Slash and burn: Abbott releases Commission of Audit Report
The report from the Abbott Government’s Commission of Audit #COA has at last been released.
Its recommendations exceed the worst fears anyone could have had about where the most backward elements of our ruling elites would like to take Australia.
If the Commissioners, led by former Business Council head Tony Shepherd, have their way:
- The real value of the minimum wage will be cut every year for ten years and then it will be scrapped altogether.
- Medicare will be dismantled and the long-standing policy of free universal health care abandoned.
- Elderly Australians will be made to pay the price for inflated property values by making many of them ineligible for the aged pension.
- Young unemployed people will be forced to relocate to areas where there is (supposedly) work or lose their benefit.
- Students will pay more for their tertiary education.
- Key public services and corporations, including Australia Post, will be privatised.
- 15,000 jobs will be lost from the Commonwealth public service.
Perhaps, though, we should thank the Commissioners for crystallising so clearly the meaning of Joe Hockey’s call for an end to the “Age of Entitlement”.
Every man for himself, with a few scraps off the table thrown to those who through age, background, educational or physical disadvantage have fallen behind in the struggle for survival.
The report’s recommendations are a comprehensive attack not only on the specific gains made by Australian working people over more than a century but on the very idea of a just and egalitarian society. They will be resisted by the labour movement and should be rejected by all fair-minded Australians. #ausunions #auspol #honestworker
