Rene,

This is not “the semantics of experts” but a glaring and basic error that has caused you to magnify the inflation rate you’re talking about by a factor of 10.

My guess is you’re adding the percentage increases in the CPI components over the quarters to get the “total” CPI increase excluding recreation and household goods. Ie price increases over this period were: food 3.2%, tobacco & alcohol 6%, clothing & footwear -2.5%, housing 6.3%, health 5.1%, transport 5.6%, communication 2.2%, education 7.8%, others 4.6%, therefore

total = 3.2 + 6 - 2.5 + 6.3 + 5.1 + 5.6 + 2.2 + 7.8 + 4.6 = 38.3%.

If so, that’s nonsense. You can't sum the percentage changes in the CPI's components like that to get the change in the total. If you spend half your income on rent and half on food, and your rent increases by 5% while food prices rise by 10%, your cost of living has risen by 7.5%, not 15%

It was you, not me, who first demanded that we “look carefully at what is measured in CPI”

As one who has lived through the 30 year period, during which Peter Saunders tells us Australians have become "more than twice as prosperous" ("Australia's Welfare Habit" p5), I think that his figures have to be wrong.

It is well understood that natural disasters and traffic accidents all 'add' to our prosperity as measured by the GDP upon which Peter Saunders bases his claims (and I would add that all the extra red tape which has been added in the last generation and which has made it impossible for anyone without good bookkeeping skills to run their own business would also have 'added' to our prosperity as measured by the GDP). It is for these reasons that Simon Kuznets, the originator of the GDP warned in 1934 against the GDP being used in precisely the way that it is being used by Peter Saunders today.

If, as John Wicks of the SSVDP says (and my experience bears this out), working class families can no longer afford holidays, or if it now requires two incomes, instead of one, to finance a mortgage, we must have (or at least many of us must have) gone backwards in these years, contrary to Peter Saunders' claims.

The GDP does not seem take into account that so much more is necessary for people to get along than what was necessary 30 years ago. For example, almost every adult needs their own car, together with insurance et al. Back then one car per family was easily adequate.

Today, almost no-one can get a decent white collar job without a reasonably current University degree, for which we all have to pay dearly for these days, thanks to the Howard Government's education 'reforms'. Then a HSC, or, sometimes, even year 10, was sufficient. The increase in the price of land has made the ability to grow your own food a luxury, whereas back in the 60's many urban working class people had ample land on which to grow their own fruit and veges. These are just a few of the more obvious examples which come to mind.

(toBeContinued)

(Continued from earlier post)

Personally speaking, for all the wonders of modern technology, the Internet, and for all the cheap gizmos which would have been much more costly two or three decades ago, I felt much more prosperous and economically secure and carefree as an unskilled worker back in the late 1970's than I do today also as an unskilled worker (albeit with a University degree which is of little practical use) today. It seemed that I had much more disposable income then that I have today, so I would gladly go back to that situation if I could.

If all of the factors which affect the true quality of life were properly taken into account (and that is not even taking into account the terrible current degradation of our environment and our scandalously wasteful consumption of non-renewable natural resources), then I think it can be shown that the GDP figures and wage figures, even (supposedly) adjusted for inflation, upon which Peter Saunders' bases his claims, are a seriously flawed measure of prosperity.

The attempt by the Society of St Vincent de Paul to try to argue its essentially correct case, based fundamentally on these same flawed figures, although with the best of intentions, seems to have been a serious mistake on their part.

I think charities should all do us a favour and close their doors. The wider community must then take responsibility for the problems that are associated with living in a democratic society. Assisting the poor should be a matter of course. The benifits: you take away the power that charities hold; you get rid of the costly bureaucracy associated with the running of charities; and you free up all those volunteers to go and get paid employment so they can contribute to the tax pool to help build our nation - and your letter box won't have half a processed forest in it every day. But that is too efficient and would take away the power bases of corporations like St. Vinnies and churches etc. Horror of horrors - certain food chains would miss out on all that free advertising, but then we could get cheaper burgers because they would not require their PR teams to tell the world how charitable they are when they give a zillionth of their earnings away to help some hospice or something. Oprah Winfrey and her new age code of self-indulgence would be out of a job as we see that not everyone in the world can pull themselves up by the bootstraps and walk among the stars. Some, through no fault of their own, end up under trains.
The Australian Government - giving charities a reason to exist. Okay all you statisticians tell us how much it costs for the wider community to fund and run all these charities compared to simply drawing from a tax base and fixing the problems ourselves. Ooops that sounds a little too like socialism.
But then again who can honestly say that church, corporations and state are separate? Mussolini (a Catholic) said that when these three come together then you have the makings of a fascist state. Don't worry PS the Catholics have too much to lose to endorse socialism and Karl Marx. And we no longer have to worry about those out there who have nothing to lose - the media has them under control.

rancid ,get real,Govt is the most wasteful and inefficient way of doing anything.If anything we need more private charities since they put more pressure on people to be self sufficient, rather than Govt bureauracies consumed with empire building.

Too much socialism diminishes us all.As we continue to drop tarrifs however we need to find jobs for the less academically inclined and this is the area our Govt has failed to address.

We should never let anyone rot on social security,since their idleness and resentment will cost us ten fold the value of any cheap products we get from China.

ARJAY How do private charities put more pressure on people to be self sufficient? Who says people using their charities don't want to be self sufficient? Step back for a second from your ideology, your conditioning. You'd see a whole new world where poor folk are nice people who don't always have things go their way. Don't rub salt into their wounds like those silly current affair shows. How does a private (and thus not as accountable) and often religious (and thus selective)organisation more efficient than a Govt. bureaucracy? And private charities do a little empire building of their own - don't they? Look at the wealth and power that Rome and the Throne have at their command. I think it is a myth that privatisation creates a more efficient organisation. All it does is replace a publically accountable (supposedly) bureaurcracy with a private one that has the protection (such as defamation laws and govt. legislation) given to private business enterprises. I won't mention all the subsidies afforded business.
You say that governments are inefficient - do you propose to get rid of governments and replace them with a private corporation (if that is not already the case)? That sounds a lot like national socialism - sometimes called state capitalism -usually leading to fascism.
This blog page has been discussing whether statistics confirm St. Vinnies' claims that poor-income folk are finding it tougher to get on. In this case I trust in the front liners from St. Vinnies - rather than stats with a spin. Socialsim is not the answer; uncontrolled capitalism is not the answer; Australians must continue to fight fascism - that should go without saying; charity is often rich people feeling good about themselves and a PR response; your answer is tariffs (thus putting Chinese workers out of a job). I don't have the answer but I do know that getting locked into society's dominant ideology (Ideology as defined by Karl Marx) is a big part of our problem.