How pleasing to see the latte left's lerv for Julia Gillard seems to waning. One of their earthy representatives Tracee Hutchison at The Age opines that the DPM is betraying all their hopes and aspirations of what her Kevin07 government could be for high-income inner-city suburbanites like herself. Feel the sense of betrayal:
I can't be the only non-family type of working Australian who thinks it sounds just a little bit odd when an unmarried, childless woman who has been such a proud advocate for choice, circumstance and empty fruit bowls starts singing from the Labor Party's working family songbook. I just don't buy it.
THE KEW BELIEVERS
Tracee (I would add multiple e's in the Tim Blair style but he does it so much better) outlines multiple disappointments: not enough for asylum seekers and refugees, not enough for climate change, not enough for private health care, not enough for solar panels, not enough $4000 baby bonuses for BMW drivers, not enough for climate change, not enough of a clamp-down on plastic bags despite the growing number of those bloody green cloth recycled bags in my drawer. I must be the only person who just accumulates the thing, surely no one else does this. Yeh, right. Oh and did I mention, not enough for climate change. It is quite the catalogue of upper-middle class complaint.
Sarcastically resentful about the governments concern for working families (because she works, is presumably in a family but doesn't feel that the description fits her), she's particularly not happy about the their apparently cruel and heartless decision that those earning over $100,000 a year (call it $2,000 a week) ought not cop a substantial redistribution of income from lower income earners to the tune of $8,000 for the installation of solar panels on the roof of their mansions.
Some seem to imply that $100K pa isn't a high income and for many it doesn't seem that way, spending increasing to the amount available or squeezable within credit limits, but it is actually quite a high salary.
Average weekly earnings is about the same $1,123.30 a week.
The chart showing what most Australians are getting here is also very interesting. While seven years old it won't have changed much proportionally. It reminds us of what we already know of course, the level of income most people are on is quite a bit lower than the average.
ARISE YE GHOST OF FINANCE MINISTER PETER WALSH AND SPEAK TRUTHS TO THE POPULACE
Call me old fashioned but I'm not sure where I can find the decency in people who are earning $10 an hour driving cabs subsidising the $12,000 solar panels of someone who earns $50 an hour, owns a house and then enjoys an extra selling point when they sell the thing without any thought to kicking some back to the poor folks who paid for it.
Slopping out money in that way to high income earners is proof that while there was much to admire about the previous government, on many things they completely lost their way, over-run with advisers from Canberra and the elite ranks of the public service. For every rough-head butt-kicking Gerry Wheeler, they had a hundred leftards pretending they weren't.
We can only be thankful that while many in this new government make nice with wealthy lefty latte sippers, when push comes to shove they don't think the government owes them a thing. Thankfully.
It was a government elected in the outer suburbs of our great cities, and in the regions and especially in Queensland. There are different incomes in all sort of places but generally these areas would be the ones benefiting least from middle-class and beyond solar panel subsidies. Hopefully the technology will get cheaper and the interest will rise. But forcing working families to subsidise the passions and the mansions of the elite is very rich indeed. If you really had to dish out money for every cause like that, there'd be a much better case made for lending the money. Then again, can't people just work these things out for themselves without the state breathing down their neck.
To adapt that famous quote, while it's true that you can't strengthen the weak by weakening the strong, you also cannot help people permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves, including financing their own energy saving home improvements.
Kudos to K-Rudd and DPM for not being captured by the likes of Tracee. Occasionally even the cynical OC can be pleasantly surprised.
Game on.
|