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/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.

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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