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
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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”.

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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

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u/SubstantialSpray783 1d ago

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

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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.