"We do not need more misinformed contributors".

Such as David Hale?

What is poverty? Some arbitrary level set by some bureaucrat, or an Anglican University Lay Chaplain, staff worker for the Australian Student Christian Movement and a member of the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship?

Some people will always be poverty stricken, no matter how much money they get. Others will always manage, no matter how little they get.

Anybody claiming that there is genuine poverty in a welfare state like Australia is no more than a crazy political activist. People are not equal. Those who cannot manage on what they are given by our very generous welfare system will never manage any better with more handouts

The construct of society points to why we will never eradicate poverty.
That society has an ethic for dealing With poverty, but lacks a personal responsibility towards care of the under-dog.

Governments best able to render poverty to its deserving place, “eliminated”, are corrupted by showmanship and self interest, exactly likened to those in the society who politicians represent.

If for example, public housing were built with the honest intention of relieving poverty, then the evidence for such consideration would not be the opposite to what it represents in truth. (Without elaborating).

Christ in his time, was surrounded by thieves and liars, many in influential positions. Even those in trusted positions such as Judas.

Best go to Deut 15:7-11, outside the Gospels for historic advice.

“If among you, one of your brothers should become poor, in any of your towns within your land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be...For the poor you will always have with you in the land. Therefore I command you, ‘You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land.’" (Christ used this for his version of a similar edict).

NB: the trick here is to “lend” what excess you have, and give in that way.
Lending is inclusive, is the sense here. Inviting the poor into the fold, is the most beneficial towards eliminating poverty, as opposed to dealing with it indefinitely.

To lend the poor the money to buy their own accomodation would be a practical application of this, ...and so on.
The situation has become one in the case of public housing, to plunder the poor for profits through vaguely subsidised rents, a situation which assists bugger-all towards eliminating poverty!

Dan

ttbn,
I agree but, we do need to curb the utter incompetence of many senior bureaucrats whose antics only exacerbate the difficulties of very low income people.

individual,

Not sure how we curb any of the nitwits mucking everything up. Look at all the money that has been heaped on the 'aboriginal problem' without any result. As long as we have the same sort of people in politics and the public service as we have now throwing other people's money around nothing will change. Religious do-gooders like this one are no help, either.

Social workers & departments can't afford to get rid of poverty. If they did, they would be the new poverty dwellers. They are too inefficient & incompetent to ever be employed in a real occupation

If we could just get rid of all those social workers, & eliminate the cost of them to the community, there would be more than enough money to lift every no hopper out of their poverty.

Yup! What we just do not need are highly paid executives in this space or middlemen who take an admin cut. Some which are reportedly as high as 85%?

What we need is a completely different paradigm!

I mean, doing what you've always done while expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.

First cab off the rank is the outlawing of paper shuffling profit demandng middlemen! Mortgage brokers, insurance brokers, finance brokers etc-etc and commission sales for all manner of goods and services.

I mean these paper shuffling, profit demanding middlemen effectively double the cost of living or doing business/and the consequent creation of poverty!

Then there's this or that charity, the worse want a direct debit piece of your monthly salary forever.

Then there's price gouged energy!

There was a time when most of this legalised theft would have been unthinkable before we we encouraged to think like "aspirational individuals" Privatised all and sundry without a mandate?

Dismantled as much of cooperative capitalism/co-ops and the community spirit that gave them life?

Turned the third wealthiest nation on the planet and a creditor one at that into a debt laden basket case with record domestic debt and exponentially expanding record foreign debt.

Squandered mining booms one and two for very short term political outcomes at the expense of the national interest and again like most of the political decisions made in this country, never ever with a bona fide mandate!

Our political servants seem to believe they were elected to rule, as opposed to serving! Conequently the term nuclear power is a power source whose name cannot be mentioned!

Or fatously demeaned by folks whose actual knowlege of the technology could be written on the back of a postage stamp using a crowbar or a longer ponocio's nose, dipped in tar for a pen!

Ignoring as they always do, the central role of price gouged energy toward the creation of endemic generational poverty! TBC.
Alan B.

I find ttbn has beaten me to the obvious four word response, and it's very rare that we ever concur!

Poverty is a very important issue. But it's not just about income; it's about access to resources. We need to eliminate the situation where a lack of resources prevents people from fully participating in society. And even more urgently, we need to eliminate the poverty trap, which is where meeting people's immediate needs is so much of a problem that it prevents long term issues from being addressed.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Hasbeen,
How many people have to die from lack of intervention before you abandon the Yes Minister view of social workers?

Before we can end poverty we need to end those factors central to its creation,i.e., the political animal/enthusiast! And the way we elect political candidates!

We need to deal,out the backroom power brokers and dirty deals done in the dead of night!

To that end we need overdue electoral reform and primaries that see just two final candidates standing and contesting this or that seat a opposed to a minor persentage preselecting for the vox populi!

