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The Forum > Article Comments > Tighten the rules on welfare payments > Comments

Tighten the rules on welfare payments : Comments

By Peter Saunders, published 8/6/2012

In Britain single parents are required to look for work once their youngest child starts school at the age of five.

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...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!
Posted by diver dan, Friday, 8 June 2012 10:32:04 AM
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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.
Posted by Rhrosty, Friday, 8 June 2012 10:46:34 AM
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'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.
Posted by Killarney, Friday, 8 June 2012 1:13:05 PM
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Welfare employs so many that most of the funding destined for the needy is syphoned away to those who couldn't care less.
Posted by individual, Friday, 8 June 2012 4:08:48 PM
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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.
Posted by Daffy Duck, Friday, 8 June 2012 4:21:49 PM
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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.
Posted by CPQ, Friday, 8 June 2012 5:20:23 PM
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The gotcha on all of this is making it actually work for people. In the UK example as described they gone to pains to ensure that people are always better off working than not working.

I wonder if that includes things like public transport costs, out of hours care and the other incidentals that don't get counted as tax deductible but which are very much costs associated with holding down a job.

I'd like to see some creative ways of easing the transition for parents. Ways of making it easier for single parents to work within school hours (including time getting to and from job's). Out of hours care can be very useful but it can also be hard on all involved especially if there are already issues. Waking a kid early to drop them at before school care, picking them up late then home to get dinner, deal with homework and all the other stuff then early to bed because they have to be up early the next day can lead to a life with not much quality time for kids.

I do think that there is a lot of value in helping parents get back into the workforce but we need to do it in a way that's not destructive, that leaves parents feeling more empowered than desperate.

R0bert
Posted by R0bert, Friday, 8 June 2012 5:31:47 PM
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Methinks Peter has been out of Australia too long. Parenting payment recipients already have to start looking for work when the youngest child turns 6. The age 8 thing is when they lose entitlement to parenting payment and have to apply for something else - usually Newstart allowance.
Posted by Spog, Friday, 8 June 2012 6:43:28 PM
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Such "welfare" payments expanding enormously during the Howard government.
Daffy Duck,
As long as we have such a huge public service it'll always administered by ALP orientated people, no matter if LIB/ALP is in Government. That has been the crux of the dilemma since 1972. There is no such thing as a Liberal Government Public service.
Posted by individual, Friday, 8 June 2012 9:13:57 PM
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Welfare for the rich or "better off" is at least as large as the budget assigned to aged care. Welfare for the rich includes negative gearing, which ought to be the first to go. Just repealing this single money for nothing measure, would add at least 5 billion to the surplus.
Ending all the forms of welfare for the better off, through proper means testing of all govt supplied services including public education and health, would add around 26 billion to the surplus.
And wouldn't that create angst in coalition ranks and the usual mostly moribund medley/Gazelle conducted chorus, of class warfare and the politics of envy, blah, blah, etc/etc.
Sure some of the disabled could work, say in call centres or some such?
But very few of them have the resources, to relocate to places like India!
Where the positions that they might actually occupy, are being outsourced in the endless mindless quest to reach the lowest common denominator!
Or become the richest permanent resident(s) in the local graveyard?
A public service dominated by ALP appointments?
Horse feathers and bird's fur!
Rhrosty.
Posted by Rhrosty, Saturday, 9 June 2012 10:35:24 AM
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The sole parents pension should be abolished. The responsibility for looking after children is and ought to be on those who want to do it. If they cannot or will not do it, the ordinary laws of child protection should apply.

There is no reason why policy should create two classes of parents: those who have to work to support themselves and their own children *and* toil under coercion for the benefit of others; and those who have the privilege to have babies without taking responsibility for their own reproductive behaviour. That latter are not any more "vulnerable" than anyone else who has to work to earn an income. It's entirely their choice whether to look after their own children(!). They should not be able to force other people into being their chattels and slaves to support them.

Women have everything they need to obtain child support, and it's right between their legs. The fact that the supporters of the pension shrink from this obvious conclusion proves that these laws are not about social security at all, but are only laws of foisting the sexual morality of the privileged onto everyone else: a kind of compulsory reverse-patriarchy.

