Far from ending the age of entitlement, the Coalition is relying on exactly the same mechanisms that Labor hoped for to bring the budget back into the black. Essentially, Hockey is holding spending steady as a share of the economy, and waiting for growth to boost tax revenues.
What Hockey has done is redistribute. He is has made big changes to spending priorities. Business is being rewarded. The poorest and sickest are being punished.
In part, this is to pay for the government’s own profligacy. On coming to office, Abbott and his team made a string of costly decisions that negatively impacted the budget’s bottom line. $2.9 billion in Labor-authored tax increases were abandoned. $8.8 billion was given, rather mysteriously, to the Reserve Bank. The carbon tax and mining tax have not yet been abolished, but the government expects they will be, so has written them out of the forward estimates.
All this extra spending has to be paid for somehow. Hockey has decided to find the money by cutting into health, education and social services. So far from reshaping Australia’s welfare state, Hockey has simply redistributed it. Significant holes have been torn in our already threadbare safety net. Meanwhile, corporations have emerged almost unscathed.
https://newmatilda.com/2014/05/13/rich-and-rhetoric-won-day
The real horror is the lack of concern from the government for all those who are poor, marginalised, the very young, and the old - all those least likely to be able to fend for themselves. There is no ability to empathise - just like a bunch of psychopaths.
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