Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Australia moves on welfare for teenage parents

The World Socialist Website reports on a pilot scheme to target teenage parents who receive welfare:

The program will affect some 4,000 parents, predominantly mothers, aged 19 or under who receive the Parenting Payment. When their baby turns six months old, they will be required to attend so-called support and engagement interviews at the government’s Centrelink agency. They will be forced to develop a “participation plan” which will include compulsory activities designed to ready them for the workforce, including placing their one-year-old infants in childcare while they finish secondary school, or engage in other training or paid work. Attendance at regular interviews will be mandatory until the parent completes Year 12 or its equivalent, or their child turns six years old, when they will then be obliged to look for work.


Good job too. The Welfare Working Group made extensive suggestions about conditions that must be put on young parents if they are to receive taxpayer funds.

The source of this excerpt is a socialist site which, naturally, can only see what is designed to enhance the life chance of both young mothers and their offspring, as part of a capitalist plot.

The Labor government’s objective is to increase business profitability and make Australian capitalism “internationally competitive” in order to attract globally mobile capital. The systematic dismantling of the welfare system will facilitate the lowering of business tax rates, while at the same time expanding the pool of exploitable labour, using those cut off welfare to leverage to drive down the wages and conditions of the working class as a whole.

The rationale driving the government’s stated goal of “breaking the cycle of welfare-dependency” is not that of helping the impoverished, but of eliminating the basic right to welfare altogether.


Sounds just like the Greens and soon, the Mana Party.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

eliminating the basic right to welfare altogether.

Hell yeah! Can't come fast enough?

How hard it is to understand that welfare is not a basic right?

Anonymous said...

Of course some wealthy people want a house full of cheap servants at their beck and call as this points out to all and sundry how wealthy they are. Would be nice to have maids, cooks,a butler etc etc from the ex welfare group. Makes you wonder why welfare started in the first place. Oh that,s right exploitation. As for cutting the minimum wage, that drags the whole paid workforce structure down.