The Govt’s Workforce Incentives Bill Is An Insult To Every Welfare Recipient Under 66 Years Old

The Federal Government passed its Workforce Incentives Bill on Tuesday, allowing age pensioners to earn more without their pension payments being affected. But the final bill omitted some hard-fought amendments proposed by the Greens: that this allowance should be extended to all welfare recipients. The bill allows age pensioners (who are 66 or older) to earn an extra $4000 a year on top of their existing $7800 threshold before their payments start to be deducted. Social Services Minister Amanda Rishworth, who tabled the Workforce Incentives Bill, said on Wednesday ​​”giving older Australians the choice to engage in the workforce will not only benefit them by ensuring they keep more of their pension, it is also an important step towards addressing Australia’s labour shortages.” But advocates and Greens Senator Janet Rice

the billinflation“I’m old enough to know it doesn’t need to be like this,” Rice said. “When I was in my 20s, people who were unemployed and on the dole could live on it and it meant that [they] could get by.“I’ve heard the most heartbreaking stories and such unnecessary suffering and it’s just getting worse [with] the increasing cost of food and housing.” Anthony Albanese“For Anthony Albanese to pretend that he understands what’s going on for people while continuing the really punitive and callous policies of the previous government, I just find unconscionable.”Kristin O’ConnellPEDESTRIAN.TV.

Latest poverty line just dropped.

And guess what? the Henderson poverty line increased by $35 a week between June & September.#HPL is now ~$88 a day. So to those folks who’ve been asking me if it’s feeling worse & harder for *everyone* right now, yeah, pretty much. #BTPM pic.twitter.com/Iwfflb6M7m — @kristin8x@aus.social (@kristin8X) February 28, 2022

“This is all couched as somehow being able to solve labour shortages but their own modelling shows that hardly anyone is going to take up work as a result of this change,” O’Connell said.“They know the jobs [in shortage] are not jobs that match the skills and capacity of people who are currently surviving on welfare. If you’ve got a shortage of nurses, what good is it for someone who’s 70 [and unqualified] to take up [that] work?”would cost the government about $15 billion a year stage three tax cuts“The reason we [make submissions] is not because we actually think they’ll listen to evidence or care about people, we do it because we feel it is necessary that these views, experiences and recommendations are on the record so they cannot say that they are ignorant or did not know,” O’Connell said. “The longer this goes on, the more people I’m talking to who feel suicide is their only option, who are becoming homeless … I need the government to stop pretending they don’t know that these decisions are killing people.”

The post The Govt’s Workforce Incentives Bill Is An Insult To Every Welfare Recipient Under 66 Years Old appeared first on PEDESTRIAN.TV .