...This article continues the attack on welfare benefits, with usual subtly of a sledge hammer.

...So to what point in history does the author "really" suggest welfare assistance for single mothers, (for eg) should be wound back?

...Keeping in mind of course, the period in our recent history, (as recently as the 1960's), where the children of single mothers (black and white), were confiscated by the State, under brutal conditions in hospitals, and handed over for adoption.

...Children from that abusive period in our checkered history, are now domiciled "The Stolen Generation". "We should be careful what we ask for": A suggestion that single mothers income be reduced $120 as an incentive "stick" to get out and find work, is not the direction reform should follow!

From my perspective both the article and the author are extremely offensive! Clearly the author is yet another of those eternally postulating over rewarded academics, who have never ever done a hard days work in their lifetime? And here I am not talking about burning the midnight oil deep in the pages of some technical scholarly tome; but rather, back bent and toiling in the noonday sun.
The average shearer, for example, is all but crippled by the age of forty, due almost entirely to the rigours imposed by that occupation, exacerbated by a genuine lack of other skills?
Try to retrain and get a job in any other occupation; and, a back injury, real or imagined, invariably precludes the applicant?
Older applicants are also discriminated against, by immature employers, who often see older folk as well past their use by date; regardless of valuable irreplaceable experience and well honed skills?
One only acquires the wisdom of the years with age and maturity. Something that seems missing in the author?
Having said all that, one can agree that welfare for the genuinely needy could and should be much more generous, if only to ensure we end the sort of generational poverty, that in effect creates those post code poverty traps, single mums and the genuinely disabled invariably wind up in?
Moreover, any attempt to force single parents back into the workforce must first be pre-empted by proper and relevant training that makes, willing job applicants genuinely job ready.
Job start also ought to incorporate a period, say six months, of very much more generous wage subsidisation? If only to encourage recalcitrant employers, to take on the older or physically disadvantaged worker.
A very nearly bankrupt Britain is hardly the best example to follow, given unfair dismissal laws, were pragmatically traded off in Scandinavia, for far better unemployment benefits?
We are not living in a bankrupt Britain, but Australia, where our common wealth, if equitably divided, would make every man, woman and child, millionaires! Rhrosty.

'Tighten the rules on welfare payments'??

How much tighter can they possibly get? And how much more money and time must be wasted in creating the mechanisms to keep up all this screw-tightening?

Over the last 30 years, the rich and the rednecks of the Western world have been indecently obssessed with an infinitesimal number of supposed 'dole cheats' and welfare 'bludgers' supposedly ripping off the system to the supposed tune of billions of dollars. Despite the fact that this has been repeatedly shown up as the fiction it really is, the power and influence of the anti-welfare lobby has successfully managed to scare everybody witless.

As a result, Australia is now lumped with the unwieldy, inefficient, bureaucratic nightmare that is Centrelink, which wastes billions of dollars per year policing people's lives and finances, instead of simply administering what was once a straightforward social service based on need and trust.

Welfare employs so many that most of the funding destined for the needy is syphoned away to those who couldn't care less.

Why do the most vulnerable always get targeted in suggested, and real, clamp-downs on social welfare spending.

I know that Peter has adressed this topic but when is the Australian government going to clamp down on the many social "welfare" payments and transfers to the already comfortably well off, and to the rich too. Such "welfare" payments expanding enormously during the Howard government.

People don't receive the DSP simply because they say they are too incapacitated to work - there is a rigorous assessment process involved which has recently been reviewed. Saunders also fails to acknowledge, as is usually the case in articles which champion the reduction of people receiving the DSP, that perhaps it's not just a matter of 'showing willing' in order to get a job if you have a disability. For example, I have often heard stories where people are told by employers that they have to be 100% fit to return to work after a workplace injury, with no preparedness to redesign work activities to enable a transitioned return to work - end result being the person loses their job, may not be able to return to their former occupation, face obstacles to retraining.... These systemic issues need to be addressed so that people with complex and chronic health conditions which make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to fit into the often unsympathetic reality of many profit-focused workplaces, do not continue to be disadvantaged in what is fundamentally a well-off nation. It's really about priorities.