Besides, it's the government itself that is causing the problem they claim to be necessary to solve. At present, the chattel class have to go to work all day, then after work go shopping, bring it all home, unpack it, cook, clean up and clean the house as well. If we were really concerned about social justice, we would abolish the pension and the tax to pay for it. Those now receiving the pension should work in the households of those now paying to support their selfishness and greed. They could do the shopping, the cooking, the cleaning, the lawn-mowing; and receive cash payment direct without income tax. That would be more sensible and just, wouldn't it?

Thus the problem is not their "vulnerability", it's a problem entirely caused by the state dividing society unjustly, preventing consensual solutions eg child-minding, and then having the gall to claim to be necessary as our saviour.
Posted by Jardine K. Jardine, Saturday, 9 June 2012 1:56:39 PM
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Jardine K Jardine
In calling for the abolishment of the single mother’s support pension it seems to me
That you are missing the fact that when a mother is looking after her own child she is saving the government the cost of building , subsidising and paying childcare workers. That is something that costs the government billions of dollars every year. Why is the job of looking after children and babies considered to be work worthy of wages when carried out by a stranger to the child, but worth nothing when carried out by the child’s own mother.

If you want a society around you that is young and fit enough to look after you in your old age Or to send to war to protect you, then acknowledge that motherhood is the engine room of the nation otherwise go and live out in the desert by yourself somewhere without the benefits and protection of a society around you.

Or are you a mother who goes out to work and wants to hate mothers who don’t? I am actually greatly in favour of mother’s having outside employment,but Your attitude to single mother’s here is saying that looking after babies and children has no value, in doing so you denigrate the work of raising children and motherhood worldwide.

Or are you a man who has never done much looking after children? Go and do some real 24hour all week babycare of a couple of children under 5years old. I bet it wouldn’t take long for you to run back to an easy 8 to 9hour working day with your tail between your legs. The sheer work load in the time needed alone, placed on an individual looking after young children is not for wimps.

In fact the engineers sent by Dr.Phil to assess a mother’s at home’s work load with 2children found she put in a 16hour day and when her husband actually stayed home and tried it, he came back on Television and apologised to all the mothers everywhere for his previous attitude
Posted by CHERFUL, Sunday, 10 June 2012 4:35:01 PM
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Cherful

It's you who are denigrating the value of motherhood by suggesting that no-one would value it unless they were threatened with imprisonment to force them to pay for it.

If we put aside all your personal arguments, or rather all your attempts to turn it into a personal argument, all we are left with is your double standard: that some mothers are to be forced to pay for others who are no worse off, and in many cases are better off.

The basic flaw in your argument is identifying value with what is obtained by violence or threats of violence: moral and factual nonsense.

The idea that, by having babies, a woman automatically generates an entitlement to live at others coerced expense is simply anti-social - the opposite of your conception of it- and besides, not even you believe it, because otherwise, why should some mothers be taxed to pay for others? Or I suppose men should be the only tax-payers and all women should enjoy the unequal privilege which you partially confer on single mothers?

It's the other way around: why don't *you* go out and live in a desert until you can learn that the basis of human social co-operation is not in threatening to kill and rape and cage people to get what you want?

Talk of the "value" of mothering is vain if no-one is willing to pay for it voluntarily. If they are, no issue arises. And if they're not, then all it means is that you value violence above caring, and everything else you say is just the expression of your moral confusion.
Posted by Jardine K. Jardine, Sunday, 10 June 2012 6:51:35 PM
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Jardine K Jardine

What I am saying to you is that children have an inherent value to you and society as a whole, otherwise you would soon find a decaying, decrepit, aging society with no-one to man the stations. You enjoy the vibrant organised society you have around you, the reasonably young nurses that are there when you need to go to hospitaL. You only see the very occasional much older one because the work needs agile fitness and older people lose that agile fitness in later years.

