I do not advocate abolition of Social Security Payments as it is one of the great precepts of Democracy but in recent times (last 50 years??) the concept appears to have become somewhat distorted and priorities shifted.
One of the things that has made this country great which is praised and lauded by people from foreign shores who genuinely join our community is our sense of "A Fair Go For Everyone".
It is our unofficial Banner and I hope it remains so forever but maybe it is time for a "Planned Maintenance Inspection" and "Resetting to Factory Specs" of our "Social Engine".
Below, some concepts to consider:-
These are possibly the 5 best sentences you'll ever read:
1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.
2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.
3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.
4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!
5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.
Can you think of a reason for not sharing this?
Neither could I......
And there is a number 6 and comes from Maggie Thatcher:
Socialism fails when it runs out of other people's money!
A snap shot of today's reality in Australia??
The name of the writer has been deleted so as not to push a particular political barrow.
I admit it is not hard to figure out who said it.
Makes sense to me.
Published in the Canberra Times this week.
“Certain things paint an indelible image in your mind. This happened to me lately when my mother-in-law told me that whilst doing meals on wheels in Winter there was always a place you could find pensioners - in bed. This was not because they were ill, but because they could not afford the price of the power to stay warm any other way. How completely self-indulgent and pathetic we have become that in our zealous desire to single-headedly cool the planet we have preferred those who can afford the power bill over those less fortunate to avoid privation. How pathetic we are that South Korea , using our coal, can provide power cheaper to their citizens after an 8,300 km sea voyage, than we can with power stations in our own coal fields.
Oh yes, and aren't the solar panels doing a great job? In Canberra last week it was revealed that they would add $225 to the average electricity bill, and that the Government's proposed carbon tax would raise them by a further 24%.
It is just that the poverty creep is making its way up the social strata, though I doubt it will reach the most affluent group, The Greens. Bitterness on my part I suppose but I represent a party that caters for the poorest electorates. Now what other lunacy are we considering, none other than shutting down the Murray Darling Basin so you can have a diet that suits the misery of the Winter nights' temperature in the unheated house..
Yes, we have become so oblivious to the obvious because the loudest voices are not necessarily the neediest. We spend… sorry, borrow.. for school halls that do not make students more competitive in competency. No school hall taught a student a second language or a higher level maths. We borrowed for ceiling insulation and burnt down 190 houses and 4 installers died.
We borrowed towards aimless $900 cheques as we decided that somehow imported electrical goods to Australia would reboot the US economy. We borrowed so much that we are now 170 billion dollars in gross debt. We are told not to worry about gross debt, its net debt that counts. Well try that out on your local bank manager. Try paying him back what you think you owe him, because of what you think others may owe you. Not surprisingly he will direct you to what is noted on your loan statement.
It is funny how the people who try to assuage our concerns with the net debt myth can never clearly identify what are the items that make up the difference between the figure on the Office of Financial Management website as Australian Government Securities outstanding and their miraculous net debt figure.
Since the election, the Labor-Green government has borrowed an average $1.6 billion each week. Every fortnight that amounts to three new major public hospitals or the inland rail from Melbourne to Brisbane . Not bad going for a country that cannot keep its pensioners warm.
Whilst we are waiting we are merrily selling at a record rate our agricultural land, mines and now the hub of commerce the ASX, so that when the day of reckoning for our children comes they can try and get out of trouble by working fastidiously for someone else and hoping they feed them. The average foreign purchase of agricultural land over the past two years is 2.7 billion a year, or more than 10 times that of the average of the previous 10 years.
So when is all this going to change? When are we going to shake ourselves out of this dystopia that we are inflicting on others less connected but more affected by the self-indulgent political delusion. What is our current solution to the very real problems becoming more and more apparent at the bottom end of the lucky country?
Well apparently, it is gay marriage. Yep… I am sure that will warm the cockles of your hearts that our nation's wisest are going to engage in hours, possibly days, at the end of the political year on gay marriage. Then when we are finished with gay marriage we may be able to engage the remainder of our time on euthanasia.
You cannot reduce power prices without increasing the supply of cheap power. No other nation has an earnest desire to feed you before they satisfy their own. It is a fluke of history that you are here in this nation but luck is easily lost with bad management and naive aspirations.”
The world will just not work on expansionism, and there is too much
tek no oledgy the biggest majority of people have no worthwhile [rewarding]
way to exist on this planet...that's why we have wars of all kinds. You have ,
I want.......If you dont give I take....
Stalin grapsed the concept well and came up with the cost effective bullet scheme
Labs are not too good but what have the libs to offer???????? Ask Tony?????????? Big silent! The labs are I minority gov. I believe the libs would have been too and have been for the years of little Johnny as they could not form gov. without the nationals, they are in WA (minority gov) and the price of power went up by 50% so what is the alternative??????
I am a big fan of the whole supply side economics thing, just love that Sarah Palin chick too.
Lib/Lab. two sides of the same coin offering at best a variation on a theme. What is required is a wholesale examination of our systems of governance and consideration if there is a better system that will allow people to get on with their lives, not rely on the state for their existance and improve prosperity for all.
