Social welfare

[c2105026]

ahahahahahhahahahahaha have you ever been to centrelink bro? I had the misfortune of going there in 2010 and if you could find a park amongst all the commodores and excels, you had to walk past the throngs of people puffing away on their durries. One woman even came in pushing a coles trolley full of groceries (meat and alcohol I could see clearly in it), and coles is like two blocks away.

Every friday and saturday night at work I see countless aboriginals heading to the riverbank with their casks of wine. I guess they forget to buy smokes cause they keep coming to my pub to try and bum some off my patrons.

Of course welfare recipients smoke and drink....but the example was to show how the mind boggles when it comes to the unemployed and their expenditure (note: should have mentioned that ). I'd be willing to say that many unemployed forgoe buying fresh, healthy goceries to fuel their tobacco and alcohol indulgences, and instead buy very cheap food like junk food, 2 minute noodles, and so on. It has been said in a recent govt report that 35% of doctors visits are linked to a poor diet. So it would be better, even for healthcare system, for the unemployed to get back to work.

 

[DAKSTER]

I've always advocated a completely different system for the unemployed. Obviously as a disabled pensioner who has paid a lot of tax over the years and feels he deserves what little he gets, I wouldnt like this to affect pensions

Why have unemployment benefits at all? Why not use the cash currently spent on benefits, administration, enforcement etc and create a whole new industry.

A worker pool for all the stuff that needs doing.. all the usual stuff like picking up garbage, mowing lawns for old age pensioners, building community playgrounds etc.. I know, not very creative but you get the drift. Put them to use.

This would be a system where you could earn say $10 hourly, as many or as few hours as you choose to do. You get crap wages, but you can be better off than you are on the dole if you work say 30hrs weekly. If you want to stay home and watch TV, you are going to have to get off your bum at some point to eat or pay rent, and if you dont its your own problem.

How is this part of a social net? By being there.. by guaranteeing that anyone can earn subsistence wages. You go there, you are guaranteed a job. Dont do it right, dont get paid. Come back tomorrow, you can try again, and if you do it right, you get paid. You only get paid if you actually work in other words. Various jobs available to suit various skills or fitness levels.

After awhile of working 30hrs weekly for $300, you are pretty likely to use the remaining 10hrs of a 40hr week looking for a real job...

Even if it means we just finish up paying 200,000 people 10 bucks an hour to pick up papers and scrub graffitti, its still going to be cheaper than paying the dole, because the other 200,000 will get real jobs... and damn the streets will be clean..

 

[Julie]

I've always advocated a completely different system for the unemployed. Obviously as a disabled pensioner who has paid a lot of tax over the years and feels he deserves what little he gets, I wouldnt like this to affect pensions

Why have unemployment benefits at all? Why not use the cash currently spent on benefits, administration, enforcement etc and create a whole new industry.

A worker pool for all the stuff that needs doing.. all the usual stuff like picking up garbage, mowing lawns for old age pensioners, building community playgrounds etc.. I know, not very creative but you get the drift. Put them to use.

This would be a system where you could earn say $10 hourly, as many or as few hours as you choose to do. You get crap wages, but you can be better off than you are on the dole if you work 30hrs weekly. If you want to stay home and watch TV, you are going to have to get off your bum at some point to eat or pay rent, and if you dont its your own problem.

How is this part of a social net? By being there.. by guaranteeing that anyone can earn subsistence wages. You go there, you are guaranteed a job. Dont do it right, dont get paid. Come back tomorrow, you can try again, and if you do it right, you get paid. You only get paid if you actually work in other words. Various jobs available to suit various skills or fitness levels.

After awhile of working 30hrs weekly for $300, you are pretty likely to use the remaining 10hrs of a 40hr week looking for a job that pays a lot more...

Even if it means we just finish up paying 200,000 people 10 bucks an hour to pick up papers and scrub graffitti, its still going to be cheaper than paying the dole, because the other 200,000 will get real jobs... and damn the streets will be clean..

Sounds good to me Infact I would extend it to include disabled pensioners too. Obviously not going and work that they can't physically do or that caused them pain but there are a lot of disabled pensioners that could easily sit on the phone or computer and converse with people. Set them up with a phone system/computer and have them doing the call centre/customer service type work normally outsourced to India. Win win win situation, the pensioners are earninga wage and get a bit of pride back, the government are no longer paying pensions and the general public don't have to listen to ####ing Indians

 

[Krisp]

