AUSTRALIAN POLITICIANS - ROBBING THE POOR TO SUPPORT THE RICH

Australian politicians are a national and international disgrace.

What they are busy doing at the moment is attacking pensioners through Centrelink and, as usual, blaming certain people for rorting the system.

Have you seen what politicians have been found to be doing -yet again - with immersing their disgusting snouts in some very deep troughs?

When are the voters going to have enough sense and guts and foresight to chuck these disgusting people out and ensure that new ones elected are people with some integrity?

The latest scandal coming to light after the Sussan Ley debacle is Julie Bishop - you know - holier than thou!!!!! Her behaviour reminds us of another Bishop of recent memory, by name Bronwyn Bishop.

How many more of these revolting parliamentary scandals will emerge before the federal parliament does something to stop them all.

How much more will it take for the sub-prime minister to take action?

The latest robbery occurred today, courtesy Kevin Rudd and the subsequent parliamentary horrors sitting in the house on the hill, and I have been shaken to the core by the petttiness of the government and carried out by its front organisation called Centrelink.

This is some of the story:

On 1 July 2009 Kevin Rudd, then prime miniature, passed legislation in the federal parliament, giving "equal rights" to the so-called glbtiq etc. members of our communities. About 87 pieces of legislation were revised to give gl etceteras equal rights with hetero members of our communities.

As we South Africans knew from the apartheid years of the 20th century and from Dr Verwoerd, the then prime dictator, we had given to us the Bantustans - separate but equal, now carried out to a new level of refinement by the Israelis against the Palestinians.

So, we were now separate, but equal, except of course we were not equal.

We had to declare our de facto relationships to Centrelink if we were on commonwealth benefits and our single pensions became "couple" pensions.

This had so many ramifications that it would take a week to record them all here, so I will just try and deal with the bare bones of it.

My partner and I were at that stage in a same-sex relationship of 15 years and we had been on single pensions each. After the declaration to Centrelink, they combined out pensions to the same amount each where before, because I had some superannuation pensions and my partner didn't I had been getting a smaller Centrelink pension than my partner. Now we became equalised.

The next part of this story is mind-boggling, not forgetting the above items about politicians.

Because Centrelink has access to the superannuation pensions (indexed, by the way) information, when these pensions are indexed and my super pensions increase, Centrelink reduces my age pension accordingly.

Now that we are "married" by Kevin Rudd, we are treated equally by Centrelink so that when the indexed pensions go up, we are Centrelink age pension reduced.

This is what happened this week.

My one superannuation pension - indexed as I said - increased by 82 cents per fortnight.

Today my partner and I each received a letter from Centrelink advising us of our latest fortnightly age pensions.

We found in the letter that our latest pensions had been reduced by 21 cents per fortnight each, that is 42 cents reduction per fortnight in our incomes!

SELECTIVE INDIGNATION!

An article in the newspapers during the week of 31 December 2012 to 4 January 2013 - has produced some interesting analyses.

Pension reductions have been forced on single women with children to force them into newstart allowance and to make them look for employment when the youngest child turns 8. There are less and less jobs and if incomes are reduced, searching for jobs becomes more and more difficulty because of associated costs. No matter, an Australian Labor Party (sic) has all the answers for social problems, as ever robbing the poor to pay the rich and make them richer. Hence the growing divide between rich and poor!

On 1 July 2009 the Rudd ALP government "married" gay, lesbian, transgender, HIV couples living together and made them into "married couples" in itself and antiquated outmoded custom where men owned women and no woman was entitled to a single pension when her husband retired and was given a pension. Married couples did not and do not each get a single pension - they get a married rate pension, considerably less than 2 single pensions - and this is now 2013!!

Fast forward to the here and now! When the two of us were "married" by Kevin Rudd and his bunch of merrie men and women, and our single pensions which we had been receiving during our 70s and some of our 80s were combined into a "married" rate pension, we each lost about $100 per fortnight.

The Rudd government refused to provide a "grandfathering" clause to this change thus apparently ensuring a saving annually to the federal government of about $66 million per year.

