THEY CALL IT AUSTRALIAN
POLITICS
By Frances Harris
Fiscal responsibility; or is it a wrecking ball?
I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature
of politics in Australia. On top of that I have been searching for a regular
pet name for the standing parties and independent candidates. It will come to
me in time. With the latest budget announcement by the Abbot Government I decided
to call them: The Lemming Party, you
know those weird little animals that swim out to sea in a group and drown for
no apparent reason. When one goes, the rest follow.
The reason I am concentrating on the liberals is because they are in power, not because I hate them. Some of them are as cute as a teddy bear; take Joe Hockey for instance.
The Liberal Party had the
election in the bag, until the budget bulletins started to surface. The show continues: - liberals are rising out of the bog again; and when they
to shake it off, everyone gets covered in mud. To make fair comment, the Labour
Party has a just as interesting routine: They are completely submerged in the bog due to their ‘pink bats home
installation,’ fiasco and a long list of other notable misadventures, and I don’t
expect them to re-emerge any time soon.
It’s always - bog in, bog out in
Australian politics. Then there is the Palmer United that hasnt yet had its chance to sink, or shine – see what happens? There is real potential brewing.
Let me recap in a nutshell, the liberal
philosophy. It’s, take from the lazy, welfare dependent nonworking poor, and
shift the savings to hard working high rollers and mining magnates etc. who
may, if they are given enough fiscal incentive; not send the jobs offshore and invest
in Australia. ‘The Trickle Down, effect’: that failed in America so
spectacularly and kept the Democrats in power for the last two terms, has spectacularly failed here too. To dd: The Labour policy here has been - give, -give,-give, borrow,
borrow, borrow, and that is not a sustainable policy either. So what’s the
alternative? Perhaps the up and coming Palmer United Party, which is yet to
show its true colors and its capacity to go, ‘bog diving or not.’ There’s plenty of
time.
Now getting back to the lemmings: Liberals don’t realize that every time they
come in with the Razor Gang, slashing and burning, leaving streams of shattered
lives in their wake, they disassemble the lives of their own middle class
liberal voters, and when they and their families fall below the acceptable poverty
line, they transform into committed Labour or independent voters for a
generation or more. Remember Work Choices? Self-destruction is theirs for the
taking.
The libs forget those families have
children who grow up, and at the most vulnerable times go through the meat
grinder of fiscal restraint. Do you think they will forget in a hurry? - Perhaps not. The
new families they make; may never get to be middle class like their parents and
resent it. So it’s ‘Bye, Bye,’ to emerging potential future liberal voters. The
most likely thing that will bring those voters back to the libs for a while is
when Labour sinks back into the bog and smells so bad nobody wants to be near
them. - Bog out, bog in, that’s how politics in Australia rotates.
Now to tackle the 35,000 or so young
people who are on the disability support pension the Abbot Government want
reassessed for work ready readiness. It’s obvious not many in the Abbot government take
responsibility for a person with an intellectual or mental health disability,
or maybe taken the time to investigate. They can't be because most of them are poor because they can't work due to their carer responsibilities. We will talk another time about cuts to the carer allowance. So not only is this quest likely to
ruin the lives of vulnerable people who look alright on the day, and talk like
normal people most of the time, there is no foreseeable prospect of them being
able to support themselves, or reconstruct their lives once the rug is pulled from under them.
There is an anti-psychotic medication
called F......., commonly used on people with mental illness for instance. I blurred the name because I want to avoid expensive litigation. There are many more medications (heavy acting drugs), but this is one example. It can fuzz the brain till the
patient can’t pick up a tissue to blow their nose for extended periods of time,
meaning the person in work will lose the long-awaited or cherished job, and
unemployment benefits are not enough to live on, so they feel they have no
other option but to ditch the pills and take their chances.
It won’t be long before they will find
themselves in the police, ‘paddy wagon,’ on their way for an extended stay in a
public hospital. Few can afford private health cover, unless they have wealthy
parents.
That ill person at the most vulnerable time, will
likely be out on the street shortly after hospital, hungry,
unsupervised, and at risk of harm and remission. So what would the authorities do
if a vulnerable animal was released instead, cold and hungry onto the street? The
responsible party would be in front of a magistrate in the blink of an eye, with a fine and possibly jail time. But
what if the animal was a stray, unowned and uncared for? I rest my case. People
are lesser creatures and under successive governments; are left to perish to neglect, accident or suicide! because it requires more money to support them. Can
you imagine the fear, loneliness and devastation that person has to endure? Not to mention the family that has no conceivable hope of dealing with it. This is the real world, not a fairy tale.
Most of the time families are not be able to pick up the pieces, so who does it then? Are our most vulnerable to be treated worse than the asylum seekers who have at least got a tent and food? They will already be too compromised to help themselves. Sure, if the
payment recipient of the disability support payment presents to the independent
government sanctioned doctor, on a good day, the Disability Support Pension will
be revoked. So then, the Libs' will have
to invest heavily in welfare safety nets like subsidized housing, more rental
assistance, more unemployment benefits, hospital ER’s, additional mental health
clinics, extra policing and new mental health mental hospital wings when the
mentally ill or compromised people ditch their pills in favor of keeping the
part time job they might already have.
Often they leave hospital worse off than
they went in, so it’s a revolving door. So many go through while there are ever reducing resources from health cuts, the treatment is not properly evaluated, or followed up. Have you seen the cost of Psychiatrists and other resources? More wasted money.
I estimate it will cost the new Abbott government
squillions of dollars to fix the fallout, or, there is the other option to build more
jails, including more policing to catch the criminals who steal food to survive
and take it back under the bridge where they are forced to live, and be visited
by the extra mental health staff hired because of the budget cuts to welfare. Then, perhaps there is the co-payment to be found for the doctor when they get a chest infection. It doesn’t make sense to me.
Have a good day.
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