Post by Banjo on Apr 17, 2011 14:51:23 GMT 7
Why politicians think they're on a winner with welfare
JULIA Gillard has been sending smoke signals since February that the May budget will be tough on welfare recipients.
She wants to see 2 million more people - disability pensioners, the unemployed, single parents - setting the alarm clock early and participating in ''the dignity of work'' rather than indulging in ''idleness''.
Her aim is to increase the participation rate - the rate at which people are either in work or searching for it - which in March stood at 65 per cent, thereby increasing the pool of taxpayers and reducing the number of welfare recipients. Social security and welfare account for 32 per cent of the federal budget. That's $115 billion a year - three times the education budget and twice the health budget.
The disability support pension alone, which is more generous and subject to fewer work tests than the dole, costs $13 billion, the fifth largest single Commonwealth expense.
In a speech delivered on Wednesday, Gillard gave some examples of the kind of individuals she believed could work.
They were a teenager in Salisbury, a country NSW town, who ''could get a job if he got a trade''; a twentysomething in the western Sydney suburb of Blacktown who left school at 16 and needs to learn to read and write; a young single mother in Woodridge, south of Brisbane, who ''didn't fit in at school'', and the ''mature-aged man in Dandenong who lost his job and lost his way''.
Of these people, she concludes, ''The old way saw a victim, the old way offered an excuse - I see a person, a person who can work.
''Understand,'' she added, ''the people I am talking about include people whose lives present 'hard cases' - all of them people who will be better off with work.''
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has sent some smoke signals of his own.
Abbott's policies are more specific: abolishing the dole for people under 30 where there are unskilled jobs available; compulsory work-for-the-dole for people under 50 who are unemployed for six months; and a new, less generous disability pension for those whose conditions are treatable.
He found it difficult to respond to the Prime Minister last week, saying only that her policies were ''right'' and ''identical'' to his, but complaining that she, and Labor, would never be able to implement them.
But where the politicians see an electoral winner, the Australian Council of Social Service sees a dangerously simplistic solution.
''What's required is not tougher talk or bigger sticks,'' says chief executive Dr Cassandra Goldie, but ''proper investment in case management, skills and training, a paid work experience program, and incentives for employers to take people on.''
Read more: www.theage.com.au/national/why-politicians-think-theyre-on-a-winner-with-welfare-20110416-1divg.html#ixzz1JlSMMUV4
JULIA Gillard has been sending smoke signals since February that the May budget will be tough on welfare recipients.
She wants to see 2 million more people - disability pensioners, the unemployed, single parents - setting the alarm clock early and participating in ''the dignity of work'' rather than indulging in ''idleness''.
Her aim is to increase the participation rate - the rate at which people are either in work or searching for it - which in March stood at 65 per cent, thereby increasing the pool of taxpayers and reducing the number of welfare recipients. Social security and welfare account for 32 per cent of the federal budget. That's $115 billion a year - three times the education budget and twice the health budget.
The disability support pension alone, which is more generous and subject to fewer work tests than the dole, costs $13 billion, the fifth largest single Commonwealth expense.
In a speech delivered on Wednesday, Gillard gave some examples of the kind of individuals she believed could work.
They were a teenager in Salisbury, a country NSW town, who ''could get a job if he got a trade''; a twentysomething in the western Sydney suburb of Blacktown who left school at 16 and needs to learn to read and write; a young single mother in Woodridge, south of Brisbane, who ''didn't fit in at school'', and the ''mature-aged man in Dandenong who lost his job and lost his way''.
Of these people, she concludes, ''The old way saw a victim, the old way offered an excuse - I see a person, a person who can work.
''Understand,'' she added, ''the people I am talking about include people whose lives present 'hard cases' - all of them people who will be better off with work.''
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has sent some smoke signals of his own.
Abbott's policies are more specific: abolishing the dole for people under 30 where there are unskilled jobs available; compulsory work-for-the-dole for people under 50 who are unemployed for six months; and a new, less generous disability pension for those whose conditions are treatable.
He found it difficult to respond to the Prime Minister last week, saying only that her policies were ''right'' and ''identical'' to his, but complaining that she, and Labor, would never be able to implement them.
But where the politicians see an electoral winner, the Australian Council of Social Service sees a dangerously simplistic solution.
''What's required is not tougher talk or bigger sticks,'' says chief executive Dr Cassandra Goldie, but ''proper investment in case management, skills and training, a paid work experience program, and incentives for employers to take people on.''
Read more: www.theage.com.au/national/why-politicians-think-theyre-on-a-winner-with-welfare-20110416-1divg.html#ixzz1JlSMMUV4