In addition, now that we had a joint and combined income, where previously I personally as an individual received extra income from two small superannuation indexed pensions which, when they went up with indexing increased my income by a few cents a week, Centrelink reduced my pension by a few cents per fortnight, but now that we had been turned into Siamese twins by the government, when my pension was reduced fortnightly, so too was my partner's, thus saving the federal government a paltry sum which was expended on sending us letters each time with our amended incomes.

Truth is indeed stranger than fiction!

Where is the understanding of low income people by a government hell-bent on ensuring that their capitalist friends are enriched immeasurably - by a few paltry dollars from pensioners and single parents?

Spare us from their tears!

FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CONTINUES PUNISHING THE MOST DISADVANTAGED PEOPLE IN THE COUNTRY!

Cutting Centrelink cash won't stop indigenous truancy

Article in The Age newspaper

Pat Turner

November 25, 2011

The federal Labor government has decided that the last resort for getting Northern Territory Aboriginal children to attend school is to cut their parents' Centrelink payments.

The poorest people, those Australians who are totally reliant on Centrelink, will be subject to suspended legal income support. How will the children be fed if there is no money in the home?

Legislation to put this into effect was introduced into Parliament yesterday. As a former, long-serving senior public servant, I see this as the last straw in Aboriginal affairs policy. I am absolutely opposed to it. This is bad public policy, it is morally objectionable, and it will not work.

It's time for all ALP politicians to oppose this proposed legislation. How can any true Labor member support such an illogical policy? Surely such punitive measures are not supported in Labor heartland. I cannot believe that Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating or even Kevin Rudd, especially after his national apology to us, would have allowed such ill-founded policy to even get out of Jenny Macklin's and Peter Garrett's offices, let alone be endorsed by cabinet.

The independents and the Greens also need to stand up against this proposed legislation.

Where is the evidence-based policy to support this legislation? This legislation is based on a pilot scheme being run in schools at Ntaria (also known as Hermannsburg), Wadeye, Tiwi Islands, Katherine and its town camps, and Wallace Rockhole. The pilot scheme has all but failed. School attendance has not changed markedly. There are no indisputable positive results. Evidence-based policy has disappeared into thin air. One rarely hears any MP citing it when talking about Aboriginal affairs these days. And that's because there isn't any. Evidence-based policy is what we as Aboriginal people were promised emphatically by the ALP government. As ever, we are still waiting.

In my long experience, exceeding 40 years working in Aboriginal affairs at the local, regional and national levels, I have never known Aboriginal children to have access to fully resourced and fully staffed schools in the remote communities in the Northern Territory.

It would be much more effective to spend the multiple millions of dollars on fully staffing remote schools with experienced teachers who have already worked with Aboriginal people, rather than employing fly-in, fly-out truancy officers. It should be compulsory for teachers assigned to work in a remote Aboriginal community to undertake a thorough background briefing on the history of the community and its present composition and profile. Every teacher should receive accredited cross-cultural training before even moving to the community. The government has long recognised the need to provide better incentives for doctors to work in regional and remote areas, so why not for teachers too?

A concerted effort is needed to train local Aboriginal people to be fully qualified teachers in their own right. This is the only way to stabilise the teaching workforce in remote areas, making school attractive for the children. The government is clearly focused on employment/workforce participation for all Australians. Jobs for qualified Aboriginal people resident in remote communities should be a high priority. Where are the intensive training programs for our own people to become fully qualified teachers? In our remote Aboriginal communities our cultures are resilient and our languages are still in everyday use.

The abolition of bilingual education has been a shame. It should be a choice available to communities. Service delivery in remote areas is costly. So, too, has been the loss of our languages and culture, so entwined with our land. Surely Aboriginal people have lost so much already that a decent education for all our children is not too much to ask.

This legislation must be withdrawn. Ministers Macklin and Garrett should go back to the drawing board to find evidence-based policy to show you what will work. Let's not waste any more taxpayers' money on using yet another stick to penalise the poorest people in our own land.

Pat Turner, an Arrernte/Gudanji woman living in Alice Springs, is former deputy secretary of the Commonwealth Departments of Aboriginal Affairs and Prime Minister and Cabinet. She is also a former CEO of ATSIC and former deputy CEO of Centrelink.