You also have a supportive society around you in times of cyclones, fires and other catastrophes to get things up and running again. You will expect the young to go and fight for you if the country is threatened as you age. You enjoy all these benefits but you don't want to acknowledge it or give it any value. Your very survival would be threatened without new generations growing up around you. You seem to want to enjoy the privileges that other people's children confer on your wellbeing for free. Who's the real freeloader?

The fact that daycare workers supervise the children all day proves that looking after children requires full time work and attention,the mother at home who has been doing the job of the paid childcare carers all day still has the night shift as well, because children don't just switch off at a convenient knock off time.

And I am not trying to take credit away from women with jobs outside the home either, motherhood however it is handled is a tough job.

They can't keep daycare staff because of the high burnout level of staff and because they are not paid enough for what the job demands.
Why do you think that is if it's such an easy job? The mother minding a child under 4years at home is already putting in the work load of a full time job. She is unpaid while the professional childminders are paid. However when the child goes to school it is best for the mothers wellbeing to go back to work.
Posted by CHERFUL, Sunday, 10 June 2012 11:42:36 PM
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>>Women have everything they need to obtain child support, and it's right between their legs.<<

So single mothers who can't find work should be denied social security payments because they can make good money as prostitutes? A noble sentiment I'm sure we'd all agree but I'm not sure if it is an economically viable solution. I haven't looked at any statistics but I fear that a sudden and dramatic increase in the number of ladies of negotiable virtue offering their services will see supply greatly outstrip demand and there simply won't be enough work to go around. Besides: a lot of the single mums I see pushing prams around my neighborhood are single for a reason: they are repulsive bogans and so ugly that they'd have a hard time giving it away for free. So it looks like your good idea is a bit of a dead-end.

Besides: where did it leave the men receiving the sole parents pension? As gigolos? It might make for an interesting HBO comedy-drama but I'm not sure how well it would turn out in real life.

>>It's the other way around: why don't *you* go out and live in a desert until you can learn that the basis of human social co-operation is not in threatening to kill and rape and cage people to get what you want?<<

Huh? Bit of a non-sequitur there Jardine. I double-checked CHERFUL's post and there's noting in there about living in deserts or killing or raping or caging people. You seem a bit confused - are you sure you're on the same page as the rest of us? Literally: I usually have at least half a dozen tabs open and I've been known to get mixed up between threads and even forums.

>>why should some mothers be taxed to pay for others?<<

Because that is how tax works. Everybody has their gripes about how the government divides up our tax money - gripes that cannot be relieved if there is bipartisan support for whatever bit of spending they object to. Welcome to the club.

Cheers,

Tony
Posted by Tony Lavis, Monday, 11 June 2012 12:47:17 AM
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The neo-liberal economist proposition that making single parents more impoverished will force them to work does not resolve questions of suitable jobs, adequate skills, accessible alternative care for children, transport to and from child care and work, let alone the health status of family members. It DOES make it harder to pay rent, utilities, food, clothing,transport, education and health costs. The single biggest predictor of long-term problems is growing up in poverty yet all this bloke can do is suggest increasing poverty in the poorest households with dependent children. A better course of savings would be to address the obscene tax rorts and middle class welfare at the top end ( but that would mean picking on himself ).
Posted by mog, Monday, 11 June 2012 11:27:34 AM
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Good comment from mog, although I think society is justified in discouraging welfare as a way of life. Perhaps long-term contraception should be required for women who have become pregnant while on welfare or with no prospects for supporting a child.

I wonder whether Jardine K. Jardine would take the same attitude to forcing single mothers into prostitution if the shoe were on the other foot. Let's suppose that there is a global depression on and Australia is not immune. Jardine's employer has gone belly up. He has tried very hard to find another job, but there are hundreds of applicants for every vacancy, and the job usually ends up going to a friend or relative of an insider. He doesn't have the capital to go into business for himself, and even if he did, it would just be pouring his savings down a rat hole in the current economic climate.

