on 21-05-2014 10:20 AM
Way to many welfare leaners and takers in this country now days
AFTER so irresponsibly dancing with his eight-year-old son in his office on budget night, and compounding the offence by allowing his wife to wear an elegant $750 Carla Zampatti dress, that cigar-chomping capitalist Joe Hockey made a speech. Towards the end, the Treasurer used the stirring phrase: “We are a nation of lifters, not leaners.”
It was an echo of Robert Menzies’ brilliant Forgotten People oration of 22 May, 1942, a paean to the middle class, the “backbone of the nation”, those self-reliant Australians who provide “the intelligent ambition which is the motive power of human progress”.
But judging by the savage reaction to the government’s first, rather moderate budget, Hockey’s assessment of the national character was wishful thinking.
The truth is that we are at the tipping point at which we switch from a nation of lifters to a nation of leaners. Right now only about half the country pays more in tax than they receive in benefits. They are the lifters.
And between 40 and 50 per cent of voters receive their income directly from the government, either in the form of benefits or because they work for the public service, according to the Centre for Independent Studies.
After six years of Labor profligacy, winding back the entitlement mentality is a huge task. No one is grateful for handouts but they scream when they are taken away.
Of course, it wouldn’t have mattered what kind of budget Messrs Hockey and Abbott brought down. Most of the feral reaction, like the weekend’s protest marches, was pre-arranged by wreckers who can’t stand a conservative government in power.
There are no depths to which the wreckers won’t stoop, from attacking Joe Hockey’s family to manhandling conservative female politicians arriving to speak at universities, to calling for the assassination of the PM.
This week, union leader Tony Sheldon, Labor’s national vice-president, even called his troops to war, advocating intimidation, blockades and civil disobedience.
“We must stand up to corporate money influencing politics,” he told a Transport Workers Union conference. “Using vehicles to block roads, sit-ins, go-slows, hundreds of trucks descending on Canberra — we’ll do it if we have to.”
Totalitarian violence is all the new Australian left has, which shows the bankruptcy of their arguments.
on 21-05-2014 10:24 AM
Are you aware that even staunch Liberal voters are disattisfied with thiscurrent government?
on 21-05-2014 10:26 AM
Who is Left?
Male or Female?
Under 30 or over 30?
Does he/she have a last name or is Left the last name?
If so what is the first name?
on 21-05-2014 10:28 AM
@bluecat*dancing wrote:Are you aware that even staunch Liberal voters are disattisfied with thiscurrent government?
So very true. My neighbour is just one of them, plus a few others that I have seen posting on their social media pages. They do not like Abbott or Hockey one single bit, especially with regards to the blatant lying that has gone on re the budget and pre election promises.
on 21-05-2014 10:29 AM
@nero_wulf wrote:
“Using vehicles to block roads, sit-ins, go-slows, hundreds of trucks descending on Canberra — we’ll do it if we have to.”
Like the convoy of no confidence that nobody came to?
on 21-05-2014 11:10 AM
Left want to trash the house rather than help rebuild it
on 21-05-2014 11:14 AM
really? what are the ones who are not the left doing?
on 21-05-2014 11:25 AM
well if we are posting scrollers heres something with some truth instead of bs and what exactly is the govt building?????
What's inside Joe Hockey's head?
But the levy is just a temporary pin-prick to the top 3 per cent of taxpayers who will pay it. And the price of petrol will rise by only about 1 cent a litre per year. The effect of the excise increase will be dwarfed by the ups and downs in the world price of oil.
The catch is this: you may hate paying tax, but don’t be too sure Hockey’s efforts to avoid tax increases and eventually make room for income-tax cuts will leave you ahead on the deal.
Why not? Because to avoid increasing taxes - and avoid cutting the big tax breaks some people enjoy - Hockey has concentrated on cutting back all manner of government spending. And most people - maybe all families bar the top 10 per cent or so - have more to lose from cuts to government spending made, than they have to gain from tax increases avoided.
That’s particularly true when Hockey’s efforts to cut government spending take the form of tightening means tests, moving to meaner rates of indexation and introducing or increasing user charges.
Don’t think just because you voted for the Coalition Hockey is looking after you. It works out that low income-earners – generally the old, the young and the unemployed - are heavily dependent on government spending, and genuinely middle income-earners with dependent kids are significantly reliant on government spending.
