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These are people living precariously: pregnant women, families with young children, elderly people. They are being 'transitioned out' of Status Resolution Support Services based on 'job-readiness'. The move not only illustrates the arbitrary nature of immigration policy, which sets people up to fail; it is institutionalised sadism.
There were the stories that didn't get much of a mention in the mainstream press but will net large gains for young people and new entrants to the labour market. Under the budget measure, inactive super accounts with balances of less than $6000 will have a three per cent cap on fees charged. But is this policy quite what it seems?
Health spending takes up a significant amount of federal and state government spending. But is this to keep Australians healthy, or to treat us when we get sick? The budget was a missed opportunity to invest in preventative health measures, and to fix health inequalities through policies informed by the social determinants of health.
This is Australia's looming inequality issue. Those who can take advantage of the energy revolution will have lower bills and more comfortable living conditions during the frequent extreme weather events we'll experience with climate change. Those who can't will be left reliant on a dirty, aging and increasingly expensive electricity grid.
On the surface budgets are exercises in financial accountability. At a deeper level they are best understood as a yearly ritual; one of the ways in which rulers acknowledge and try to manipulate truths about state power. We should evaluate these less on their stated intentions but with what the show of competence and generosity reveals.
For the past several years, education has been treated as solely a technical problem. One of the pitfalls of this is that political will becomes a function of money, which in turn rests on political expedience between federal and state governments, further complicated by external lobbying. Education gets ground to a grain.
With every passing year the government is siloing its building and expansion funding from the money needed to prevent the environmental consequences. In this budget, we see an environmental agenda hijacked to reinforce ideas of growth, using environmental buzz words which convince constituents it's for the earth.
The budget includes a range of tax cuts for many Australian workers and some funding for education and early childhood services but fails to address the ever-growing inequality across the country. Simply put, it is those in the greatest need of support who have yet again been left behind.
193-200 out of 200 results.
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