A report released by the Federal Government's Australian Institute of Health and Welfare [AIHW] on 19 October 2017 states that welfare spending in 2016 reached 9.5 per cent of Australia's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) having been increasing on average by 0.09 per cent or est. $4 billion annually over the last ten financial years.
Some of this increase is inevitably due to population growth over the same period - between 2006 and 2016 the national population grew by 3.18 million people to reach a population total of 24.20 million.
However, the media suitably primed began to discuss welfare costs principally in terms of cash transfers to Centrelink clients.
But does such discussion take in the whole picture of welfare costs in this country?
According to the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) there are a large number of concessions, offsets and rebates available to working and retired individuals, active businesses, family trusts and superannuation funds.
These can reduce the annual tax payable by an individual, business, trust or fund – sometimes as low as zero dollars.
Along with universal education and health services, Centrelink and Veterans’ Affairs pensions, benefits, and concessions; these ATO concessions, offsets and rebates are a form of government welfare.
So when the Murdoch media trumpet statistics like “Last year, more than 733,000 people received unemployment benefits, costing $10 billion” with est. 68 per cent of recipients moving off this payment within a year - remember that Australian Government tariff, budgetary assistance and tax concessions to primary, mining, manufacturing and services industries totalled $15.1 billion in 2015-16 and, based on past performance, an estimated 33 per cent of all businesses would probably have paid zero tax in that year.
Put simply, Australian Government welfare directed at industry cost taxpayers est. $41.3 million per day in 2015-16.
And when these same News Corp megaphones go on to state that “more than 100,000 jobseekers who were on the dole for at least five years had cost taxpayers $15 billion over the past decade” – readers might like to recall that the Australian Government spent in the vicinity of est. $96 billion on industry assistance in the six years commencing 2010-11 and ending 2015-16.
[Australian Government, Productivity Commission Annual Report Series, Trade & Assistance Review 2015-16]
If a similar level of government assistance were to continue for another four financial years then government welfare received by industry would reach est. $156 billion over ten years.
That's over ten times the quoted amount in welfare payments outlaid on the long term unemployed in a decade.
However, when the likes of Liberal Minister for Human Services Alan Tudge, Liberal Minister for Social Services Christian Porter, Liberal Senator Eric Abetz or One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson talk about the cost of government welfare programs they rather strangely neglect to look at the full range of federal government financial assistance across all sectors of the economy – preferring instead to target vulnerable groups of people with little ability to fight back against their distorted, punitive and highly politicised world views.
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