Or worse, a high profile "yes man" party hack, parachuted in to keep the elected dictators who rule us, entrenched on the treasury benches.

Imagine if there were no preference that could then be swapped, thanks to primaries that ended them? And with that event, the disappearance of irrelevant, roadblock minor parties! Or candidates getting in with as little as 3% of the popular vote!

I will conclude later with a recipe that ends poverty everywhere we can apply the self-evident cure.

All that prevents it are the puppet politicians who serve their political masters and elected dictators!

Where this not so, we wouldn't have poverty, bloodbaths and war fought over deminishing resources,i.e, arable land and water. TBC
Alan B.

Ending povery does not start wih those with the least getting less/giving more, Dan!

It starts with a source of energy the most impoverished can afford!

And endless affordable potable water, cost-effective enough for broad-scale irrigation on food and fibre crops!

And those two are MSR thorium and power prices as low as 1.98 cents PKWH. And new space age desalination.

And those community-owned and operated power co-ops used to power up also community-owned and operated deionisation dialysis desalination co-ops. And endless repeated everywhere we can, starting here at home with government-funded and facilitated community co-ops.

On the clear understanding that these investments return 2.5 dollars for every one committed, in co-op creation. That then as income earning entities go on to pay generous salaries and create superior conditions, plus pay a fair share of a common tax burden as an unavoidable 15% flat tax.

And given that is the paradigm we choose to adopt, only limited by population numbers and the missing political will.

I mean the very next boom is to be the food boom. the co-op model examplified can also be used to replace this or that import and to a large extentent produce and deliver cheaper than the import, regardless of the source!

And given my prefered energy source. Nuclear waste or thorium burning MSRs and cooperative capitalism, any manufactured goods!

Let's not give demeaning handouts to the impoverished, let's instead put them into productive work in industries they have some pride and skin in! And no industry one can imagine is neccesarily excluded. Vehicles, metals smelting seawater to fuel production, graphene highways etc-etc.
Alan B.

Caution Alan B, Foxy, Mr opinion & Paul1405 et al will gang up on you for denigrating all these valuable Public Servants who studied so hard for their BA to get a career in making life difficult for decent folk.

In Piketty, all societies have "inequality regimes" and justifying narratives.

His point is, inequality briefly got better, over 1910-1980, and now it is indisputably getting worse. Politics has no answers to this.

In the worst examples of poverty, small gifts to the village of an ox, a plough, a water well with a windmill pump, all managed by the industrious women folk, saw an almost miraculous change.

If an also donated bicycle or two were added with carrier racks, their excess production could be carried to market to create a cash flow they could also use to buy a few solar panels, a sewing machine and a washing machine or two. And a slow and gradual improvement in their economic lot!

To two or three generations later a transformed middle-class society/trading nation, with schools, hospitals/a domestic manufacturing base, etc.

Not for nothing is it writ large from little things, big things grow?

Two-thirds of the worlds households have no washing machine/condemns the womenfolk to dawn to dusk lives of endless servitude/endemic, endless, generational poverty!

Similarly, in so called advanced societies, where the "aspirational individual" is preferenced at the expense of community spirit?

We create postcode poverty traps/generational poverty by systematically concentrating too much of our finite wealth in too few hands!

And with that paradigm and the robber barons it created, ushered in the subsequent Great Deression!

Given that is the destructive paradigm in play/compounded by a world wide pandemic, heading for more of the same, aided and abetted by dithering, do SFA, populist pollies and their expensive short-termism, where both ends are played against the middle!

Those ends (tools, fools, hasbeens) encouraged to believe, if things are improved for the great unwashed, it'll be at their expense! When if fact, the very opposite is the truth!

If you want to change your lives and your world my friends? It needs to start with the only thing you have absolute control over. The bogus, implanted, inculcated, thoughts you care to entertain in your heads and with them, your every erroneous attitude and fallacious belief!

And with that change, enable a change at the ballot box that renews anew community spirit and the missing cooperative capitalism!

After all, we're all in this together, for all time!
Alan B.

In Piketty, all societies have "inequality regimes" and justifying narratives.

Steve S.

Yes, but there’s more to that...

The calamity for Australian workers was Keating/Hawke years.
Away went Australian jobs to Asia with little regard for consequences.
The changes were too quick for appropriate adjustments towards a service industry economy, the only alternative to a collapse of manufacturing.

High immigration levels maintained pressure on wage growth, a deliberate policy.
John Howard’s antagonistic view of workers and their trade Union affiliations.

A huge capital drain from labour intensive industries directed towards real estate With its boom and bust outcomes continued to drag down workers, saddling them with historic levels of debt.

Pikettys’ solutions will not be popular on these pages, but hold good merit.

