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
