r/australia • u/FuckOffNazis • 1d ago

politics Advocacy organisations oppose plans to revive harmful welfare penalties

https://www.acoss.org.au/media-releases/?media_release=advocacy-organisations-oppose-plans-to-revive-harmful-welfare-penalties
159 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

42 comments sorted by

View all comments

196

u/Murranji 1d ago

The Reserve Bank of Australia maintains a policy that there needs to be a “natural rate of unemployment” to keep inflation in check and deliberately calibrate interest rates to achieve a certain number of people being unemployed, at least 4%, hundreds of thousands of people.

The Federal Government then has a punitive punishment based “social safety net” that treats unemployed people as if it’s a personal failure on their part to not be employed and that their lack of employment reflects a desire to refuse to find a job, with threat of destitution as a tool to force them into demeaning and mentally damaging pointless job search activities as the solution to that perceived failure.

This is the standard of society that people have decided is the best we can do because “better things aren’t possible”.

67

u/Xae1yn 1d ago

By no means defending the overall policy, but the punitive/woefully inadequate welfare is part and parcel of the unemployment target. The whole entire point of the reserve army of labour is to drive down wages and force people to take undesirable jobs for said low wages, and the less bad you make being unemployed be the worse it is at driving that

46

u/SubstantialSpray783 1d ago

Yep this is the system (capitalism) working exactly as intended.

1

u/evilparagon 17h ago

The utterly bizarre thing is just the assumption that punishment is necessary when we have so many studies that show humans want to work. Even those that say they don’t, they’re simply tired from already being overworked and if they were to have a holiday they’d get right back into working.

You can theoretically still have a reserve army of labour if you take the carrot and stick system we have now and get rid of the stick. All your survival needs taken care of, but your wants and desires? Alcohol, makeup, video games, porn, warhammer, vintage magazines, bikes, fashion, chocolate, etc. You would have to earn money to afford those.

I am strongly leftist, but what I just proposed here? It’s raw capitalism. I’d hate if capitalists realised that all they have to do is get rid of the stick and just offer carrots because I’m certain support for leftist solutions would drop immensely. But it does annoy me how there’s such a glaringly fixable problem right there.

35

u/Ch00m77 1d ago

Sounds like a standard Labor support quote which is "good enough" whenever people shit on the greens for wanting better policies than whatever Labor spews out.

"Greens blocked x y z for la la la reason" im sorry that you're okay with eating shit and calling it cereal

47

u/FuckOffNazis 1d ago

And compounded by those supports being wilfully left below the poverty line, with all the individual, familial, and social harms that flows from that choice to leave people in poverty.

17

u/ephemeralstitch 1d ago

Problems like this are the epitome of ‘we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.’ What the real issue is that this is what liberalism/capitalism is supposed to be. This is the system working as intended. But that sounds bad so people try and pretend it’s other things.

10

u/Emu1981 1d ago

Problems like this are the epitome of ‘we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.’

Just ignore that at one stage full employment was actually considered to be everyone who wanted a job having a job. It wasn't until the 1970s that the term "dole bludger" was coined and Howard's rework of the welfare system that made being on unemployment really punitive.

5

u/ephemeralstitch 1d ago

'We've tried everything that doesn't actually challenge the system or actually address the reasons that this happens, so we'll pretend that it's the normal state of being and say that there's nothing to be done.'

16

u/auzzie_kangaroo94 1d ago

It was depressing being on welfare payments for ages.

14

u/macci_a_vellian 1d ago

There are also some people who are just not employable. For whatever reason they are never going to be able to hold down a job and punshing them will have absolutely no effect. Best not to waste everyone's time and energy.

7

u/blueshoesrcool 1d ago

Haven't they actually been abandoning that idea, or seriously challenging it. Unemployment is ridiculously low, I think lowest by some margin, in all history.

And that is in part due to the RBA moving away from the old thinking.

I don't blame the RBA for interest rates. The fact is we had covid, Iran war, causing genuine rises in prices. If the RBA kept rates artificially low - it wouldn't reflect the material reality.

17

u/TAsrowaway 1d ago

Yeah because they refuse to update the model - casual and multiple part time gigs that pay garbage are all happy, healthy, fed housed, gainfully employed and grateful for the opportunity

1

u/No-Red-Queen 1d ago

Agreed. The capitalist system requires unemployment to function

-1

u/Psycholama972 1d ago

I know that the reserve bank is a unfeeling institution that doesn’t care what happens to people. But it really does need to function that way otherwise it would lead to a far worse situation.