Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site
Forgot your password?
Subscribe

Keywords: Budget 2014

  • ECONOMICS

    Blessed are the moneymakers

    • David James
    • 16 May 2014
    9 Comments

    The 2014 Federal Budget has created a new hierarchy of virtue in Australian society, with well off investors deemed to be good and the disadvantaged bad. It is not so much class war as a war between capital and the rest of society. Those wielding significant capital are useful, while those who can save little, and have little to invest, are considered a burden.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Cruelled by the Budget

    • John Falzon
    • 15 May 2014
    4 Comments

    'You don't help young people, or older people, or people with disabilities, or single mums, into jobs by making them poor. You don't build people up by putting them down. And as even the OECD acknowledges, you don't build a strong economy by increasing the level of inequality. You don't create a strong country on the backs of the already poor.' Statement by John Falzon

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Whose rule book is Abbott playing from?

    • Neil Ormerod
    • 15 May 2014
    48 Comments

    It took John Howard until his third term before he let his personal leanings completely off the leash. It led to his electoral demise. Abbott is doing much the same in his first term, over-reaching, thinking himself invulnerable to a political backlash. Whereas Machiavelli's prince could rule through force, Abbott must face an electorate whose trust in political promises has been completely eroded. Our political system will take a long time to recover.

    READ MORE
  • CARTOON

    Australians all let us lament

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 14 May 2014

    View this week's offering from Eureka Street's award winning political cartoonist.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Budget more slow-burn than big bang

    • Jackie Brady
    • 14 May 2014
    3 Comments

    The Budget does not signal an end to the 'age of entitlement', as there are still plenty of beneficiaries of government expenditure or foregone revenue. You don't need to be an economist to see that collectively the Budget measures will impact negatively on the income levels of the poor and disadvantaged. The discussion now must be who will pick up the pieces left behind by Government in developing a system with obvious gaps.

    READ MORE
  • ECONOMICS

    Whose liberty matters as Dickensian budget looms?

    • Fatima Measham
    • 07 May 2014
    16 Comments

    French economist Thomas Piketty argues that current conditions have set us on track for a return to 19th century-levels of inequality. The Commission of Audit proposals suggest that the auditors and the Government are keen to expedite this neo-Dickensian era. It's all done in the name of 'incentives' toward 'personal responsibility', but this cannot remain coherent in the face of those who will be hit hard by the proposed suite of cuts and co-payments.

    READ MORE
  • EDUCATION

    Audit Commission's Gonski landmines

    • Dean Ashenden
    • 06 May 2014
    9 Comments

    The Commission of Audit has planted so many landmines across the political landscape that two have been scarcely noticed. One is planted directly under Gonski, the other under the federal role in schooling. Christopher Pyne's brazen effort to get rid of Gonski served only to show that he is not to be trusted. Abbott must be wondering whether this minister could carry the day with the kind of scheme recommended by the Commission.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    What Pope Francis thinks about Abbott's Audit

    • Michael Mullins
    • 05 May 2014
    17 Comments

    The National Commission of Audit believes spending cuts that produce a balanced Budget will make us all better off because we will have a stronger economy and more jobs. But Pope Francis is skeptical about such 'trickle-down' economic theories, which express 'a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power'.

    READ MORE
  • ECONOMICS

    Abbott and Hockey more Prince John than Robin Hood

    • David James
    • 05 May 2014
    11 Comments

    In politics, one should never opt for a balanced and thoughtful description of the truth when wild exaggerations will do. Especially when you want to take from the poor and give to, if not exactly the rich, at least the investor class. The dire pronouncements from the Abbott Government in response to the Commission of Audit's 86 recommendations reflect not only the PM's relentless negativity, but also more than a whiff of class war.

    READ MORE
  • ENVIRONMENT

    Religious rebels rattle Big Coal's cage

    • Thea Ormerod
    • 19 March 2014
    14 Comments

    The arrest last week of three identifiably religious people drew attention again to Whitehaven's new coal mine site at Maules Creek, in northern NSW. Why did these people of faith feel it was time to put their bodies on the line? Simply put, when the law is fully harnessed to keep in place a system that many consider to be immoral, the most ethical action is peaceful, non-violent disobedience.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    $6 co-payment not what the doctor ordered

    • Michael Mullins
    • 24 February 2014
    22 Comments

    Health minister Peter Dutton has refused to dismiss the possibility that a $6 ‘co-payment’ for GP visits could be announced in the May Federal Budget. This would be no more than a quick and easy temporary fix that would penalise ordinary Australians. It would simply defer the government's need to tackle the vested interests that are arguably the major cause of the inefficiencies that have made our health care system prohibitively expensive.

    READ MORE
  • INTERNATIONAL

    The war on asylum seekers

    • Justin Glyn
    • 22 January 2014
    32 Comments

    The current dispute with Indonesia over border incursions by the Australian Navy is symptomatic of a deeper problem — the militarisation of political discourse. Von Clausewitz famously claimed that 'war is politics by other means': in other words, that military force is employed in service of political ends. In Australia, as elsewhere in the West, this is being taken to an extreme not previously seen outside authoritarian societies.

    READ MORE