It would be nice to believe, as the Treasurer wants us to, that better times are just around the corner. But while wages stagnate and company profits surge, inequality is now at its highest point since the 1950s.
This is clearly not going to get any better any time soon. By 2019, the highest income earners will have received an effective tax cut of 1.5 per cent compared to all other taxpayers who will be paying an extra 0.5 per cent. But for the young people of Australia especially, Budget 2017 boosts inequality instead of building a better future.
Corporate tax cuts at the same time as penalty rate cuts and cuts to social services and social security to the tune of $15 billion since 2014 will not help young people into jobs. Neither will the imposition of behavioural sticks on the backs of the unemployed, which only serve to distract us from the existence of structural walls that keep them excluded.
Wealth does not trickle down, unless, of course, you have wealthy parents. Young people need housing security, not the threat of homelessness. While the government's restraint in not axing homelessness or social housing funding is going to be a source of relief for many, it is hardly the expansive vision for housing that is so desperately needed.
The fact that housing is on the government's radar is positive, as are some of the measures announced with regard to social and affordable housing, but we are yet to see an overarching plan that is going to address the housing crisis in prosperous Australia. Without significant changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts, for example, housing will remain a speculative sport instead of a human right.
To those in the government who pretend that the solution to unemployment lies in putting the boot into the unemployed, let me state the bleeding obvious: There is only one job for every ten people looking for work or more work. One in three young people are unemployed or underemployed. We have a Newstart payment that has not seen an increase in real terms since 1994.
If you are young and studying you are looking down the barrel of fee increases and university funding cuts. If you are trying to survive in low-paid, casual work you can expect penalty rate cuts. And yet still the government makes an art-form out of cruelty to young unemployed people.
It can drag all of the weapons it likes from its dismal armoury but this will not create a single job or address the structural drivers of unemployment and underemployment. It can drug-test and impose demerits and force people to rely on charity or even turn to crime and it will still not have improved people's lives or strengthened the economy.
"These measures are another iteration of the government's ideological obsession with attacking and demonising people who are excluded from the labour market. Their crime is the crime of being poor."
These measures are not designed to address the very serious health problem of drug and alcohol addiction, which, of course, exists right across the community. Specialist services and supports in this area in fact need extra investment, rather than the cuts we have recently seen. To suggest that because you need access to income support you are somehow more likely to have an addiction or that punitive surveillance and stigmatisation might actually address this problem if you are living with an addiction, is not only inaccurate but deeply disrespectful and offensive. You don't build people up by putting them down. And you don't build a strong economy or a fair society by boosting inequality.
These measures are another iteration of the government's ideological obsession with attacking and demonising people who are excluded from the labour market. Their crime is the crime of being poor. By blaming them and scapegoating them, the government is merely justifying further cuts to social security and social expenditure on the one hand, and preparing the ground for the further lowering of wages and conditions in the labour market on the other.
We longed for a carefully considered vision in this budget but we were served a buffet of tactics. We yearned for hope, but young people, along with older people who have been pushed out, have been given yet another serve of deliberate humiliation. For those of us who stand in solidarity with the people who are targeted and degraded in this budget this is just one chapter in the long-haul struggle to build a more just and compassionate society.
And our struggle may be long, but it is beautiful. We believe with all our hearts that hope will win against humiliation and that deep respect between people will triumph over the mean-spirited abuse of power that accompanies the rise of inequality.
Dr John Falzon is Chief Executive of the St Vincent de Paul Society National Council.