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“The Australian government spends too much on welfare”
Australia’s spending on welfare is considerably lower than most of the other OECD countries. Currently Australia is spending 6.9% of its GDP on welfare payments, less than half of other developed countries like France, Italy, and Belgium which spend more than 16% of their GDP on welfare payments. Despite this comparatively low level of welfare expenditure, the Federal government has continually stated that the current welfare system is “unstainable”. According to the Coalition Government, something needs to done quickly or Australia’s welfare system will become too expensive and bring the country deep into debt.
However, this is a myth.
While the Coalition Government has been busy declaring that Australia must end its
‘age of entitlement’, in reality the percentage of people on Centrelink payments has steadily decreased since the Howard era. Even a 2010 Government report predicted that by 2049-2050 Australia’s welfare spending will remain at 6.9% of GDP.
So if our welfare spending is expected to remain at 6.9% for the foreseeable future, well below the average of other OECD countries, how exactly is our welfare system unsustainable?
Far from being overly generous, it is clear the Government’s current welfare spending is not enough. According to the Australia Council of Social Services (ACOSS), today 2.5 million Australians are living below the poverty line, or 13.9% of the total population [Note: the poverty line is defined by ACOSS as living on less than $400 a week for a single adult or $841 for a couple with two children]. The situation becomes even more alarming when you consider the elderly (35.5% currently living below the poverty line), youth (17.7%), the unemployed (61.1%), the Disabled (42%), people living on Social Security Payments (40.1%), single parents (33%) and even workers (33.2%). These rising poverty levels clearly show the failure of our welfare system as it currently stands.
Despite the obvious inadequacy of our welfare system, in the recent budget the government announced that it would cut around $13 billion from our welfare system. As it stands today, $3 billion of these cuts has passed the Senate with the promise of much more to come. To justify these extraordinary cuts, the Government and its supporters in the media have been relentlessly pushing the myth that Australia is spending too much on welfare.
However, what the government and its supporters don’t mention is that the this campaign to cut government spending on welfare is actually part of a long-running trend to pass government debt onto Australian citizens. In contrast to the Coaltion Government’s obviously false claim that Australia is experiencing a ‘Budget emergency’, we are actually facing a much worse bigger problem: skyrocketing private debt. Given this situation, slashing Government expenditure on welfare is the opposite of what the Government should be doing.
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This government is most evil corrupt government in Australia’s history.
The problem with this government is they have financialised and weaponised the welfare system as they did with electricity.
The rules and regulations alone are like a mine field to negotiate and if you manage it you still have to front up to these privatised employment service so that they can get an even bigger slice then your hoping to get and might not. So did the cost to the tax payer go up because of privatising the system, or is it more unemployed. How did Mrs Rudd get rich. Q&A had a segment on it.
Up until today the Albanese government has been spending as much on job seeker 0:5 percent of G.D.P. the same as Morrison’s junket tour’s, so it’s probably now flown up to about 0:5 and a half.