No amount of vacuous, repetitive pre-budget reports can disguise the true intention of Labor's economic inclusion strategy, writes Nick Cater.
The Treasurer has barely 250 days to rebuild capitalism, the bold project for 2023 that he announced in January.
The two most expensive proposals, lifting unemployment benefits and increasing rental subsidies, have reportedly been rejected by Chalmers - who can ill-afford another $34 billion in a Budget that is already some $50 billion in the red. Those that constrain the choices their citizens make through tax and regulation make every household poorer, except those whose incomes aren’t paid by the government.
Lifting the dole by 40 per cent is all very well, but you’ve somehow got to persuade recipients to keep looking for work. What makes it different from the “whole-of-government policy and investment framework for place-based initiatives” in recommendation 17?What’s the difference between “a full employment objective” and the long-held, bipartisan assumption that the best form of welfare is a job?
None of this should come as a surprise since the first beneficiaries of every government programme are the people paid to administer it.
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