Jesus Goes To Centrelink

Plan A:

“Coalition’s Speaker’s Notes”, July 1, 2012 (PDF, p.4):

3. We have introduced a four point plan to boost workforce participation that will significantly increase the numbers of workers and dramatically increase the strength of the Australian economy:

• mandatory work for the dole for all long term unemployment beneficiaries under 50 would improve their work culture and also send a strong signal that people who can work should work: preferably for a wage but, if not, for the dole;

• extending welfare quarantining from the Northern Territory to all long term unemployment beneficiaries would put more food on families’ tables and send a strong signal that welfare money should be kept for the necessities of life;

• suspending dole payments for people under 30 in areas where unskilled work is readily available would boost the size of the local labour force and send a strong signal to young people that job snobs won’t be supported by the taxpayer; and

• a more sophisticated approach to the disability pension that distinguishes between disabilities that are likely to be permanent and those that are not would help to prevent older unemployed people being parked on welfare.

Plan B:

Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution (Yale, 2009, pp. 10–11):

God, in short, is every bit as gloriously pointless as Ditchkins tells us he is. He is a kind of perpetual critique of instrumental reason. John C. Lennox writes in God’s Undertaker that some scientists and philosophers think we should not ask after the reason for the universe because, according to them, there isn’t one. In this, however, they are unwittingly at one with theologians. If we are God’s creatures, it is in the first place because, like him, we exist (or should exist) purely for the pleasure of it. The question raised by radical Romanticism, which for these purposes includes Karl Marx, is that of what political transformations would be necessary for this to become possible in practice. Jesus, unlike most responsible [Australian] citizens, appears to do no work, and is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. He is presented as homeless, propertyless, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinsfolk, without a trade, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, careless about purity regulations, critical of traditional authority, a thorn in the side of the Establishment, and a scourge of the rich and powerful. Though he was no revolutionary in the modern sense of the term, he has something of the lifestyle of one. He sounds like a cross between a hippie and a guerilla fighter. He respects the Sabbath not because it means going to church but because it represents a temporary escape from the burden of labor. The Sabbath is about resting, not religion. One of the best reasons for being a Christian, as for being a socialist, is that you don’t like having to work, and reject the fearful idolatry of it so rife in countries like [Australia]. Truly civilized societies do not hold predawn power breakfasts.

About @ndy

I live in Melbourne, Australia. I like anarchy. I don't like nazis. I enjoy eating pizza and drinking beer. I barrack for the greatest football team on Earth: Collingwood Magpies. The 2024 premiership's a cakewalk for the good old Collingwood.
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