Tackling poverty or helping the poor has been a powerful political argument for those people who want to increase government spending and tax. They are the ones who want to tell people what to do, therefore obtain a sense of power. Power is really what they are after. Our society has produced too many experts who are given the power to order people around. They treat people like children thus have very strong paternalistic mentality. Unfortunately, they know less than one percent of the society as Thomas Sowell from Hoover Institutes said.

Tackling poverty is such a intangible topic. Who are in poverty? It is a mobile society. People who are poor today may not be poor tomorrow. They come out of poverty by working hard and taking their own responsibility, rather than being fed. If there is an increase of people in poverty, it is because they have been encouraged to stay out of the workplace by our welfare system. In addition, the minimum wage policy and other red taps have prevented people from creating jobs.

It is blind for those people who compare Australia with European countries. Europe is in recession, thanks to it's generous welfare system and big government. Do we want to get down to this dead end? Let people decide what to do and not to be governed by experts and elites.

Our public servants are so bl00dy incompetent that we should sack the lot of them.

I was once the "development coordinator" of a local sports club. We had a picnic race track, donated by a large landholder years before, in rather dilapidated condition, along with a horse & pony club, a soccer club, a little athletics club & a cricket club using the same 150 acres.

We had been given an old railway house, which we had transported & set up as a club house, canteen & toilet area, & were doing a lot of other work.

I was given 4 men with community service orders to do some of this work. The only problem, I would turn up, the men would turn up, but the public servant in charge of them would not.

I could not tell these men to do anything, that was the bureaucrats job. No bureaucrat, & they sat on their butts as community service.

That woman, who turned up for only one in 6 appointments was still in the job 2 years later, despite numerous complaints.

We gave up on help, & did it ourselves, & public servants wonder why they get no support from the public when sacked.

Hasbeen, that question of uninsured & unregistered cars.
Saw an episode tonight of Police Interceptors and they said one in
twenty cars are uninsured and or have their MOT out of date.

Cheers

Our society has produced too many experts who are given the power to order people around.

Power Corrupts

Power attracts the corruptible

Some pigs are more equal than others

Personally I have contempt for any human with uncontrolled authority because they are invariably little tin gods & inevitably corrupt. Rather than attempt to put band-aids on the broken democratic political model, I suggest anarchy would be a viable alternative. If 'mqnagement' is deemed necessary, it could be achieved by way of a voluntary / unpaid panel of people, none of whom have individual power, appointed for a strictly limited time (eg 12 months) with extremely robust checks & balances including immediate capital punishment for consorting with lawyers / developers / lobbyists.

Tackling lack of affordability of appropriate secure housing would be a start to tackling poverty. If less welfare money was spent on "housing support workers" and service providers and more money put into affordable housing especially accessibility to low cost land instead of the current selloff to legal migrants there would be less demands for high welfare handouts. Housing support agencies need to stop asking for more money for funding bon productive service providers and start asking for more solutions to the housing crisis

Molly,

I haven't read what the others said but I got 0.2% of the budget when I did the calculations a few months back but maybe I was using a larger figure as I was using $1.55T on Stephen Koukoulas's say so rather than the current I think $1.52T

Either way its less than chicken feed. I'd really like to know who Gillard's current economic advisors are.