Monday 25th of November 2024
Home » Blogs » John Richardson's blog

we can't have it all .....

we can't have it all .....

The next election will be austere if the Treasury boss, Martin Parkinson, gets his way.

Dr Parkinson told the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia in Canberra last night that Australians should get real and realise they couldn't ''have it all''.

Ageing and rising expectations were likely to put ''enormous pressure'' on budgets, he said. The taxation base was ''weaker than had been imagined in the mid-noughties''.

''Much of the debate assumes we can have it all, with people simultaneously believing we can maintain or even reduce taxation levels while keeping the current range of social policy interventions with limited targeting and self-provision - and indeed adding to this with a long list of worthy, but expensive, new proposals,'' he told the conference.

''The key point is that choices need to be explicitly debated. The examples of the United States and Europe, where decisions have repeatedly been put off in good times, are not models to emulate.''

Australia needed a ''sensible discussion on what we expect governments to provide, and the tax system needed to support these expectations''.

Treasury will soon publicly release its methodologies for costing political promises, giving the community and political parties a clearer idea of how it evaluates policies. It was severely criticised by the Coalition after the 2010 election, when it found what it said were up to $10.6 billion worth of errors in costings the Coalition had had certified by two Perth accountants. The Coalition said the accountants were unable to replicate the Treasury's methods because it had not made them public.

Treasury will also make the methodologies available to the new Parliamentary Budget Office, which will independently cost political promises on request.

Dr Parkinson told the conference the typical Australian voter was ageing. By 2050, almost one-quarter of Australians would be aged over 65.

''It is unclear what impact this will have on future Australian policy debates, but the experience in Europe and Japan hardly suggests that ageing populations are enthusiastic advocates of structural reform,'' he said.

Australia's economic success had been built on the ''three pillars'' of a floating exchange rate, an independent monetary policy and budget policy that aimed at running surpluses over the business cycle to build national savings.

''In the current environment of volatility and uncertainty with what can seem overwhelming global and domestic pressures, some have been tempted to suggest dismantling or undermining this framework,'' Dr Parkinson said.

''I refer to a range of views - from questioning the value of the Reserve Bank's current mandate, proposing a return to industry protection or exchange rate intervention, to significant restrictions on foreign investment while ignoring the role of foreign capital in raising Australian living standards.''

The Reality Is, Australians Can't Have It All - Treasury Boss

The only person who needs to 'get real' here is dear Dr Parkinson.

With 40% of the Awstraylen workforce now 'casualised' & denied the opportunity to aspire to a certain future, a new 'underclass' of poor has been created (compare the average hourly rate of pay for all full-time employees of $47 to that for casual workers of $17 & you might just begin to understand the size of the growing gap).

Add-in the families of those casual workers & then those citizens struggling to survive on fixed incomes & you have a situation where more than half of Awstraylens aren't consumed about 'having it all' but with simply surviving.

That Dr Parkinson, Julia Dullard, Tonocchio Abbott & the rest of the 'elites' think everyone should be so grateful about this says more about how out-of-touch they are with the realities of our modern world .... a pox on all of them I say. Then, in the face of all this, to hear the likes of Dullard & Swan patting themselves on the back over the performance of the economy on the one hand, whilst wring their hands helplessly as the robber barons pillage & plunder with impunity on the other, simply frustrates many people & makes many more enormously angry.

For those who might question my thesis, look at the share of wealth (GDP) going to our nation's shareholders today vs the share of wealth going to wage/salary earners .... the skew in favour of shareholders (the wealthy) has never been higher (see 'from bread to breadcrumbs' http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/18876).   

breadline britain .....

Almost 7 million working-age adults are living in extreme financial stress, one small push from penury, despite being in employment and largely independent of state support, according to the most comprehensive study yet of the finances of employed households, commissioned by the Guardian.

Unlike the "squeezed middle", these 3.6m British households have little or no savings, nor equity in their homes, and struggle at the end of each month to feed themselves and their children adequately. They say they are unable to cope on their current incomes and have no assets to fall back on, leaving them vulnerable to something as simple as an unexpectedly large fuel bill.

The findings challenge the argument made by the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, who said last week that parents should get a job to ensure their children are not brought up in poverty.