I worry about the fact that Barnarby cannot grasp the simple intent of the stimulus payments:
"We borrowed towards aimless $900 cheques as we decided that somehow imported electrical goods to Australia would reboot the US economy"
It is a sad state of affairs that a successful program that kept the economy humming along is not understood by most people. Maybe that is where the problem lies.
Maybe political decisions need to be done with really simple logic so that 90% of the population can understand, with online voting through the newspaper websites
And here's me thinking we were alive in the best time in human history, perhaps the best country in the best time in human history.
BTW: If the pensioners are freezing where the **** are their relatives?
If i never got that $900 I would not be worse off
If i never got that $900 I would not be worse off
rightwingnews.com/religion/you-cant-legislate-the-poor-into-prosperity/
Turns out it was some right wing religious baptist dork.
Here's a much better quote for a counter-argument, from Geoff Lemon - here:
heathenscripture.wordpress.com/2011/07/14/you-shut-your-goddamn-carbon-taxin-mouth/
I've cut a few bits out, but I'm quoting a lot of text because he said it better here than I can.
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This taps into a very prominent feature of our political landscape: the constant line from Tony Abbott that Australian families are hurting, that Aussies are doing it tough, that life is somehow getting harder, that the cost of living is on the rise.
Shenanigans, Tony. Let's get one thing very clear. Australians, en masse, are enjoying a better standard of living than has ever been enjoyed in this country's history.
And not just marginally, but by a huge degree. Really, along with a few other developed countries, we are enjoying a better standard of living than any group of people has in human existence. We have every kind of food and beverage from around the world deliverable to our doors. We have technological advances that make a decade ago look archaic. We have goods and luxuries of every conceivable kind; cheap and accessible. We have more and better options with transport, entertainment, comfort, place and style of residence. We have the most advanced medicine and best life expectancy of all time.
While there is still poverty in Australia, it does not even touch the kinds of poverty experienced in most countries on earth. Support systems and sufficient wealth exist to cover at least basic needs. The small proportion of genuinely homeless usually have other factors that keep them away from those systems. Being poor in Australia means living in a crappy house, in a crappy area. Maybe a commission flat. It means living on welfare, getting by week to week, not having any money for nice things. It might mean the kids have to go to their friend's house to play X-Box, or that they don't get sweet Christmas presents. It sucks, but it's safe. It's solid. It keeps you alive. It's a level of stability and security that half the world would kill for, and even the basic amenities of a commission flat are amenities that half the world doesn't have.
Poor people in Australia do not starve to death. They don't die of cold. There is clean water running in any public bathroom. If they're ill, they can walk into a hospital and be treated. If they're broke, they can get welfare. They can get roofs over their heads, even if they're temporary. They have options. If the utilities are shut off, they can find a tap, or a powerpoint. They can make it through the night.
And those poor aside, the rest of the country is doing very ****ing nicely indeed, thanks very much. Reading these stories of parents bitching about working long hours to afford their private school fees just makes me want to give their little tow-headed spawn a spew bath. The lack of perspective is astonishing. Their kids are safe and fed and healthy and getting every opportunity to do whatever they want with their lives. They're not getting sent out to suck tourist dick for enough US dollars to get their siblings through the week.
...
But in being part of the luckiest couple of generations of people to yet walk the earth, most of us still like to imagine we've got it tough. It's that same sense of entitlement that I was discussing regarding Raquel a couple of weeks ago. When you grow up with a certain standard of living, you come to regard it as the natural state of affairs. If someone threatens that state, they are depriving you of what is fundamentally yours. To your mind, you have a right to live like this, purely because you're lucky enough to have lived like this.
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One of my South African (immigrant) friends said it well... he said "The biggest problem with Australia is .... there are no problems". Meaning that because we can, we spend the whole time bitching and arguing about stuff that really doesn't matter in the big picture.
That article is not totally true. There are many homeless people in Australia. Absolute poverty exists in Australia. I live in a fairly prosperous part of Sydney, on the upper north shore. In this area there is a large number of homeless people who surviving in surrounding bushland. A local church runs a mobile kitchen for homeless people every Friday night and they get large numbers of people around for a decent meal. Volunteers say the numbers they feed are increasing dramatically. A large number of the homeless are there because of a lack of money.
Despite the tens of billions of dollars that are redistributed, many Australians suffer from absolute poverty. Governments has largely given up on looking after these people, many of whom suffer from mental illness. Despite giving up, the workers and entrepreneurs keep getting taxed.
Because these people are marginal and don't have a voice, they are looked over, feared and despised all the time.
The article should also ask whether some Australians have become more prosperous and have more gadgets to keep them entertained despite the state, not because of it.
Sure you can't legislate everyone into prosperity but there are many examples of legislating industries and people into poverty. There are also examples of freeing up people to do the deal and work into prosperity.
If i never got that $900 I would not be worse off
i think the stimulus package was intended to boost public confidence and moral rather than actually making any macro economic difference.
If i never got that $900 I would not be worse off
Simple question: have you purchased anything since you received the $900? New board, equipment etc. Let's say you already had some money or you used it to pay bills how is it possible to tell if you used the money to buy something that stimulated the economy or not.
Unless you withdrew it and burnt it you spent the money most likely within the Australian economy. That means $900 more in the economy than sitting in the coffers doing f-all for anyone.
