Comment on Could this be the death of Australia's nightmarish welfare system?
SaneMartigan@aussie.zone 1 week ago
There will be no change. Punching down at welfare recipients is so ingrained in Australian politics it’ll never go away. If Albo tries it’ll be the perfect campaign basis for the Libs, your tax money given free to blue haired dole bludgers that want to turn your kids trans.
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
It’s neoliberal politics. Basically after WWII it was obvious people didn’t like fascism and politicians couldn’t openly embrace it. But it was too useful for portecting capitalist interests, so a bunch of neoliberal experiments were run in south america to figure out the best way to use fascism to oppress workers without creating that world-war style blowback.
And one of the techniques they landed on was to keep scapegoating the vulnerable, but to use sanitised language. So it’s not “dirty n-----s, g-----s and k----s polluting our precious blood and soil”, it’s “immigrants taking our jobs”. It’s not “useless eaters withering the soul of our nation” it’s “welfare recipients mustn’t be allowed to freeload.”
It’s the same ideas dressed up to sound a bit more respectable and not trip the fascism alarm, but they work nearly as well to strip the social safety net, which lowers wages.