daggett comments suggest that I had done it easy, or reached a situation where it was easy?.

If I had to answer yes or no to the idea that life was “easy” for me and my industry, I would have to answer no.

I have no problem with a “welfare system”, but the attitude is that it should provide you with more than some of us in the work force, is blatantly unfair.
Where I live, access to the welfare system is extremely limited

This means we have to use” after tax” income to make up the difference.

I don’t see why I should offer working conditions and wages based on a protected standard when my industry has to base this on the world market situation, such as having an income that is derived from selling to the Chinese factory workers.

It seems you are saying that you deserve more, regardless, as your comment about getting more back from the welfare than you pay in taxes implies

Questions;

How will the govt survive if we all had that attitude?

Who pays for it?

Should we have differing standards for Australian citizens?
?

Yes, it can be different trying to get a job as you get older, and I am much older that you and did not have the benefit of an 80% govt subsidised tertiary education.

Another benefit not available to me, but to you.

Maybe this is the problem with our tax system; huge sections of the community are getting protection from the world market, as well as other benefits by regulation.
The cost of this has to be payed for, and as you cannot subsidise yourself, it has to be those that don’t get the benefits.

In summery, I have no problem with a welfare system, and “breaks’ for the lower income and disadvantaged people in our community, “as long as it is the same for to all of us”

Quote;
“"Trying to tax or regulate ourselves into prosperity, is like standing in a bucket and trying to lift yourself off the ground"

dunart,

No, I was not suggesting that you had done it easy. What I wrote seems to have gone completely over your head. I chose to relay a small part of my own life experience in order to make a point about what Peter Saunders wants to do to the poorest people in our community. Instead of addressing the points I made, you chose to ridicule me personally, without even having properly understood what I had written.

For example I wrote: "unless you have been in the situation, where you have put your heart and soul into something, to the exclusion of almost everything else, for two years, and got nothing for it, and had this happen not once, but several times in your life ..." How you could have read that and concluded that I had given up after 'only two years' escapes me. Possibly you have had it worse than me, but how you can know that is also a mystery.

In any case, that is beside the point. Of course there will almost always be people worse off in the world, but I don't see why that should be used to justify injustice being inflicted against people in this country.

When Australia was first deregulated in the 1980's all the neo-liberal economists dismissed the commonsense concerns that this would threaten the living standards of ordinary workers, saying that this would leave to untold prosperity and wealth for everybody.

Now we learn that what was told to us was the rubbish we always suspected it was. Ordinary Australian workers cannot possibly compete with workers earning only a few dollars a day, so much of our manufacturing industry has been exported to China.

There is no simple answer to this problem, but it is obscene that those already on multi-million dollar incomes, which are many times that received by the lowest paid in Australia, wish to throw those workers on the scrap heap by exploiting even more poorly paid workers in third world countries.

(Out of space again #@!!@#. Will have to use personal pages in future.)

I agree with Peter that getting people off welfare and into work is fairer on the claimants themselves - I have been a claimant in my recent pass. The budget helps single parents to plan for the future.

I applaud Costello's efforts to encourage single parents to maintain employability. His consideration to timing with school age (6 years) is a very compassionate initiative. When I was a single parent I could only benefit from government help and training support to continue my career. After all my child will leave home one day and I will be better prepared vocationally to enter the workforce full time.

A friend of mine, a single parent, has just experienced a huge drop in her welfare income because both her children recently left home. As a result she could no longer afford to pay the rent and was forced into a tent. She is in her mid 40s and suffered health problems due to her homeless status. I agreed to help her out with accommodation until she can rent her own. This crisis pushed her to focus hard on her job search. If the government had encouraged her to prepare for the inevitable maturation of her children she would not be suffering now. She would have maintained some earlier skills and workplace experience.

It's a very sensible and compassionate initiative.

silversurfer,

Whilst deprivation of income can be the spur for some to lift themselves up by their bootstraps, it doesn't always work that way. Besides, many others may not be so lucky as to have a friend with a spare room, and, instead, become homeless, because they can't afford rents which have been artificially inflated to suit the needs of property speculators.

The fact is that unemployment statistics lie because anyone who works for more than one hour is deemed to be employed, so there are not enough jobs to go around, and even many of those on offer are demeaning, lowly paid, insecure, often extremely physically strenuous, and often not even socially productive. Examples include telemarketing, junk mail delivery, standing in the streets wearing billboards, fruit picking and various casual unskilled occupations where you are regularly paid for well under 8 hours work at a time.

The measures being enacted by Peter Costello will only cause even greater hardship for the majority and serve to drive more and more people to accept sub-standard working conditions.

I suggest you read Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed" (http://www.nickelanddimed.net). This describes how life changed in the US after similarly "sensible and compassionate" measures were enacted by Bill Clinton. Just one of many examples was that domestic cleaners would often continue working even after having sustained injuries at work, so desperate were they to hold on their jobs. Those workers often could not afford their own accommodation, and lived in their cars.

Instead, the Government should be using the budget surplus to meet the urgent environmental and infrastructure needs of this country. This is what President Franklin Roosevelt did in the 1930's when he employed millions of previously unemployed Americans, although with funds raised through loans under the "New Deal" program. Peter Saunders' co-thinkers of the time no doubt loudly objected that it cost the taxpayers too much, however few would argue that the US economy was not massively improved as a result, and even Colin Powell and the late Ronald Reagan were grateful to Roosevelt for having lifted their fathers out of poverty.

Daggett,a lot of poverty in the US is a direct result of the trillions of dollars they spend on weapons due to the arms race.They have kept the world free of a major conflict for 60 yrs.We on the other hand can spend our surplus on social security instead of developing a massive defence system.
No one is removing social security,we just ask that those who take it contribute something back to the slaves who support them.

Arjay,

There's a grain of truth in what you wrote. If the United States had not dropped more bombs on Indo-China than were dropped in WW2 and similarly devastated Korea around 15 years earlier, had not funded death squad regimes in Latin America throughout the 70's and 80's and had not started the recent war in Iraq, there may well have been more money to spend on worthwhile projects at home that would have helped its poor. However, it is debatable whether this has kept the world free of a major conflict.

On the one hand you object to paying taxes to support those who are now on welfare, but have nothing to say about all the other inefficiencies in our economy that I mentioned. For, example do you seriously think that we don't all ultimately bear the cost of advertising, including telemarketing and junk mail?

And what about the windfall gains given to property speculators, which have caused an essential commodity, shelter, which used to be affordable by ordinary families on single incomes to go beyond the reach of even double income middle-class families today? The whole community has paid the cost of this.

As I implied earlier, Roosevelt proved that it is possible for the Govenment to give unemployed people dignified occupations that would be of benefit to the whole of society.

It may mean that today's high income earners would have to pay a little more tax, but all of us, and our children, would get so much more back in return.

If this were done, and if our Government were prepared to do what the private sector has shown itself to be incapable of doing, that is to set up a program to gainfully employ people with disabilities, then the numbers of welfare recipients would be vastly reduced.

What is wrong with that?