The $52,000,000 spent by the government between 2015 and 2019 (Source: Teena Blewitt from Dept. of Social Services) to manage the ‘Cashless Welfare Card‘ or ‘Indue card‘ could have increased the payments made to 50,000 pensioners by $20 a week EVERY WEEK since 1st January 2019! Notice use of the word ‘manage‘, because that $52 million does not include the actual income support payments made to those 12500+ individuals who are using the card today.
Any sane economist would tell you that every cent of that $20 would have been put back into the retail sector.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Josh Frydenberg (Treasurer) and Mathias Cormann (Minister for Finance) have been running around for the last week like chickens with their heads cut off, scrambling for ways to “stimulate the economy” in an effort to reduce the effects of the coronavirus epidemic on the country’s socioeconomic landscape. Any ‘Stimulus Package‘ that doesn’t include direct cash payments to the very people who will spend it straight away will do fuck all to increase business and investor’s confidence in the economy. Sadly, those Three Unwise Men won’t realise that there’s not many better ways to inject money into the country’s finance system and get it moving again, than to
~ immediately scrap the absolutely corrupt money laundering scheme that is the Cashless Welfare Card, and
~ increase every Newstart Allowance, Aged Pension and Disability Support Pension payment by $40 per fortnight.
It would then be a case of sit back and watch as every one of those benefit recipients spends that $40 at their local supermarket, bakery, butcher or fruit&veg, variety store, hairdresser or beauty salon, hardware store or petrol station (just to name a few).
Okay, for argument’s sake let’s use a figure of exactly 5.2 million as the base of calculations for number of people currently receiving one of either an Aged Pension, Disability Support Pension or Newstart Allowance payment as of 1st January 2020.
Based on that many people, increasing their benefit by $40 per fortnight would cost the government an extra $5.41 billion a year – an amount adequately covered by both the $8.5 billion a year the Treasury collect in tobacco excise and other easily implemented changes to federal taxation policies.
Just quickly, speaking of money and where to get it…
if just half of the 500+ companies who have dodged their tax liabilities over the past six and a half years of Coalition governance had paid just half of what they’ve owed since September 2013, Fraudenblurgh and Co(n)mann would have enough cash to
~ build a 1500 megawatt renewable energy power station in each of QLD, NSW, VIC, SA and WA at $50 billion each;
~ upgrade every inferior ‘fibre to the node‘ NBN network that’s been rolled out across metropolitan areas of those five states to full fibre to premises hardware ($30 billion);
~ fix the Murray/Darling river system so no farmer would ever need be concerned about it running dry ($15 billion); and
~ complete construction of the national highway between Sydney and Brisbane so it was divided dual carriageway for the entire 900 kilometres ($15 billion)
Total: $310 billion.
Thing is though, you’re not just giving 5,200,000 people a helping hand while increasing consumer, business and investor confidence. You’re also giving those welfare recipients’ mental health, their physical health and their quality of life a boost, all while receiving that $5.41bn back in sales tax, increased income tax from the extra staff hired at retail stores, and flow-on increases in other revenue streams.
Any chef will tell you that you don’t stir a sauce by sticking a spoon in at the top and swirling it around a few times; instead, you put a longer spoon deep into the saucepan and mix through the ingredients which have sunk to the bottom. Sadly, until Mr. Waffle, Fraudenblurgh, Scummo and the rest of Australia’s completely lackadaisical incompetent and corrupt federal government get that through their thick heads, we’re effectively FUCKED!
Rants by Terin Mah sout 