As most threads on this forrum, there is too many people acting asif they know too much about the current system, without actually being directly affected by sudden change in employment. I was in a stable job some years ago, never out of work. One phone call and i had myself another if needed to be. High quality work, on time with no comebacks. I was cruising along when suddenly Bam i was out of a job. Previous General manager had stopped all external work from coming in to concerntrate on the companies own projects, which when finished he left with a golden handshake and a new manager came in to sort out the mess.
New general manager culled more than half the workforce . Shock changed my whole mental angle on what i thought myself to be worth. Loss of confidence ment i spent the next 3 months without benefits , using my redundency to prop myself up. The money ran out and i scored a job as a fitter supervisor in a leading firm. Busted my arse like a cotton picker with gun to my head. Took its toll and depression sunk in. Got fired for the first time for a piss ant excuse and having the recession hit my industry at around the same time (still within the 3 month trial)
Here i joined a labour hire mob, and grabbed what ever the job that was available. Then suddenly it all dried up. I spent the next 18 months locked into a disability pension through centerlink. Disability was for the clinical depression and the constant need for sessions to stop me from taking my life. Ended up being transfered to crs which is there to get you back into the workforce. I tried to retrain but thats hard while being a mature age canidate. My resume was impressive but due the the time out of work it wasnt good enough, i was seen as a liability and even a risk to take on. I aplied for job after job to no avail. I even went after low qualified jobs as trades assistants no one would touch me. I finally got my big break in a small family run stihl shop business that had nearly given up getting anyone they could trust to do the job, yes the money was crap but it was something. I was there for 3 months then was laid off due to bugger all work. 4 weeks i was invited back to do retail then out of the blue i was offered a job i hadnt applied for to get back into my industry . Have been at this same job for nearly 2 years and im well back on track.

Due to being laid off for such a long period of time, my options with the way i lived decreased ten fold. Centerlink paychecks didnt cover my sessions or even my fuel to get down to my centerlink appointments. I had to move back home, offload quite a few personal items and borrow a fair amount from my parents. Now i didnt sit around watching tv day in and day out, smoking billies or create crime. I was out working on peoples cars and equipment and kept my mind clicking over. But the biggest dissappointment was how everyone saw me, as a ####ing dole bludger, useless and utter scum. The whole crap of that everyone saw that they were paying for me to live. Without even thinking about if they were in my shoes. There is different senarioes for different people, no case is the same. So before you go out and downgrade everyone on centerlink and try to put tough restrictions and time limits, have a heart and think about if it was you. Asif you had no other options , no way you could see to move forward except time to be healed and to see the light.

 

[DAKSTER]

Sounds good to me Infact I would extend it to include disabled pensioners too. Obviously not going and work that they can't physically do or that caused them pain but there are a lot of disabled pensioners that could easily sit on the phone or computer and converse with people. Set them up with a phone system/computer and have them doing the call centre/customer service type work normally outsourced to India. Win win win situation, the pensioners are earninga wage and get a bit of pride back, the government are no longer paying pensions and the general public don't have to listen to ####ing Indians

Whilst I agree with you in principle, things arent always as they appear. Mostly I am reasonably lucid, but on a bad day I wouldnt like to employ me with the amount of painkillers in my system, its just a recipe for disaster... even in an office job.

I'd have no problem at all with disabled pensioners having work available to them via the same system, and I totally agree that many would be happy to take advantage of the ability to contribute. It can be very demoralising being told you are no longer useful to society.

Finding a job that lets you work whenever you can, and of course having to report it as income, would be something that appeals to me, but I could not survive if it was made my only available source of income. At the moment I am unemployable because I cant predict which days I will be capable of working, which of course rules out a normal working environment.

I do think many disabled pensioners are not genuinely disabled. The rules are pretty tough now, I have a terminal disease and I still had to jump a lot of hoops. Unfortunately, the rules used to be a lot more lenient, and once you are in the system it becomes much harder to remove you.

Survelillance could be useful in those cases, but again, its not black and white. There are days when I am confined to bed, days when I am confined to my wheelchair, and days when I am able to stand and spend short periods building my kitchen or painiting my car. Both of these projects have become very long term because of an increasing shortage of days like those but if a centrelink spy saw me at the workcentre cutting timber for 5 minutes, I would have to defend myself.

Conversely, some guy with fake back pains can be working as a back yard mechanic for years, selling the morphine he gets on a subsidixed script and claiming a disability pension unfairly, simply because he hasnt come to centrelinks attention.

I'm not saying there arent thousands of pensioners rorting the system, because they are. You would need to be very careful about how you weed them out though, or genuine people can suffer too.

Having said all that, I am sure that even on a bad pain day, off my face on morphine, I could offer better IT advice on the phone than any Indian call centre

 

[wraith]

Until you have reached rock bottom and have no choice but to claim a benefit you can't talk like you know how it is.

 

[minux]

As most threads on this forrum, there is too many people acting asif they know too much about the current system, without actually being directly affected by sudden change in employment. I was in a stable job some years ago, never out of work. One phone call and i had myself another if needed to be. High quality work, on time with no comebacks. I was cruising along when suddenly Bam i was out of a job. Previous General manager had stopped all external work from coming in to concerntrate on the companies own projects, which when finished he left with a golden handshake and a new manager came in to sort out the mess.
New general manager culled more than half the workforce . Shock changed my whole mental angle on what i thought myself to be worth. Loss of confidence ment i spent the next 3 months without benefits , using my redundency to prop myself up. The money ran out and i scored a job as a fitter supervisor in a leading firm. Busted my arse like a cotton picker with gun to my head. Took its toll and depression sunk in. Got fired for the first time for a piss ant excuse and having the recession hit my industry at around the same time (still within the 3 month trial)
Here i joined a labour hire mob, and grabbed what ever the job that was available. Then suddenly it all dried up. I spent the next 18 months locked into a disability pension through centerlink. Disability was for the clinical depression and the constant need for sessions to stop me from taking my life. Ended up being transfered to crs which is there to get you back into the workforce. I tried to retrain but thats hard while being a mature age canidate. My resume was impressive but due the the time out of work it wasnt good enough, i was seen as a liability and even a risk to take on. I aplied for job after job to no avail. I even went after low qualified jobs as trades assistants no one would touch me. I finally got my big break in a small family run stihl shop business that had nearly given up getting anyone they could trust to do the job, yes the money was crap but it was something. I was there for 3 months then was laid off due to bugger all work. 4 weeks i was invited back to do retail then out of the blue i was offered a job i hadnt applied for to get back into my industry . Have been at this same job for nearly 2 years and im well back on track.