Dan

The business of poverty- Yes charity organizations seem to rely on the disadvantaged- and create a cycle of entrenched disadvantage. Not that charity workers don't have some sense of empathy with disadvantaged- but empathy can lead to a victimized dependency.

Also as mentioned by the author- in the two sided market the organizations focus on the victim's issues fail to recognize the entrenched society structures such as forced mass competition and it's complicity in unemployment, powerlessness and poverty.

In fact it seems that most people are in a sense one step away from poverty- most people aren't independently self sufficient- and are very vulnerable to the arbitrary natures of governments, markets and more recently political correctness

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty

Piketty appears to be relatively intelligent but seems to be overly influenced by Trotskism.

The solution is cooperative capitalism comrade. And the removal of the political potato heads who oppose and dismantle it on every level.

The Hawke/Keating years were disastrous, inasmuch they included the start of dismantling of our manufacturing base and the last of the people's politicians removed and replaced by career pollies working against the true national interest and for powerful vested interest.
(R.M. and co?)

Also manifesting in the Public servant class which went from helpful to pedantic and ridgly unhelpful! As the first and primary goal became, I believe, the expansion of personal empires and control.

I mean the disposable masks supplied to health workers in most cases are not a good seal.

And when that was proven for all to see along with the fact that an unapproved here but approved in the UK an the US reuseable respirator povided both better protection, 99.9%! The whistleblower punished?

The reusuable, more cost-effective over time, as well, was money well spent and money well saved by eliminating/overriding/willfully disobeying, the penny-wise pound-foolish paradigm the pervades the public service and our politial circles.

Our ability to waste public money in pursuit of political outcomes and personal fiefdoms is legendary, and in no small measure contributes to the growing chasm between the diminishing haves and the expanding have nots; and endemic generational poverty.

I mean the one branch of government we just do not need, state governments, costs us more than 70+ billion P.A. Just for the perverse pleasure of having their duplication and middleman style of, staggering from crisis to crisis, often corrupt, government.

That 70+ annual billions would be better spent on developing various co-ops that make all manner of stuff! That effectively replace imports and expand into niche export markets!

Don't give the poor minuscule handouts that entrench the problem but put them to work and concequently, lift us all higher up the social-economic ladder! There are just no downsides here for anyone save the control freaks and empire-building bureaucrats!
Alan B.

The secret to eliminating poverty is to put everyone who can, to work.
No ifs, no buts, no procrastination - on either side - just demand this as the price for participation in communal society.

Sure, there are better ways of employing people and their individual talents - while maintaining their individual integrity and human rights - and better industries and commerce to develop, towards national security and self-sufficiency and less reliance on global markets, as well as maintaining greater environmental integrity and resilience and bio-dynamic-security.

No more forests destroyed or farmlands violated or minorities bullied.
Manageable immigration in the interest of global peace and security.

No-one should borrow more than they can afford to repay; limits placed on credit card use and use of the buy-now-pay-later industry; and people assisted moderately to live within their means.

Work hard, study hard, make good choices, and take pride in belonging to the best Nation on Earth.

Flat tax perhaps, affordable high-quality public services available to all, and responsible government living within national means.

Want something? Earn it - and don't count on handouts.
No man is an island.

Saltpetre

Well here is the question you forgot to mention: who changed the situation of your tidy outline from what it was, (as you well described), to the mess Australia represents today; so far away from anything sustainable but increasing poverty of the nation, cursed with inequalities which the blinded nation has been led to believe are “ Only Black Lives Matter” and the non urgency of gay rights and gay marriage to be given an unequal share of attention and resources better destined towards addressing real poverty and GENUINE inequality.

Dan

Alan B

We waltz to the same tune on this subject.
An urgent overhaul of Local Government is more than urgent.

This is the community level. And the level where the community standing on the bottom rung of the ladder looking upwards, spot immediately the posterior of Real Estate agents land land developers using a branch of a Democratic Governance to feather their own nests and assist in personal profiteering in the name of the community they pretend to serve!

Local a government, like its bigger brothers, have lost track of an inclusive society. We’ve seen this at work in their lack of oversight of aged care, their disregard of the welfare needs of communities in desperate need of social housing, and the abysmal quality and unaffordable cost of it when and if it appears at all.

The root and branch restructuring of Australia should begin by disengaging the housing “market” from one of a stampede for profit, to one of primary importance towards affordable and long term dwelling for families in particular. This a priority before jobs.

Dan

A lot of poverty is caused by the over-privileged syphoning resources before they reach the needy !

Poverty is comparative and if there are to be rich, there must be poor.
The trick is calibrating these conflicting greeds, then implementing efficiently.
David was clear about what he believes we don’t need, but my hope that this would then lead to what we do need was unmet.

The poverty in mentality is the critical one !