Remember when Labor announced it would be increasing JobSeeker by the pathetic amount of $40 a fortnight (plus interest)? AKA a measly $2.85 a day, or up to $4 a day if you include indexation. Well, that’s set to finally go ahead in September — but not if the Coalition can help it.
The federal opposition announced on Monday that it’ll try its darndest to amend the bill when it comes before the Senate today so that the $40 ($56 including indexation) increase is reversed and a new plan is implemented, because contrary to what literally every expert on the matter has said, it reckons that $20 to $28 a week is actually too much money to be giving to people who live below the poverty line.
Instead, it wants to increase the amount of money welfare recipients can earn before they lose their benefits — which might sound good in theory, but how many people actually reach that threshold? More on that later.
“There are 808,000 JobSeeker recipients across the nation, of which more than 75 per cent have zero reported earnings, with no part-time work,” Shadow Social Services Minister Michael Sukkar said, per ABC News.
“Increasing the income-free area before benefits are reduced incentivises those on working age payments to take up employment opportunities.”
That might sound like a load of BS because it is.
Sukkar essentially claimed that by implementing the $40 fortnightly increase, Labor would be paying welfare recipients more money to not work — the age old classist argument of “if you give poor people money they won’t ever get off their ass and work!!!!”. As if those of us working *full-time* and being paid above the poverty line in our jobs aren’t also fkn struggling with money these days.
According to the Guardian Australia live blog, he then linked this shitty argument with the fact that businesses are crying out for staff. I’m playing the tiniest violin right now.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the Coalition’s proposal a “shocker” and said it was “madness” to vote down the $40 JobSeeker increase.
“The problem with their thought bubble is that increasing the income free area will have a number of unintended consequences. It does nothing at all for the almost four in five jobseekers who don’t access the income free area at all,” he said, per Guardian Australia.
Yep.
However, Albanese then said the raising of the income free area (basically the amount of $$$ you can lodge in your earnings before Centrelink starts to remove benefits) would prevent people from getting full-time work, which, again, implies that people are on the dole out of laziness and not because we are in a cost of living crisis with an increasingly disappearing middle class.
The hostility this country has to those who are struggling never ceases to amaze me.
The post The Coalition Wants To Undo The $40 JobSeeker Raise & Imagine Hating Poor People This Much appeared first on PEDESTRIAN.TV .