Eventually, he turns to Centrelink in desperation. The woman behind the counter looks him over and tells him that he doesn't need help because he is young and attractive enough to earn his living as a prostitute. She then gives him the address of a brothel for gay men. Would he take it with thanks or say that a decent society doesn't force people to prostitute themselves to survive or feed their children?
Posted by Divergence, Monday, 11 June 2012 5:31:51 PM
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Cherful
The fact that people have intrinsic value is an argument against, not in favour of one group of people having the unequal privilege of living at the expense of others who are to be locked up if they dare to refuse to submit to being plundered to pay for your opinions.

And the fact that human beings, by living in society, generate many social benefits, does not in any way justify what you are contending for, which is that some people have a right to exploit other people against their will by threatening to lock them in a cage.

If everyone, just by being human and living in society thus generating social benefits, had an equal right to live at the coerced expense of others – obviously society would just collapse wouldn’t it? Yes. Therefore what you’re arguing for is not some kind of higher social principle, but an anti-social principle. Obviously it cannot be an equal right, but only the unequal privilege of a minority backed by force.

Tony, mog, Divergence
That’s why it’s not valid to talk about the issue in terms of “us” and “society”, as if the benefit accrues to society as a whole, rather than to one privileged group at the expense of others (exploitation) – a point you have completely missed.

Your arguments all founder on the fact that you are trying to pretend AS IF the sole parents’ pension is paid from voluntary donations. For example you, and everyone who agrees with your opinion, could pay it all and there would be no issue. But you don’t want to do that, do you? No. You want to force other people to pay even if they disagree with your moral and social opinions, don’t you? Yes.
Posted by Jardine K. Jardine, Monday, 11 June 2012 9:20:51 PM
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So that’s what the issue. It’s not about caring for children per se, since that could be done without the pension by many and various voluntary arrangements. It’s about the fact that you openly prefer violence-based arrangements to bully other people into complying with your moral and sexual opinions – a moral and social approach that you have in common with the Taliban, don’t you? Yes.

So don’t try and squirm out of the fact that the quintessence of your argument is that violence and central planning are somehow morally or pragmatically superior as a basis for social co-operation. They aren’t. They’re worse. If people aren’t to be caged or killed to enforce the policy, then does that mean you think payment should be voluntary? No you don’t think that, do you? Thus you are caught in a double standard that you cannot justify.

This critical fact makes nonsense of both your ethical and your economic arguments.

If it’s true that the pension has the economic benefits you allege, then people would pay for it voluntarily, wouldn’t they – just like you aren’t doing?

And if your theory is true, then
a) Everyone else must be too stupid to know what’s good for them or society. So how do you know? How did you get to be in that unequal, superior and all-knowing position?
b) Why doesn’t the same reasoning apply to all parenting? Shouldn’t all children be regarded as little potential soldiers and all parents be regarded as chattels belonging to the state, in accordance with social Darwinist philosophy?
c) Why doesn’t the same reasoning apply to the provision of all goods and services? Since, according to you, coerced political redistributions of income presumptively confer economic benefits on society, why shouldn’t the tax rate be 100% and all income be thus determined? Please explain the principle by which you distinguish the political redistributions that do, from those that do not confer social benefits. Or rather, admit that are way up an absurd dead end.
Posted by Jardine K. Jardine, Monday, 11 June 2012 9:25:51 PM
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d) Do you notice how the concept of freedom is completely missing from your conceptual framework?
e) Whatever happened to equal rights?
f) Do you notice how you have totally confused consensual with non-consensual relations, and society with the state and vice versa?

In fact you couldn't be in a bigger wallow could you?

Your blind love of the idea of the stronger taking from the weaker has so spell-bound you, that none of you has given any reason why those who want to look after children should not be constrained to do it by voluntary arrangements. By your moral and economic logic, there is no reason why the families who work to pay for themselves *and* the sole parents pension, should not be able to force the pensioners to work in their houses for nothing, on the ground of the alleged social and economic benefits it would create! All else that you have said is just fake moral superiority and fake economic conceits.

