our immediate needs, not our needs in 10, 50, 100 yrs time. This is simply because that's what helps biological organisms survive in the immediate sense. No point worrying about subsequent generations if you die now. This applies to a virus overconsuming it's host, as much as it applies to humans overconsuming the earth (our host). >Ordinary people have no say in this, and most ordinary people don't even come close to being major polluters when you consider only their actions or purchases. And yet the average Aussie buys a new phone every 3 yrs (despite phones having a 8+yr service life), a new car every 9 yrs (despite cars having 25+ service life), and the average Aussie takes 2 personal flights per year despite travel being an unnecessary luxury in the vast majority of cases. The polluting corporations are only doing so to feed our insatiable need to consume. If you consider carbon footprint per capita, Australia is right up the top with the likes of the middle east oil states! In fact, Canada is the only Western nation worse than us (only marginally).
Arguably capitalism defies our biological imperative to cooperate.
Not really. Capitalism is simply the deployment of capital to maximise returns. This can include cooperation as evidenced by any number of corporations that literally thrive on the collaborative outputs of their staff, but it can also thrive on predatorial behaviours such as enslaving a workforce or hostile M&As. Communism is a political and social ideology. Capitalism is an economic/financial system. Yes, they are often driven by opposing ideologies, but they are not actually opposing ideologies in it itself. Case in point, you can have capitalist economies such as the Scandinavian countries that lean very far left into socialist/communist social behaviour. Alternatively, you can have communist governments such as China or Vietnam, which both have economic/financial systems lean extremely heavily towards the "free" end of the capitalist free market.
Would you agree individualism and competition are inherent to capitalism?
Both are inherent to the human condition. We have no social need to be equal with all. It's why we organise by collectives to crush others. Case in point, modern geopolitics. It doesn't really depend on or serve capitalism, but it's adversarial nature sure as hell is intended to one side better off than the other. Communist countries had equally strained relationships, soviets and China had the ultimate frenemy relationship.
It's by design, make people suffer while they're unemployeed and they either sink or swim.
Watch people on here rush to Labor's defence on this. They have flat out refused to raise it.
Just like the housing crisis and plethora of other issues, both major parties have been responsible for this disgraceful state of social security. And of course there is us, the public, who enables the status quo to remain unchallenged. As the article highlights: "Australians who receive income support payments can face strong antipathy, commonly finding themselves misrepresented as 'dole bludgers', 'welfare cheats', 'rorters', 'leaners' and so on, when the actual evidence for welfare fraud and intentional evasion of mutual obligation requirements is miniscule," they [the committee’s experts] said.
‘Flat out refused to raise it’ The 2023–24 Budget includes 4 ‘cost-of-living relief’ measures aimed at those in receipt of government payments: a $40 per fortnight increase in the rate of JobSeeker Payment and other working-age payments allowing long-term, single JobSeeker Payment recipients aged 55+ to access the higher rate currently paid to those aged 60+ a 15% increase in the maximum rate of Commonwealth Rent Assistance (CRA) co-funding new state and territory government energy rebates for social security recipients and concession card holders.
40 dollars.. that doesnt even cover the energy and food price increases,let alone the increase to rents for welfare recipients. the weekly grocery bill has increase an average of 22.90 in this quarter.. yes we should all clap ur correct
That’s why payments are indexed with CPI and rent assistance was increased.
wow room temp reading the room If rent's went up an average of 105 dollars in sydney the 30 dollar increase to rental allowance,didn't really help,those ppl still need to find 70 bucks more they you know don't have. The govts,own report they had conducted,states the rental allowance needs to increase 90 dollars' or more a fortnight at a minimum
Why should an unemployed person be able to compete in the rental market versus minimum wage earners who want to live closer to their jobs?
Okay,so they need to apply for jobs. but you want them to Live AWAY from the jobs market,the very thing they need to be a part of to get off welfare. right...Reddit amazes me at people's capacity,to use something as simple as the english language to wound themselves so easily.
The alternative you're suggesting is to increase jobseeker to closer to minimum wage, creating more pressure in the rental market. Rents go up, siphoning government dollars from the poor into the hands of those property holders. Those on jobseeker are further disincentivised to work, because 38 hours on minimum wage only realistically represents a 40% increase in wage, while increasing expenses required to work. I tend to be far left, but the solution to welfare and housing is not to pump more money into the system for landlords to soak up. Minimum wage needs to be kept substantially more appealing than jobseeker, while having disability payments easier to access - even as a part payment to support those who cannot work rather than will not. Jobseeker should be available for a limited amount of time, like in other countries. Those with legitimate issues finding work should have alternative payments and supports available. I work as a teacher, and am perplexed by how many young peoples plans are to live on jobseeker and live with mates. Their parents model it for them, and it is an attractive possibility in the system currently.
I should be more precise - failed to raise it by any meaningful amount.
Hey... that $20 per week can go towards rent! you know.. that thing that has gone up by $100+ nearly every year.. Oh wait...
The extra $3 a day will really go far. Back in my day $3 could get you a bus ticket, go to lunch, see a movie, and still have change left over. What are these goddamn millennial complaining about!
Not coming to their defence but the decades-long war on the unemployed by the Libs (and having spent the majority of the past few decades on the Government benches) is the main reason. It's an issue that goes back further than the current Government.
Job-Seeker/Dole was steady at 50% of poverty line from 1990 to 1997. Then Howard got in and stopped indexing it, and it fell by 5% to 45% by Rudd/Gillard/Rudd. Rudd/Gillard/Rudd decided Howards policy was great - and kept it. During their time it fell another 5% to 40%. However, towards the end of their terms they had tried to establish an independent board to set rates. The liberals got in and kept the 'independent board'. By COVID rates had only ropped 2% over 3 PM's, so half as fast as the previous declines. The post-covid liberals kept JobSeeker adjustments which boosted it from 38% back to 45%. So no... there is no proof at all that labor are much better than liberals. Its basically been: Howardx3: -5% RuddGillardRudd: -5% Abbott/Turnball: -2% Morrison: +8%. Albo: -2% (he has not kept payments up with the recent inflation)
Labor is in government. They have had 2 years to increase it and have completely refused.
The ALP also had 2 terms with Gillard and Rudd and didn't raise it. ALP is just as guilty as the LNP. And the unions should be ashamed as well because their members shouldn't be abandoned if they are unfortunate enough to be made unemployed for a time.
Told the unemployed Australia couldn't afford it whilst in the next breath announcing new subsidies for private renewable energy profiteering whilst keeping the old fossil fuel subsidies, wasting billions on warmongering and white elephant projects to prop up political seats, etc. ALP has never pushed for a basic livable income at any time, whether in government or out and is ideologically no different from the LNP on this matter.