Last year’s idiotic, fake ‘racism’ furore was not the first time that cartoonist Mark Knight has ‘outraged’ the online offenderati. Knight’s cartoon responding to the release of figures showing the staggering number of Australians receiving government benefits, and the dwindling numbers of taxpayers who make a net contribution, set the lattes a-frothing. Knight’s cartoon showing a young suburban couple leaving for work and “waving goodbye to their dependents” – a huge crowd of students, unemployed, old age pensioners, disability pensioners…
The usual outrage-mongers might have been ‘offended’, but Knight was savagely on point. Half of Australia’s families receive more in benefits than they pay in income tax. On average, Australians pay just $3424 net tax.
New Zealand is not far behind.
The Household Economic Survey revealed 29 per cent of households receive government benefits and transfers, excluding superannuation.
According to the survey, “18.8 per cent of households earning more than $150,991, and 24 per cent of those earning between $100,001 and $150,000” are receiving some type of government financial assistance.
How did we come to the point where households earning more than $100k – and worse, more than $150k – are beneficiaries? Where did we, as a society, go wrong?
By the relentless expansion of tax-churning ‘benefits’, ‘safety nets’ and government ‘bonuses’.
This is a problem that has to be owned by governments of all persuasions. In Australia, Julia Gillard saddled us with the multi-billion-dollar behemoth, the National Disability Insurance Scheme, but it was John Howard and Peter Costello – supposed ‘fiscal conservatives’ – who brought in the generous ‘baby bonuses’ and first home-owner’s grants. Twenty years later, bogans still push their ‘baby bonus babies’ while they have a ciggie in the shopping malls, and house prices have inexorably risen.
It seems that we have strayed from the purpose of the social welfare system […]the fact that we have allowed relatively high-income households to become beneficiaries means that we have normalised middle-class and upper middle-class welfare in this country.
Not only that but complete welfare dependency for the poor. Multi-generational welfare dependency is a sad reality for many poor families. Welfare has become honeyed poison for the very people it was supposed to help.
The biggest issue with a creeping welfare state is its inexorability.
Who wouldn’t miss free money? No-one wants to have their total income reduced, which is why former Prime Minister John Key, who originally called the Working for Families scheme “a giant welfare package”, back-tracked and retained the scheme out of fear of losing votes in the 2008 general election.
Inaction and a lack of push-back by successive governments has made it much more difficult to untangle the web of the welfare system.
Once a government starts handing out a benefit, it’s practically impossible for it to stop. Even the most modest attempt to reign in any benefit is met with howls of protest. When Tony Abbott tried to introduce a piffling co-payment of just $7 for public healthcare – which no one on a government pension would have had to pay anyway – he might as well have trampled kittens on the steps of Parliament House.
Instead, benefits just keep growing, like some 1950s science fiction monster. In the 90s, Paul Keating introduced a modest stipend of a few hundred dollars for first-time parents, to help them meet the cost of equipping themselves for a new baby. Howard expanded it to three thousand – explicitly to encourage people to “have one [extra] for the country”. Gillard’s NDIS is an unworkable behemoth which drains billions from the public purse without actually doing much at all to help the disabled. But heaven help the government which is crazy-brave enough to try and overhaul, let alone axe it.
The expansion of the welfare system seems to have done nothing to alleviate the hardship of those the welfare system was designed for.
The fact that 18.8 per cent of households earning more than $150,991, and 24 per cent of those earning between $100,001 and $150,000 are now beneficiaries, means that we are in desperate need of a courageous overhaul of the welfare system.
stuff.co.nz/national/politics/opinion/115192566/150k-households-receiving-benefits-show-new-zealands-welfare-system-has-strayed-far-from-its-purpose
None of this does anything to grow the economy, either. While it might employ armies of public servants, instead of growing wealth it just churns the existing wealth through a deteriorating cycle of tax and spend, tax and spend.