Australians woke up this morning in bewilderment, anger, and, for many, without the secure future they’d been promised in the supposed Lucky Country. Federal Liberal Party Treasurer Joe Hockey announced the budget last night, and the cuts to basic services – not to mention $8 billion in cuts to foreign aid – were devastating. This marks an end, we were told, to the ‘age of entitlement’. When interviewed afterwards on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s 7.30 Report, Mr Hockey indicated that it’s no big thing that people on benefits will be losing money because it’s not their own.
Let’s see how that plays out. Those on, for instance, $200 000 incomes will be paying $400 more in tax, but people on benefits will be losing more money than high income earners – and not just proportionately. The age of eligibility for the Youth Allowance is being raised from 22 to 25, which pays about less $50 less per week than Newstart, the job seekers’ benefit presently allocated to the 22+ bracket. Both payments place one below the poverty line. Plus, if you’re under 30, you have a six month waiting period before these benefits and can only receive them for six months per year.
I’m not sure how on earth people are meant to survive for six months on no money, because neither money nor jobs grow on trees. Moreover, with the axing of 16 500 public service jobs, the market is going to be flooded with experienced and qualified workers, which is going to make it that much harder for job seekers to get off benefits (once they get on them). Want to improve your chances with study? The deregulation of university fees means that fewer students will be able to enrol overall, something that can’t be made up for piecemeal with increased scholarship funding for some disadvantaged students. This measure is, by the by, being implemented by politicians who received free university education under the Gough Whitlam government.
If you’re in your mid twenties, for instance, and you do manage to get a uni degree, and you don’t manage to nab one of the shrinking number of graduate-appropriate roles, under this budget you’re going to be in huge course fee debt with no money for living expenses. It’s not clear where people in this situation are going to be living, either, with 235 million dollars disappearing from the pockets of the National Rental Affordability Scheme and Sydney and Melbourne rental prices heading into the stratospheric.
This is part of a range of measures that will disproportionately affect lower income earners; another example is that solo parents – who are primarily women, of course – who receive the family tax benefit of up to $3018.55 per annum until their youngest child turns eighteen will now only receive it until the child turns six. This is money that’s desperately needed by recipients, and relative small change for the overall budget. There are no increases in corporate taxes or the like.
One big carrot being offered is increased funding for medical research. One is tempted to ask about the chronic underfunding of public hospitals, for which funding is also being cut, and about the increased burden on hospitals by those unable to afford what’s now an extra $6 for prescription medicine and $7 for each of the medical appointments that were once free. It’s a noble thing to put more money into medical research, but that’s not a whole lot of help in practical terms right now. Of course, people with disabilities are not going to have a lot of space to protest: all the funding was cut for Ramp Up, the ABC’s disability website. A starry-eyed future of world-leading medical research is all well and good, but that possibility and narrative are coming at the expense of poor, sick, and disabled people right now and into that future. Furthermore, the Australian Research Council is now going to lack for 75 million dollars, not to mention the 111 million dollars taken from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, so the kind of research being funded into the future is going to be quite limited.
Would you like to know the kicker? These cuts didn’t save that much on the Budget’s bottom line, because most of the cut funds were reallocated to other services, like the extra quarter million dollars allocated to the controversial chaplaincy program. This is hardly the “fair go” entrenched in the fabric of Australian values. Cassandra Goldie, chief executive of the Australian Council of Social Services, said it best: ‘The budget divides rather than mends. It entrenches divisions between those with decent incomes, housing and health care and those without them. It undermines the fabric of our social safety net with severe cuts to health, disability support, income support, community services and housing programs.’ This is not a budget for Australia, it’s a budget for shredding the security of the most vulnerable. Gone is the ‘age of entitlement’ to survival.