"These figures are a mega-indictment on the mantra of both political parties, that work is the route out of poverty," said Frank Field, Labour MP for Birkenhead and former welfare minister who is now the coalition's poverty tsar. "What's shocking about this is that these are people who want to work and are working but who, despite putting their faith in the politicians' mantra, find themselves in another cul-de-sac. Recent welfare cuts and policy changes make it difficult to advise these people where they should turn to get out of it: it really is genuinely shocking."

This group are "traditionally proud, self-reliant, working people", said Bruno Rost, head of Experian Public Sector, who used more than 400 variables from Experian's database and government research to identify those belonging to At-Risk Britain. After removing from the research households in the "most deprived" categories, Rost's team focused on those working but are nevertheless suffering high levels of financial stress.

He also looked at respondents' attitudes, behaviour and outlook.

"These are the new working class – except the work they do no longer pays," Rost added. "These people say that being forced to claim benefits or move into a council property would be the worst kind of social ignominy and self-failure."

Challenging the government's claim that people are better off in work than on benefits, the exclusive research found that 2.2 million children live in families teetering on an economic cliff-edge – despite one or both adults earning a low to middle income. The households in trouble include couples without children who earn a gross annual income of between £12,000 and £29,000, or couples with two children on between £17,000 and £41,000.

Revealing thathaving a job is no protection against homelessness and destitution in modern-day Britain, the findings challenge David Cameron's claim to be committed to "a fair society in which effort is rewarded [and] work pays".

The findings echo a report by Oxfam last week that more people in poverty were working than unemployed and the number in work but claiming housing benefit had more than doubled since 2005, to nearly 900,000. People in work were increasingly turning to charities for help, Oxfam said, with thousands more accessing food banks this year than last.

The findings come on the first day of an exclusive series by the Guardian on the reality of poverty in austerity Britain.

The research into 26m households across the UK, carried out by Experian, identified eight types of employed adults most likely to be suffering in-work poverty, including:

·         Self-employed tradespeople living in small communities.

·         Ethnically mixed communities and single people who are living in the centre of small towns.

·         Young owners and private renters in inner-city terraces.

The findings redraw the perceived map of acute financial stress, finding it is not an exclusively northern or inner-city problem. Working households across large parts of south-west England, outer London and East Anglia struggle to avoid slipping into official poverty.

Top of the "at-risk" list are the "English Riviera" towns of Torquay, Paignton and Brixham.

The groups experiencing poverty vary from region to region. In Torbay, the most "at risk" are indebted families living in low-rise estates; mixed communities with many single people in the centre of the small town, and self-employed tradespeople.

By contrast, the Lancashire borough of Hyndburn – which includes Accrington and is second in the list with 30% of households at risk – has a higher number of south Asian communities experiencing social deprivation and low-income families occupying poor-quality, older terrace houses.

In Brent, north London – Britain's most mixed borough – it is predominantly upwardly mobile South Asian families living in interwar suburbs who suffer.

The local government districts of Fenland in Cambridgeshire and South Holland in the East Midlands also have just under a third of households at risk of poverty.

Further research, also commissioned by the Guardian, reveals average salaries by region and how this has changed over the past five years. People working in the Blackpool South parliamentary constituency have the lowest average wages in the UK – £320 a week, compared with £1,305 a week in the London borough of Kensington, according to a deprivation index commissioned from the Resolution Foundation, an independent thinktank aiming to help those on low to middle incomes. The four constituencies with the lowest average wage are in north-west England; those working in Blackley and Broughton, Preston and Middlesbrough earn an average salary of between £323 to £330 per week.

Gavin Kelly, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, said: "Many households move in and out of the low to middle income group from one year to the next, but around a third remain 'stuck' over the longer term, finding themselves in the group over a 15-year period." He warned that the stagnating economy, increasing unemployment, rising prices, falling incomes and cuts to public services – 88% of which lie ahead over the next four years – meant things would get worse for those on low incomes.

Last night a spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions said: "For years the welfare state has not helped those people who are in work but on low incomes. The whole point of Universal Credit is that it will help make work pay and help those on lower incomes, topping up wages, ensuring it is financially better to always be in work than on benefits.

"What is clear and this research shows, is that the existing system doesn't help those families who strive to do the right thing."

Millions Of Working Families One Push From Penury