Only high income-earners who’ve already been means-tested out of eligibility for most programs (e.g. me) have little to lose from Hockey’s cuts. That’s the reason for the deficit levy. Without it, it would have been too easily seen that high income-earners weren’t doing any of Hockey’s "heavy lifting".
Indeed, too many people might have twigged that the whole exercise was designed to have high income-earners as its chief beneficiaries. The spending cuts are permanent and many of them save more as each year passes. But the deficit tax is temporary.
Hockey wants us to believe he had no choice but to do what he did. I accept he had to get on with bringing the two sides of his budget back into balance, but he had a lot of choice in the measures he took to bring that about.
He chose to focus on cutting three big classes of government spending: health, education, and income-support programs (pensions, the dole and family tax benefits). Not by chance, these are the programs of least importance to high income-earners.
He carefully avoided cutting the programs of most importance to the well-off: superannuation tax concessions, the concessional tax treatment of capital gains and negative gearing, Tony Abbott’s Rolls Royce paid parental leave scheme, the mining industry’s fuel excise rebate and other "business welfare" and, of course, the high income-earners’ favourite charity: defence spending.
And while slashing away at health, education and income support, he was also busy abolishing the carbon tax, the mining tax paid largely by three huge foreign mining companies, cutting the rate of company tax by 1.5 percentage points and exempting federal grants to private schools from his education cuts.
High income-earners want more user-charging (for pharmaceuticals as well as GP visits) because they’re no great burden to the highly paid, but they reduce the need for higher taxes. They reduce the cross-subsidy from the rich to the poor.
I must warn you, however, of the one glaring exception to high income-earners’ insistence that tax increases be avoided at all cost (to other people). The one tax increase they lust after is a rise in the goods and services tax.
Why? Because they believe it will be part of a deal in which the higher GST paid by everyone is used to pay for another cut in the rate of company tax plus a cut in the top rate of income tax.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/whats-inside-joe-hockeys-head-20140520-zri5f.html#ixzz32JCuqFKb
on 21-05-2014 11:29 AM
@nero_wulf wrote:Way to many welfare leaners and takers in this country now days
AFTER so irresponsibly dancing with his eight-year-old son in his office on budget night, and compounding the offence by allowing his wife to wear an elegant $750 Carla Zampatti dress, that cigar-chomping capitalist Joe Hockey made a speech. Towards the end, the Treasurer used the stirring phrase: “We are a nation of lifters, not leaners.”
It was an echo of Robert Menzies’ brilliant Forgotten People oration of 22 May, 1942, a paean to the middle class, the “backbone of the nation”, those self-reliant Australians who provide “the intelligent ambition which is the motive power of human progress”.
But judging by the savage reaction to the government’s first, rather moderate budget, Hockey’s assessment of the national character was wishful thinking.
The truth is that we are at the tipping point at which we switch from a nation of lifters to a nation of leaners. Right now only about half the country pays more in tax than they receive in benefits. They are the lifters.
And between 40 and 50 per cent of voters receive their income directly from the government, either in the form of benefits or because they work for the public service, according to the Centre for Independent Studies.
After six years of Labor profligacy, winding back the entitlement mentality is a huge task. No one is grateful for handouts but they scream when they are taken away.
Of course, it wouldn’t have mattered what kind of budget Messrs Hockey and Abbott brought down. Most of the feral reaction, like the weekend’s protest marches, was pre-arranged by wreckers who can’t stand a conservative government in power.
There are no depths to which the wreckers won’t stoop, from attacking Joe Hockey’s family to manhandling conservative female politicians arriving to speak at universities, to calling for the assassination of the PM.
This week, union leader Tony Sheldon, Labor’s national vice-president, even called his troops to war, advocating intimidation, blockades and civil disobedience.
“We must stand up to corporate money influencing politics,” he told a Transport Workers Union conference. “Using vehicles to block roads, sit-ins, go-slows, hundreds of trucks descending on Canberra — we’ll do it if we have to.”
Totalitarian violence is all the new Australian left has, which shows the bankruptcy of their arguments.
- Miranda Devine
- From: The Daily Telegraph
- May 21, 2014 12:00AM
Did you mean too many? Like these?
on 21-05-2014 11:32 AM
"Did you mean too many? Like these?"
OMG someone made a typo! Quick! call the spelling police!