BUDGET BLUES Peter Costello9s seventh budget can be described as a ride through Dante9s inferno for the most disadvantaged in Australian society. This budget gives Australians an insight into the thinking that shapes that ideological concerns of a government that has been hijacked by the interests of trans-national corporations. To ask the most disadvantages in the country to shoulder the financial burden of the "war on terror" that is being waged by the United States and her loyal deputy the Australian government, is an indictment on the type of society we have become. Instead of reducing corporate welfare and passing legislation through parliament that ensures that corporations pay more than the token taxation they currently pay, the Federal government is forcing the 650,000 Australians who currently receive disability support pensions to pay for the "war on terror". The Howard government has embarked on a campaign to force at least 200,000 recipients off the disability support pension over the next five years, so they can experience the "dignity" of working for the dole or working for wages that fall for below the current poverty line. Those Australians who were manipulated into voting for the Howard government last year by the media induced hysteria over the arrival of a few thousand refugees, will now pay the price for their decision. The very people who were stampeded into voting for the government, will now find that what little personal security they believed they enjoyed has disappeared. To change eligibility requirements for receiving a disability support pension from being able to work thirty hours per week, to being able to work fifteen hours per week and then over the next five years re-assessing everybody who currently receives the disability support pension, using this new criteria is against everything that this country stands for. The current budget is the type of document that is to be expected from a government that ran out of ideas years ago and that has forgotten that governments are in power to protect the interests of the people they represent, not those who own and control the means of production, distribution and exchange. END. As a dis sup pen since before it was the in valid pension and expensive drug user,(only users lose drugs)I now know how right I was to be extremely PARANOID!
