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The Forum > Article Comments > Towards a new social democracy > Comments

Towards a new social democracy : Comments

By Corin McCarthy, published 26/11/2009

Much higher spending should be targeted to those who are most disadvantaged, but targeted in ways that alter behaviour.

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What is the justification for saying that “the family tax benefits…should be repackaged as working tax credits”? Perhaps the author could give us some reasoning and the figures.

Family Tax Benefits are attacked as “middle class welfare”, but no one ever presents a detailed alternative. I have often challenged those who go on about middle-class welfare to come up with a scheme – with the figures included – to show how to avoid this ‘problem’ without creating other problems, such as a high effective marginal tax rate, along the way.

There are a few people who don’t care if children live in poverty, so their solution is easy – just cut welfare. I’ll leave them out of the debate and just focus on benefits, thresholds, withdrawal rates and tax rates. The lower the benefit, the less use it is to the poor. The higher the withdrawal rate, the higher the so-called effective marginal tax rate. The lower the withdrawal rate, the higher the income level at which the benefit is still paid. The lower the threshold, the less use the benefit is to those who need it. The higher the threshold, the higher the income level at which the benefit is still paid.

So, let’s hear the solution
Posted by Chris C, Thursday, 26 November 2009 9:57:41 AM
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Actually Indigenous people have seized many opportunities in the past twenty five years: back then, in 1984, there were barely a thousand Indigenous university graduates and now there are around twenty five thousand. By 2020, there will be more than fifty thousand, and by 2034, twenty five years in the future, there could easily be a hundred thousand Indigenous university graduates. Those graduates will be one of the key drivers of Indigenous affairs and policy throughout this century. Those 100,000 individuals will be contributing, living, working and inter-marrying, overwhelmingly in the cities.

Having worked in Indigenous student support programs at universities, I am aware that there are ALWAYS more places available than are taken up, that Indigenous people have those opportunities in abundance. Even with the winding-down of support services as support staff are coopted to teach Indigenous Studies to non-Indigenous students (on DEEWR-supplied support funds), and even though universities have scrapped many of the lower-level courses, a record number of Indigenous people are taking up those opportunities, and those numbers are likely to increase dramatically over the next decade as a demographic boom hits tertiary age.

So I look forward to the days when we can get away from a 'poor-b*gger-me' focus in Indigenous policy which has been so good for the Indigenous Industry. Maybe it is bad news for the Industry and for the elites (Black and White) who would be quite happy if there were fewer Indigenous graduates, but people do have opportunities and people do make their choices, as individuals. Those Indigenous graduates are not confined to some Indigenous sphere, certainly they are not sought after by the Industry, but they have the far larger Australian open society to interact with and build their lifelong careers in.

21st century social democracy will have to come to terms with individual rights and aspirations, for Indigenous people as much as for anybody else. If it can't offer anything more than liberal democracy can, then it will continue to wither away, whether we like it or not.

Joe Lane
Posted by Loudmouth, Thursday, 26 November 2009 10:06:12 AM
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Any and all attempts by government at social engineering are i) doomed to fail in their original purpose, ii) certain to disadvantage twice as many people as those for whom they create an advantage and iii) a slap-in-the-face insult to every citizen who dares to think and act for themselves.

Of course, that will not stop politicians from continuing to put forward their paternalistic, condescending and arrogant plans for the rest of us, because that's what they believe they have been elected for.

But it always gets my goat, when every day we get another proposal for a "new social democracy" that dribbles along its smug pathways into our collective inboxes.

This one is neither better nor worse than all the rest.

But it does reek of the cesspit of manufactured "right-on" phrases that these control freaks seem to favour. In fact, the entire piece could have come from one of those "buzzphrase generators" that were popular in the business world back in the seventies.

http://bbilanich.typepad.com/blog/2006/03/bill_piombino_a.html

They have them for techo nerds as well

http://www.jrl-engineering.com/misc_randgen.html

Someone, somewhere must have put one together for devotees of social engineering.