Due to being laid off for such a long period of time, my options with the way i lived decreased ten fold. Centerlink paychecks didnt cover my sessions or even my fuel to get down to my centerlink appointments. I had to move back home, offload quite a few personal items and borrow a fair amount from my parents. Now i didnt sit around watching tv day in and day out, smoking billies or create crime. I was out working on peoples cars and equipment and kept my mind clicking over. But the biggest dissappointment was how everyone saw me, as a ####ing dole bludger, useless and utter scum. The whole crap of that everyone saw that they were paying for me to live. Without even thinking about if they were in my shoes. There is different senarioes for different people, no case is the same. So before you go out and downgrade everyone on centerlink and try to put tough restrictions and time limits, have a heart and think about if it was you. Asif you had no other options , no way you could see to move forward except time to be healed and to see the light.

Krisp, as I said, spend a little now to prevent this from happening. Income insurance is a brilliant thing, one that protects you. Why people do not part with a few dollars a month to protect themselves proves 2 things to me, that people are living so far beyond their means they cannot afford it or 2 just plain stupid. Most income insurance starts at $40 month...hardly a pricey venture when it can protect so much.

Until you have reached rock bottom and have no choice but to claim a benefit you can't talk like you know how it is.

There is ALWAYS a choice, unless you are a quadriplegic with down syndrome and blind!

 

[monkeys437]

Krisp, as I said, spend a little now to prevent this from happening. Income insurance is a brilliant thing, one that protects you. Why people do not part with a few dollars a month to protect themselves proves 2 things to me, that people are living so far beyond their means they cannot afford it or 2 just plain stupid. Most income insurance starts at $40 month...hardly a pricey venture when it can protect so much.

I've heard of people getting income protection through their superannuation company so its paid for through super contributions the same way life insurance is. I've read up a bit on it and im going to try and insure myself this way when i've got a mortgage (hopefully later this year). Apparently its quite expensive but its not coming out of your take home pay so it's affordable week to week and i think its well worth the sacrifice.

 

[Rufys]

Income Protection Insurance premiums are also 100% tax deductible.

 

[Decicrate]

This thread just gets better every day, it is so full of fail it is unbelievable.

The vast majority of people that are on "welfare" are there because they wont do work that they don't want to do. Its not because they can't do certain types of work, its because they think that a lot of jobs are "below" them.

Currently Australia is looking at getting in thousands of migrant workers to do jobs that our "unemployed" will not do. As a tax payer this disgusts me. Why should I be paying for others to sit on there bum, waiting for their dream job, whilst we are getting other people in to do the work that these people don't want to do?

If I was the leader of this country, these would be some of the first changes I would make. (ahhh to dream)

1. Any one that is on unemployment or single mothers etc, etc, does not have the right to vote in any election. Why you may ask? Because they are not contributing to society. Once this is passed, see No.2

2. I would dump the current unemployment, single mothers and quite a few other schemes. Now that they can not vote there will be very little voter backlash. So a lot less chance of getting voted out.

3. Take the vast majority of civil libertarian laws that have been passed in the last 20 years and throw them out the door, with the vast majority of civil libertarians.

4. I would still have an unemployment scheme and a single mothers scheme, it is as follows.

Unemployment.
A person would only be eligible for "unemployment" payments if that person has held a job for a minimum of 2 years and has their tax up to date. If you have made no contribution to this country, this country will not make a contribution to you, pretty simple really.
There would be a maximum of 3 months of payments until you will be cut off.
To be eligible for payments again you would have to work for another 2 years consecutively before any more payments can be issued.

Single Mothers.
There is no payments for any more than 1 child. We all make silly mistakes in life, so I would give you 1 freebie so to speak. Anymore than that and you are on your own.
There would also be a set number of hours of work a week that you must do once the child is at school age.


Side note.
When I was at school, I was taught about the Great Depression in Australia. During this time many fathers and sons left the family home to travel looking for any work that they could. Why did they do this? Simple, there was no DOLE or cash hand outs. There were food stamps, not alcohol or cigarette stamps, food was the important thing.

Today a lot of these people that are getting a free ride wont go past the end of their streets to find work. Its far easier to sit and wait for the dream job that pays more than $100 000.00 a year for doing nothing.

I can guarantee that if you removed the "dole" the unemployment rate would drop by at least 3% in the first week.

Well thats my slant on things, for the bludgers and civil libertarians feel free to flame on.