Food bills soaring, electricity prices going through the roof at the same time as blackouts increase, housing crisis getting worse, nearly a million more migrants imported for cheap labour, stoking racial division, government spending surging, debt ballooning…
… and now, a push to boost bennies by over a third.
Tell me this isn’t a Labour government.
The federal government is facing growing pressure from its backbench to increase the rate of the JobSeeker unemployment benefit in next month’s budget.
And as we know with jelly-back Albanese and his clueless Arts graduate Treasurer, what the backbenchers want, the backbenchers will get. We’ve seen that already with stuff like illegal immigrants, where Labor’s powerful “refugee” lobby cracked the whip and Albo scrambled to hand out nearly five million new visas, and personally intervene to let a bunch of ex-Tamil Tiger chancers and their anchor babies leech off Australia forever.
Labor backbenchers are among more than 300 signatories to an open letter addressed to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, calling for an urgent boost to JobSeeker, Youth Allowance and related payments in the upcoming budget.
The open letter said addressing the “structural injustice” of JobSeeker was long overdue.
“Right now, the rate of income support is so low that people are being forced to choose between paying their rent or buying enough food and medicine,” the letter stated.
Perhaps, rather than arguing how much of working peoples’ taxes they can steal, these brow-furrowers should address the structural injustice of importing the equivalent of the population of Canberra every year. If housing wasn’t in such a crisis in Australia, then people wouldn’t have to pay such exorbitant rents that they have no money left over for anything else.
When housing is in such short supply, having the highest per capita intake of migrants in the world is a moral outrage.
And, of course, there’s no Labor woke party without dripping wet LINOs.
Last month, Ms Payne established a parliamentary friends group with Liberal MP Bridget Archer, dedicated to ending poverty.
Didn’t they hear? Bob Hawke abolished poverty in 1993.
Oh, wait…
The open letter comes as the government faces public pressure from backbenchers to also raise a single parenting payment, which Labor cut when it was last in power.
Because there’s nothing so helpful to poor families than further inducement to raise more fatherless children.
The Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee labelled the current unemployment benefit as “seriously inadequate” and said lifting the rate from $50 a day to around $68 should be the government’s “first priority”.
It’s a move that would cost the federal government $24 billion over four years.
So, that’s another six billion to throw on top of an already gargantuan welfare bill that already accounts for more than half of government spending. Including that other great Labor “achievement”, the NDIS, which already costs more than the whole Medicare budget — and rising.
The government has promised there will be measures in the budget next month to address disadvantage, including energy bill price relief.
ABC Tasmania
And so it goes… until they run out of other peoples’ money. But, by then, they’ll be out of office and it’ll all be someone else’s problem to solve.
Tell me this isn’t a Labor government.
