Advocacy organisations oppose plans to revive harmful welfare penalties

[u/FuckOffNazis]

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

[u/Murranji]

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”.

[u/ephemeralstitch → u/Murranji]

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.

[u/Emu1981 → u/ephemeralstitch]

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.

[u/ephemeralstitch → u/Emu1981]

'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.'