May they rot.
Posted by Pericles, Thursday, 26 November 2009 10:34:19 AM
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The greens and labor have among their constituents many public servants and NGO workers all associated with welfare service delivery.

Despite the posturing and tokenism adopted by welfare service providers and their operatives, welfare remains a top-down, authoritarian model which is geared towards the ruling classes' desires rather than the needs of society wholly.

Why is it easier for somebody to have money wasted for example, on a short course for an essentially unskilled occupation yet if that person wants to go to college, they're on their own as far as organising access to the course and also paying for all course costs and books etc? Its because the upper classes want as much of their progeny as possible to take the high road rather than the low road, so much so that its easier for a mediocre kid from a rich family to take the high road than it is for a capable or quite bright extremely disadvantaged young person to do so. A lot of short-term thinking also pervades the employment and welfare sector, lets shunt them into some short course and get an instant outcome (even if it doesn't last long) rather than put in the hard yards and extra resources for a sustainable and long-lasting quality outcome.

We need to empower recipients of welfare services with genuine, diverse and meaningful choices of access to a wide range of paths, and all the support to get there. We need to stop being authoritarian, and instead be authoritative and supportive. However, too many BA and SocWk graduates working in the sector have an interest in the status quo as it offers easy work, high pay (also FBT exempt in the charity sector) and the ability to favor the submissive and compliant client rather than the more demanding or articulate.
Posted by Inner-Sydney based transsexual, indigent outcast progeny of merchant family, Thursday, 26 November 2009 11:40:20 AM
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Yes well, what can I say, the world is not a perfect place.

Using tax to spend on welfare thus diverting the reward due to the able to subsidise the ignorance of the less able will not do any good.

Those people who do not understand that they bear some personal responsibility for their circumstances will not suddenly brighten up simply because the welfare state provides them with free education, cheap housing or income subsidies.

Only when people are required to prove their worthiness will you get any momentum for them to change the practices inherited from previous generations of chronic welfare dependents.

As for the trannies notion “Despite the posturing and tokenism adopted by welfare service providers and their operatives, welfare remains a top-down, authoritarian model which is geared towards the ruling classes' desires rather than the needs of society wholly.”

Wrong, it has nothing to do with the upper classes or even the wealthy folk of the world.

Welfare by government makes individuals serfs to the public servants who like to play “lady bountiful“ with the taxes they extort from “real people”.

The authoritarian aspect is there but it is because people have, through voting for certain political parties who then enacted statutes, surrendered their individual sovereignty to a heartless, indifferent and non-caring bureaucracy (regardless of what lies as socialist will spin to get your vote)

“We need to empower recipients of welfare services with genuine, diverse and meaningful choices of access to a wide range of paths”

The problem with that is it requires government to treat people as diverse and diffeering "individuals" and not as the equally-entitled uniform and consistent autonoms which government is forced, by its own laws of "equality", to adopt.

and in the end, it ain’t ever gonna happen because it just will not work.

Better we reduce the taxes on the people who produce and encourage the indolent, through applicaion of that stimulating motivator, starvation, to change their ways.
Posted by Col Rouge, Thursday, 26 November 2009 12:39:24 PM
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Corin

Since the GFC, all these "social democrats" have suddenly emerged from, well WHERE, exactly? What the hell IS a "social democrat" anyway? We have the completely self-contradicting, all-over-the-shop rambles of Kevin Rudd's where he misunderstands and misrepresents everybody from Adam Smith to Stalin to Hayek. Rudd the authoritarian Xian wowser has clearly never read, let alone understood, any of them. The man is a complete philistine and clueless about economics and history. Then we have those whose "social democracy" champions bank nationalisations, and then Keating-style "social democrats" who are basically Thatcher without the handbag.

Note it is also these "social democrats" who have further confused/polluted public discourse with their swear word "neoliberalism"; a word they nicked from marxists and other types of socialists and anarchists, but again don't know what they mean by it.

I'm afraid when I hear somebody describe themselves as a "social democrat" I must reach for my revolver.
Posted by Agape, Thursday, 26 November 2009 5:24:41 PM
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