I didn’t realise this ’til now but in BREAKING NEWS…<\/p>\n
In April<\/a> an Australian Senator pretended to spend a week as a dole bludger.<\/p>\n LIVING off $17 a day may sound impossible to most people but Greens senator Rachel Siewert will do just this for a week, in an attempt to highlight the struggle people on the dole face.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In this context, Senator Siewert is a bit like Christopher Hitchens: The Drink-Soaked Ex-Troyskite Popinjay For War needed to actually undergo torture in order to understand that water-boarding is not. fun.<\/a> For her part, Siewert discovered that having a very small income does tend to make life a little. bit. difficult. (NB. The stunt of going on the dole for a week is an old one: I can remember a Democrats Senator doing it once back in the ’80s.)<\/p>\n Of course, the Senator’s week of poverty was intended to help promote the Greens’ campaign to reward shirkers with an additional $50 per week of unearned income. Or to put it another way: to ensure bludgers would continue living under The Poverty Line.<\/p>\n Well, that’s what the policy wonks at the Melbourne Institute<\/a> tell their fellows anyways. In their latest report (March 2012), the scienticians at the Institute calculate that a single person with no dependents and a weekly income of $470.36 is on the poverty line; the maximum allowable Newstart payment, on the other hand, is $303.10.<\/p>\n In any case<\/a>:<\/p>\n On 26 June 2012 the Senate referred the following matter to the Senate Education, Employment and Workplace Relations Committees for inquiry and report.<\/p>\n The adequacy of the allowance payment system for jobseekers and others, the appropriateness of the allowance payment system as a support into work and the impact of the changing nature of the labour market.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n No doubt the inquiry will prove to be an exciting development<\/a> in the struggle for economic justice and social equality.<\/p>\n Of course, the Greens aren’t the only ones who think the unemployed should be punished with poverty for their work-shy ways. Labor too is firmly committed to maintaining a reasonably-sized pool of surplus labour, the useless mouths<\/a> useful as examplars of what happens to work resistors and those who fail to worship at the feet of The Economy.<\/p>\n Last month, according to The Age<\/em>, “PRIME Minister Julia Gillard faces a growing push from Labor MPs to raise the dole<\/a>, with warnings it is so low that people are being forced into poverty and even turning to crime.”<\/p>\n Which — as well as ignoring the existence of the underground economy — I assume is expected to be responded to as though it were some kinda revelation rather than as a perfectly predictable and completely unremarkable fact of life.<\/p>\n Speaking of poverty, KRudd’s wife Therese Rein recently snuck on to Australia’s Rich List<\/a>. Her rise was dependent on the decline of the welfare state and the privatisation of state employment services. The massive expansion in state subsidies to the charity industry — dominated, naturally, by religious institutions — has also enabled folks like Toby Hall to ascend to the pinnacle of the industry, from which vantage point the former stockbroker likes to lecture the poor on good behaviour<\/a>.<\/p>\n If so many people weren’t made so rich by the poors, I’d advocate some kinda Final Solution.<\/p>\n