The budget ignores the real bottom line
The ALP government has delivered its first budget in a while, but it does little to address the crippling structural poverty that is destabilising the nation
The budget is going through, there will be no change to wages, and it looks like the poorest Australians will have to live on $46 dollars a day for a bit longer. The fuel excise is back too, just as variable mortgage holders really start to shudder every month the RBA makes an announcement, and while some may want it to be a ‘solid, simple and sensible’ budget, for many it can’t ever be. The cost of living has been made worse by the incomprehensible fluctuations in the price of everyday goods, of fruit and vegetables and basic items, of petrol and interest rates — it squeezes families across the country and leaves people living alone somewhere on the other side of the poverty line unable to buy vital medicine. But this time, there will be no respite in a simple budget that sits inadequately on top of a deeply complex socio-economic problem.
Today in Australia, a country that has seen impressive shareholder dividends for investors for close to two decades, a period that has ensconced a mega-billionaire class and seen corporate profits tear away from wage growth, Australians are experiencing economic hardship not felt in generations. The multinational service industries and retail brands got the best of Jobkeeper during the pandemic, and many in their large and underpaid casual workforces, robbed of job security and dignity of work under the same decades of Howard’s WorkChoices, are dealt death knells by an all-out economic assault with no safety nets. A type of hard-knock-end-stage capitalism.
Regular Australians could be forgiven for their suspicions when the unelected governor of the reserve bank is firing warning shots on wages across an elected treasurer's bow, but as Sally McManus so clearly indicated, the RBA is not “in touch with reality” if it feels that Australians can hang on to real cuts to their wages. CPI increases have turned living on low wages in this country into a steep gradient, a snowballing combination of economic factors, both natural and man-made, careening down the hill towards over 3.3 million Australians living in poverty.
This week in Australia, a few days after Anti-Poverty week, a controversial US firm previously accused of ‘egregious’ security failures is granted a $750,000 per day security contract to lock away mentally exhausted refugees on Nauru, Gina Reinhardt pulls netball Australia funding because she doesn’t want to acknowledge her family’s role in imagining newfangled methods of genocide, and a budget delivered at such an important juncture of time will not do enough for the one in six children now living in poverty in this country. The baseline of Australia has shifted above the reality of the neo-poor, the status quo around the perception of fairness regarding corporate profits has shifted, while the baseline of social security sits stagnantly at almost half the Henderson poverty line.
On the traffic-jammed arterials and ring roads around our major cities, the working class drive home from their casual jobs, interest rate hikes on variable home loans and petrol prices see people looking miserably towards their petrol gauges, going broke at the bowser and checkout, choosing what bill won’t be paid in a lean month. Without any respite, and $243 billion in stage three tax cuts stubbornly being kicked down the road, it’s anyone’s guess what may be done in the future, but it’s apparently “everyone’s responsibility” to hold on for dear life until we find out.
When the ALP and LNP were jousting along the way to an election earlier this year, for all the minor differences in policy, going soft on dole bludgers was not one of them. The Albanese campaign doubled down on the fact that it would not be making any changes to the notorious $46 dollar baseline, both sides boasting their toughness on welfare as a virtue during an election campaign that took no welfare prisoners.
The beginnings of a new group of downtrodden Australians pushed to the side by major party politicians, look upwards towards the corporate titans, who have established a culture of admiration and subservience from our political and media class. This culture trickles down to the people who are expected to find culture in large shopping centres and buy into the quarter-acre dream of increasing uncertainty, overpricing and absurdity.
A cautious Labor Government, so reticent in its run into government, has been unable or unwilling to demonstrate that it has the ambition to dream up a new way of viewing poverty as a central issue that affects us all, ultimately impacting Australia’s ultimate success as a social experiment and an inclusive democratic society. There are templates that can be drawn upon in the various progressive Labor state government policy suites, and if their actions are anything to go by, they seem to recognise the glaring issues of poverty more than their federal counterparts and are more prepared to have the discussion about it.
Much needed implementation of childcare reform and urgent changes to paid parental leave are important, they are a start, but they are not revolutionary in any sense. These reforms still do nothing to empower the poor in this country, who suffer from compounding socio-economic factors that are not being adequately addressed in this budget. Recognition of this encroaching, unaddressed poverty is conspicuously absent in the equations that form the body of important plans like the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children. Without this recognition, many of the government’s good intentions may fall short due to swathes of the population being too poor to fathom them.
Without genuine representation in Canberra, the working class fall victim to more extreme political avenues, without genuine inclusive national discussions that inspire the working poor, snake oil merchants and charlatans fill the gaps with conspiracy riddled messaging, isolating a population already teetering on either side of poverty and duress, complicating the barrier of economic segregation that divides millions of Australians.
The absence of genuine class discussion in Australia has created a rigid and callous ignorance to the mounting poverty that now pervades this flailing OECD nation; a nation that sits at the precipice of something it doesn’t quite understand, clinging onto something that is impossible for most of us to define. A compounding poverty affects millions of Australians, unprecedented in generations, as it is becoming increasingly impossible to ignore. Poverty is a policy choice, so are the unfair advantages granted to the richest in the nation baked into our legislature and regulations, made only worse by the politically motivated appointments that station them and the unchecked corruption that has become a new norm.
Inadequate measures in response to real time economic crises and a refusal to strengthen sturdy social safety nets whittle away democratic confidence in swathes of the population, taking the confidence and faith of citizens in their society with them. Belief in government is hard to retrieve once it is gone, and it is far more valuable than the short-term gains made by not addressing the fundamental structural flaws that promote disenfranchisement in the voting bloc. This budget does not directly address the realities that keep those flaws in place, and it may not seem like much to those who live in Canberra and enjoy the benefits of high-powered jobs, but it’s another kick in the guts for the increasing number of Australians who don’t.