LEGO,

The poor actually form a highly diverse group. Many poor people work full-time at unskilled jobs that will never pay much - domestic cleaners, dishwashers, sweatshop labourers and so on. Many live in areas of chronic unemployment such as depressed rural regions or decaying urban neighbourhoods where industries are in decline. Many have only recently become poor, and most don't stay poor for long. Each year, about one-third of the nation's poor families manage to climb out of poverty, only to be replaced by newcomers. And of course some of the poor form an underclass who are trapped in long-term poverty.

Some people believe that the poor are in poverty because they are "idle" and prefer to live on "handouts." This view is fervently held even by people who don't know poor people, and have never tried to raise a family on welfare payments, and haven't the faintest idea what poverty is really like. Opinion polls repeatedly show large sections of the population favouring cuts in welfare spending, or favouring plans to "make welfare recipients go to work."

These attitudes bear little relationship to reality. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics more than 60 percent of welfare recipients are children, aged people, disabled. Most of the rest are mothers with young children, and less than 3 percent are able-bodied men, most of them unskilled workers in areas of high unemployment.

Other myths abound - that welfare recipients are mostly foreigners or black - (nearly two-thirds are locals and white): that they have many children (most have two or fewer) and that they are on welfare
indefinitely (most receive it for less than two years) and that welfare is a terrible burden on the taxpayer. Welfare represents 2 percent on the federal budget.

There are few complaints however, about how the country pays out far more in "handouts" to the nonpoor than the poor. This fact generally escapes attention because the benefits take the form of hidden subsidies or tax deductions rather than the direct form of cash payments.

LEXI.

Every society over 200 people has divided themselves up into “classes”, this is because in complex societies, skill specialization requiring different levels of intelligence and different types of intelligence (talents) creates different social standings. Generally speaking, people with high intelligence are upwardly mobile while people with low intelligence are downwardly mobile.

Your premise that one third of people from the disadvantaged class are upwardly mobile could well be true. Such people would be more intelligent than able bodied people who remain in the disadvantaged class.

As a former member of the disadvantaged class, whose family found itself impoverished by circumstances, I know that there are people in the disadvantaged class who are upwardly mobile. However, I was also aware that there are very large numbers of people with low intelligence and personality disorders who have no intention of working at all. Some of these people were once my friends, and some of them are my relatives. My niece has had four children by her former husband, and two by her husbands son (a product of a previous liaison.) Every one of them is on the dole.

For you to imply that poor people are all desperately looking for work, and that dole bludgers are a figment of the imagination, makes me wonder what sort of sheltered existence you were raised in. My direct observations from living in a Housing Commission block of flats with 84 units that had a very high proportion of healthy young dole bludgers who went surfing every day, completely contradicts your preconceived notions of what reality ought to be. And there are just too many people like myself who have seen first hand that large numbers of dole bludgers do exist, for you to do anything other than influence people like yourself who have a social conscience but who have no idea what is happening down the wrong end of town.

Finally, your premise that foreigners are not the primary welfare recipients can easily be dispelled by the simple expedient of walking into the Parramatta Social Security office next Monday and playing “spot the Aussie.”