Australia has the lowest benefits for the short-term unemployed among 34 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Remarks by Treasurer Jim Chalmers seem to say there’ll be no one-off increase in the pitifully inadequate rate of unemployment benefits in Tuesday night’s budget. If this is wrong, I’ll be delighted to offer an abject apology. If it’s right, Anthony Albanese and his ministers should hang their heads in shame. They claim to be the good guys, but they aren’t.
The lowest? Really? Does that make us the poorest of all those countries? No, of course not. We’d be comfortably among the richest. So the real question is why the government doesn’t want to fix JobSeeker. Well, it’s no secret. It might be the right thing to do, but there are no votes in it. But this is self-justifying nonsense. The single dole is now just 43 per cent of the full-time minimum wage.
That’s the point: you can include it among all the things you’ll do if you really want to. Economists are great believers in “revealed preference”: judge people not by what they say, but by what they do.
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Labor’s persistent refusal to fix the JobSeeker payment is shamefulAustralia has the lowest benefits for the short-term unemployed among 34 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
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Labor’s persistent refusal to fix the JobSeeker payment is shamefulAustralia has the lowest benefits for the short-term unemployed among 34 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Read more »
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