Note to Divergence: the function of the vagina is to receive the erect penis; but the same can’t be said of the anus, which is to excrete faeces. Thus your anatomical confusion is as bad as your moral confusion. In politics you favour inequality when you should be favouring equality, and in sexuality you jumble a meaningless equality between incommensurables when you should be respecting difference.
Posted by Jardine K. Jardine, Monday, 11 June 2012 9:29:00 PM
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http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=13717#237446
Tony not to be JKJ's defender here but just to correct you. "He/she" never asserted prostitution, they asserted they can automatically receive welfare by being a women and having child. I am not sure where your prostitution bit came from ?

As to CHERFUL's bit, yes they did say go live in a desert, re-vist the post. They also implied raping etc. Try not paying your taxes, you WILL eventually have armed police handcuff you and take you to jail. You will go to court and you will go to jail (eventually, if you don't pay the fines) and you have a high chance of being raped if prison stat.'s are to believed. All for others enforcing their concept of wealth distribution upon you. Sure, some will spout social responsibility as a justification for that "violence". JKJ seemed to be saying in response that if society puts such a high value on an action, forceful, coerciveness should not be needed, there IS something to be said for that, who exactly is Government supposed to be there for ?

I admire Thoreau (as did Gandhi and Martin Luther King), he didn't pay taxes to support the Mexican War and ended up in jail, I am not so brave to stand up for the causes I believe in that way.
Posted by Valley Guy, Tuesday, 12 June 2012 2:24:45 AM
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Valley Guy,

This is from Jardine's first comment:

<Women have everything they need to obtain child support, and it's right between their legs.>

A Libertarian approach just might work in a frontier society. If you don't like the boss, you can always go over the mountain, clear some land, and start your own farm where you can work for yourself. That is why slavery hung on in the New World long after it was abolished in Europe. But what happens when all the resources already belong to someone? Libertarians are exquisitely sensitive to political coercion, but completely blind to economic coercion. Libertarians still do believe in government when it is defending their property rights, i.e. their ability to coerce people economically.

So far as welfare is concerned, there is a lot wrong with the present system, but in any case, it would be a non-excludable benefit. If some of us pay for it voluntarily, then Jardine shares the benefits (without having to pay for them) of social peace, of not having children so stunted by poverty that they will be unemployable in the future, and of having a safety net for himself if he ever falls on hard times. Voluntary charity is completely inadequate in any case, except under exceptionally favourable conditions, as was discovered in the Great Depression.

It is nice that Jardine would give a single mother a job as his housekeeper, but what happens to the children while she is at work? Does Jardine pay extra for childcare so the family has enough to live on, or will the children be getting up to mischief in his house?

Finally, Jardine, why does it matter what a part evolved for or was designed for, so long as you can use it to make money? Fingers didn't evolve for writing, after all, or voices for singing opera. It is hard to imagine anything more repugnant than being faced with a choice of starving or selling sex to some repulsive stranger, whether he/she is of the same or the opposite sex.
Posted by Divergence, Tuesday, 12 June 2012 12:18:10 PM
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Jardine K Jardine

Your attitude is the same as someone who says,. "well look at all these extra streets in the city that I don't use but my taxes have to pay for them, how unjust and unfair to me."

Also my taxes do go towards paying for all the childcare centres and staff that the government has to pay for and yet I don't use them because my children are grown up. I don't have any objection at all to my taxes being used to help others. Maybe you should be less hostile and judgemental and jealous of what you think could be going to benefit you, instead of your fellow countrymen and women and children.
This seems to be an attitude that has crept into the Australian way of thinking and it is not a very nice one, when you resent the fact that your neighbour might be getting some benefit that you are not.
Tend your own back yard and stop looking jealously over your neighbour's fences.

You say my opinion on giving value to the work of raising children is like the Taliban. On the contrary, The Taliban is one of the cruellest oppressors of women on the planet. They throw bombs and acid in the faces of schoolgirls for going to school. I think your attitude resembles that hostility to women and women's work much more than mine does.
Posted by CHERFUL, Tuesday, 12 June 2012 5:29:13 PM
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Quarantine every single cent so zero can be wasted.

If they wish to waste money, waste theirs, not mine, as I work and pay taxes, so the least they can do is respect my efforts by not wasting it.
Posted by rehctub, Wednesday, 13 June 2012 6:20:31 AM
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