Scott Morrison is an ideologue, even under the heavy makeup he wears pretending to be pragmatic. Otherwise it's hard to understand the meaning of his speeches and how they connect to what he does as the Treasurer.
Heading into its fourth year in office, the Coalition government is again warning of a complacency in Australian politico-economic discourse, which blithely accepts rolling budget deficits as normal.
Tilling the soil for a looming budget savings battle when Parliament resumes, Scott Morrison notes that most Australians have not experienced a recession in their adult lives and thus don't appreciate how terrible they can be.
This insouciance has allowed for long-run operating shortfalls, and worse, an electorate-wide failure to realise that being structurally in the red is no way to go into a sharp global downturn, even if deficit financing is the obvious response once one occurs.
Reworking Joe Hockey's infamous age of entitlement message with its notorious "lifters and leaners" dichotomy, Morrison believes too many people pay no tax effectively, and that the country is in danger of sleep-walking into economic distress because of a lack of imagination. And past political will.And to that extent what he will do is start by cutting the dole. This is while the rich end o town still get to keep their superannuation perks. In other words, he is putting the poorest of Australians first into the firing line in a bid to fix the bottom line of the government. It's a novel idea if you don't really understand what that would mean, and it's an absurd idea if you do understand the ramification of such a course of action. Yet, this is the man.
Just as a contrast, the previous Conservative PM of Britain David Cameron - he of the Brexit vote and other calamities such as austerity - once said during the GFC that one thing his government would not do would be to balance the books of the government on the backs of the poor. Whether he meant it or not, or was able to do as he stated or not, I do not know. However, as positioning statements go, it's a lot better than "lifters and leaners" or "Taxed and Taxed-nots". I guess if you're the party that insists on conserving the class system, it pays to show some class sometimes. Seeing that we live in a class-less society according to the blue bloods, it is not that surprising to find conservatives in this country show no class whatsoever.
For whatever it's worth, this pic was doing the rounds from Get Up!:
For whatever it's worth, this pic was doing the rounds from Get Up!:
He Doesn't Understand The Problem
On a related topic, there's this interesting defence of the Prime Minister's $5 for the homeless person.
This week the Prime Minister spoke with a homeless guy in Melbourne and put $5 in his begging cup. Our mainstream media followed accusations that the PM was "stingy". This story – and picture of the Malcolm and the man with his cup – was reported around the country and was even reported in the New York Times. Now I never tell anyone to vote for any political party and I don't mind when people criticise government policy or lack thereof, but to call Malcolm Turnbull "stingy" is an outrage.
I don't know if it is an outrage. His government just cut $4.00 per week of dole money. If you looked at the $5 charity, it's like he's giving one person a one-off compensation for a shitty cut to benefits while he gives the middle finger to the rest. It's not that the Prime Minister is stingy so much as he doesn't understand that he's part of the problem that keeps the man homeless and on the street.
Malcolm has been here many times, sometimes with cameras and many times without. As the Bible says, good deeds should be in secret.
He's put on an apron or sometimes just sat and spoken with homeless people in our community. Many times since those days when we were on the brink, the Turnbulls have helped us with breathtaking generosity.
I happen to know that the help we've received is just the tip of their charitable iceberg. "Stingy" is not a word I'd ever use to describe our PM.
Imagine the story in the media if the PM had put $100 in the cup? Our culture will be crippled and miserable when we become incapable of seeing an act of compassion.
It would still be myopic of the prime Minister tithing he's doing any good. It's pretty simple. He's the Prime Minister - he should be able to devise policy so there is minimal level housing available to the homeless, if people's homelessness really worried him. And if he can't it can only because he's too stupid or too incompetent or too unwilling to do just that; honestly the problem isn't whether the Prime Minister is stingy or not.
Gosh you know what? You never used to see homeless people in Sydney before '96. Certainly not in the numbers we're seeing today. People could be down and out and downright unemployable but the dole was there to make sure they could afford a place to live. It's not surprising that since John Howard won in 1996, Australia has somehow managed to create a class of misery out there all the while enjoying 20-odd years of economic growth. It just doesn't make sense that this is what has become of our nation. This is all a product of Neo-Liberalism.
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