<Aren't those convinced opportunity and a fair go are somehow contingent on obligatory <income redistribution and free health care, part of the problem?

Gee there are some real haters of our health care system out there.

Our health care system is not "free" and any one who says that is a liar. It is in part funded through taxation and there is already a co-payment system in place for many health care services.

Bleating hearts about 'income redistribution', they are the ones who avoid paying taxes and leave the heavy lifting to the wage and salary earner.

Well, given we currently shell out around 70 billions per as middle class welfare, rolling all that back would make all the current cuts to REAL welfare unnecessary.
With limited and shrinking funds, we really do need to fund real need, rather than real greed!
Current welfare is around 50 billions, the structural deficit is around 40 billions, and welfare for the rich; negative gearing, tax breaks on super super, family trusts, and health care insurance rebates, etc/etc, before the PM's PPL, is around 70 billions!
Do the sums, it's not rocket science!
Welfare for the rich, 70 billions more or less, structural deficit, 40 billions more or less.
End all forms of (vote buying) middle class welfare, and hey presto, no more structural deficit, and a 30 billion annual surplus!
What did we say we needed for a fully funded NDIS? 11 billion PA?
How can that be more important than entirely unearned and undeserved, middle class welfare?
I don't know who are the real leaners here, except, I just don't think it's disabled people, who'd give up all their entitlements tomorrow, for a real job and the self esteem of being able to pay their own way!
In almost all cases, only employer disability discrimination prevents that! Can there be another reason?
I mean and for heaven's sake, even a blind person, or someone permanently incarcerated in a wheel chair, could answer a phone, or man a computer terminal/call centre?
Ditto most young folk or retirees?
And given the pension is little more than $5-6.00 an hour, be pleased to do it for $15-20.00 an hour!?
Outsourcing may save a few dollars, but I'll warrant being spoken to in your own language, and with an Aussie accent, would produce more than enough additional custom, to offset, any minor additional cost!?
As would being able to access a PR service, out of normal business hours!
Rhrosty.

Rhosty,
The current single pension with various allowances is now 840 odd dollars per fortnight. This equates to something over %10 per hour.

David.

Mr Abbott does himself no favours by encouraging women to offload their kids into factories and paying the mothers top dollar to return to work. Far better to get them to stay and home and take up mothering responsibilities for a few years. It also seems crazy that the only ones not getting free health care are those who already pay medicare and private insurance. Populace policies ruining an already me me me generation.

Yes, it certainly is the Age of Entitlement.

I could add a few more 'entitlement whiners' to the list;

Those politicians who expect workers to negotiate one to one with their employers but are quite happy to have their salaries determined by a tribunal, the parents who send their children to taxpayer-subsidised private schools, the farmers who are exempt from the laissez-faire policies and budget cuts of the current government, the rentier class, the media oligarchs, the corporations and plutocrats who pay little or no tax because they're able to use techniques unavailable to other taxpayers, and finally, the parasitic religious institutions which, scandalously, are still tax-exempt.

mac

' the parents who send their children to taxpayer-subsidised private schools'

your bigotry is showing. It costs far more of the tax payers money for state schools which produce worse results.

Mark Christenson,

you say that there is an unhealthy and dangerous “entitlement mentality” in our nation, and you mean the regular people who have been complaining at recent talk about cuts to Medicare, Pensions, Newstart among other things.

Well, guess what Mark? The issue you talk about has already cost our nation dearly since we have ignored it and worse even, we have dismissed its very existence from out of our thoughts and even our potential thoughts.

That is, the massive problem our nation faces today where millions of “lower caste” type workers and citizens have become heavily reliant on welfare and sometimes even permanently, which in fact did arise DIRECTLY as a result of the historical and extreme restructuring of not just our economy and work industries but also ALL other western nations worldwide – that change was our nation’s almost 100% shift of ALL our traditional low skill and manufacture jobs [which used to employ the bulk of those classes now on welfare]from being our lower class industries to now being in Asian labour oppressive and rights violating economies over seas.

That FACT regardless whether our leaders and businesses claim innocence and their impotence in face of world market forces, SHOULD NOT EVER be ignored or forgotten as the history to the problem tells much about the actual and likely mentality of those who now get branded “lazy bludgers”.

When you say that the general “reluctance to confront this moral dimension betrays a failure of imagination, one that's likely to cost the government dearly” I know you mean to indicate the masses on welfare today [same people who have had their traditional work stolen away and given no hint of substitute] need to be cut off and somehow put to use.

However, surely the nation as whole should take some responsibility to resettle those classes who lost out in world market forces into other jobs and industry? Afterall it is a world wide crisis, and when we have droughts or other economic disasters our government usually provides assistance [i.e. welfare].
What’s the diff?

Mark,

you claim that one problem for the west’s apparent “entitlement mentality” is the long lived “Utopian delusion that knowledge – revealed by God or plain old empirical – can and will, someday, liberate us of the exquisite demands of existence” as if this is somehow both a farce and impossible.
BUT I remind you and others to RECALL the average scenario that was the average western nation [UK, Aus, North west Europe, USA] just 50-60 ago just after WWII and the triumph of liberty over slavery [at least in the western universe] . . . . .
. . . What can one see in that lost world that was and should never have gone?

I see [Aus as e.g.] a moderate size nation of enough wealth for all and which had jobs and careers in abundance [this was of course before we sold ALL manufacture jobs to cheap labour markets for the profit and pleasure of the business elite in our nation] where the rights of workers from cleaners to judges had improved to near utopian levels [e.g. unions meant workers had some sway over the rich] and where the lower price of land meant even a supermarket shelf packer could buy a home and raise family.
I call this something close to a utopia, at least much closer than anything else ever in history.

WHAT HAPPENED? Where did that utopia disappear to? Also, is this perhaps a causing factor in the modern phenomena of mass unemploym ent being referred to as “entitlement” thinking and bludgery?

Geeze people,
take a breather of context and reality and ask yourself this:

. . . What mad lunatics would have wanted to go from the Utopia of 50 years past to now being called a scum bag bludger for having no place in the job market and having to survive on 200-300 dollars a week? Fascinatingl

Well, the choice is yours, folks.

Rabbit on incessantly about entitlement and keep on cutting and slashing and burning and massacring the social contract.

Then poverty, destitution and mass resentment of the rich escalates. There are no more places left to transport our destitute masses for desperately stealing loaves of bread, so we're stuck with them.

Hark, the sound of tumbrils and revolution.

Look, for goodness sake. This is not about philosophy and entitlement. It's about cause and effect and history. When the social contract is broken, society falls apart.

And take a look at the real history of the welfare state in the West. It was not the socialist and labour parties that initiated it (in fact, they were against it, believing it to be a cop-out); it was the conservative parties, who knew the game was up. They had to start looking after the people on whose destitution and poverty their wealth depended, or face the consequences of runaway socialism - and possibly their heads on spikes along the castle walls.

All,

lastly and I think most telling, most outrageous and most in need of recognition is –

. . . the mentality of “entitlement” amongst the privelliged sectors of society is the real and actual problem.
Not only does the classes of owners and leaders I note here have the most to either gain or lose in any given climate of industry, business, worker rights and their obligations therein, making it an obvious [yet somehow history and the common memory of it managed to not notice or maybe they ignored it away] likelihood that when post WWII unions and worker rights [as well as other rights movements] began to get more say and power and control over wages, process and thus the owner classes returns SUDDENLY and MYSTERIOUSLY [not] the privelleged owner classes allowed or submitted to global forces of extreme greed and selfishness, when they LET the businesses of our country take part in the global panic and push to have all the jobs of the lower skill and manufacture industries [commonly employing the bulk of the Aussie workers, the same workers who now threatened their business return and profits] taken away from Australian manual workers and given to the third world, oppressed and inhumane worker markets springing up after 1960 which were distastefully named “Tiger Economies” and “Miracles”.

I mean clearly people, the blue collar classes did not have the power to stop the owners and employers [whom they had recently rattled with minimum wage demands etc] and most certainly they were not consulted nor even compensated in any way such as massive re-education andn retraining to create new industries and a place for the nations traditional manual workers. Instead the workers were simply just left alone and let rot away into the phenomenon we see today of mass unemployment, addiction and mental illness.

... continued . . .

The very thought that common men of western free nations believed they risked life in WWII where millions died for liberty, freedom and decency for all people makes me sad and outraged together when I think how only 10-20 years after WWII the business owner and leaders of western nations who boasted of liberty over slavery made the conscious CHOICE to make those extremely massive and also inhumane changes to their nation’s economy and job/industry set up, which they did when CHOOSING to allow their own manual working citizens [a class that comprised most of the WWII fodder] lose their jobs and livelihood totally and allowing their businesses to employ the human rights abusing economies of emerging Asia.

The ones who made it home alive even managed to reap some rewards for the brave struggle when they found themselves soon after coming home from war with abundance of jobs and thus relative ease in purchasing a family home to raise kids. Isn't this what the war was about?

Obvously the owners and leaders of our nations duped the poor fools into fighting for a world which is not concerned to have slaves like centuries ago and fighting not for their own lives and desires for freedom and equalityl, but rather they died for the greed of the wealthy owner classes to maximise profits by overcoming the nuisance that was after WWII being in form of worker rights and wage rises etc, which they achieved by taking those nuisance workers out of the equation - which was achieved by giving ALL their jobs to slave labour Asian markets.

I charge that it is not the poor workers who were affected to extent that today their descendants are the "welfare bludgers" being hounded and mocked of late, BUT rather it is the elite, wealthy or owners of property and business . . .who are the ACTUWL brats who have the mentality they deserve much that is not fairly theirs [legal or not].

We aren't that far off how "masters" of old Europe felt that human beings were their own property.

Killarney,

"and possibly their heads on spikes along the castle walls."

Yes, indeed, social democracy has probably saved many plutocrats ( and their money) from the anger of the 'lower orders', and yet they still attempt to sabotage the system, blind greed perhaps?