52. Scott Morrison

Hi. I am Greg and I want to grumble about last week’s grumble!

Last week I took a cheap shot at the new Federal Minister for Social Services, Scott Morrison. Now it is true that his record in overseeing our immigration regime – where secrecy ruled and meta-policy goals appeared to override any compassion for desperate individuals – does not fill one with hope that understanding and appropriate support for vulnerable people will be cascading down through Centrelink offices any time soon.

However, my grumble was bad politics – not because now that he is Minister we should speak nicely and announce our willingness to work constructively with him, but because it cedes the Minister too much power.

Anyone remember Graham Richardson – right-wing headkicker in the Hawke-Keating government? He did not have an environmental bone in his body, but as Environment Minister he protected swathes of precious old growth forests. Why? Because community groups mobilised to make it politically attractive to protect those forests.

So if we want to promote the interests of vulnerable and disadvantaged people, we need to stop begging whatever Minister is in power to do the right thing – or hoping that we get a “nice” Minister.

We need to mobilise popular support for the values that promote community over competition, or at least an inclusive growth that leaves nobody behind.

We need to make targeting the poor politically unpalatable.

If we do that, then it won’t matter – or at least will matter far less – if the Minister is a hard arse, a conservative Christian or a supposed social democrat who still believes that punitive and paternalistic Income Management is a good thing.

It’s called power. Exercising it is not always nice, and it is harder than whinging, but it trumps policy and compassion every time.

So yes, I am grumbling about Scott Morrison as Minister, but I am grumbling more about the fact that we let it matter.

I am Greg and I am grumbling.

This Grumble can be heard online or by podcast.
First Broadcast: 27 January 2015 

35. Age Pensions

Hi. I am Greg and I want to grumble about proposals to raise the pension age.

I am not necessarily against changing the pension age, or tightening some of the restrictions so that we are not subsidising relatively wealthy people, but it is such a mono-dimensional debate.

“Be prepared to work until your 70” the headline says – but what does it mean for people who aren’t working? We already have a real problem of mature age unemployment – people who may have worked for 30 or 40 years, but who find themselves out of work and facing age discrimination in the employment market.

Sure, if you are a CEO, an academic or a highly paid consultant there might be jobs for 60 year olds which value that lifetime of experience, but for many people, if you are made redundant or out of work in your 60s it might be near impossible to get another job.

For those people, raising the pension age is not about the inconvenience of staying in work longer, but living for longer on the much lower unemployment income support rather than getting the higher benefits of the age pension. The difference is about $120 a week in the base rate, so raising the pension age may sentence older unemployed workers to another 1, 2 or 5 years of living below the poverty line.

If we are going to have a conversation about raising the pension age, can we have a real discussion which includes:

• how we are going to change workplace cultures to provide job possibilities for older employees;
• whether we can create a part-time job pathways for older workers to ease into retirement, or to just share work more fairly; and 
• how we can index pensions so that pensioners do not begin to slip backwards relative to the rest of the population – in the same way that those on CPI-indexed benefits like Newstart and Austudy have been left behind.

And finally, if we keep people in work longer, who is going to do the vast amount of volunteer caring and community work that younger retirees do – because there is no doubt that retirees care for grandchildren, aging parents and siblings, and are the backbone of many community organisations?

These are genuinely hard issues. Much easier to just cut benefits to vulnerable people in order to fill a revenue hole at the same time as we cut mining and pollution taxes.

I am Greg and I am grumbling.


This Grumble can be heard online or by podcast.
First Broadcast: 15 April 2014

24. Cory Bernardi

Hi. I am Greg and I want to grumble about Cory Bernardi. There is a lot of that about lately as many people have rushed to social media to vent their outrage at Cory’s book, The Conservative Revolution.

But what is striking – and what I want to grumble about is how few of the people sounding off have actually read the book. Some admit they haven’t read it, many more are just hurling generic abuse with no real engagement with the text – which to me is just a little too close to what the right does when it dismisses whole swathes of research on the basis of alleged “common sense” or anecdotal experience.

Now I understand that you may not want to legitimise or reward conservative propaganda by buying the Bernardi book, and sometimes parody is the best way to attack offensive views. But sarcasm is often a low form of wit and much of the commentary is not critique – it is simply abuse. Even if his ideas are wrong, silly or offensive, he has held these views throughout his political career. What makes writing them down so special as to warrant this outcry?

What we should really be outraged about is that a man who holds these views got re-elected to the Senate almost by default. Sitting at the top of the Liberal ticket in South Australia (what was that about him not representing the views of the government), he didn’t attend various campaign fora in the lead up to the last election, said very little publicly and did not feature in the media which fixated on the Presidential-style contest.

How many people who put a 1 in the Liberal box on the big Senate ballot paper knew that they were voting for a conservative revolution built, according to the advertisement for the book, on faith, family, flag, freedom and free enterprise. A nice alliteration, even if somewhat self-contradictory.

So fine, go ahead and grumble about Cory and his book, but where was this critique in the lead up to the election when it might have mattered more? Where was the media exposure? How many now exercising their wit and outrage actively campaigned for something different? And what of those who actually hold such beliefs, I doubt we will change their mind by simple abuse. Social media is easy, social change is hard.

I am Greg, and I am grumbling.

This Grumble can be heard online or by podcast.
First Broadcast: 14 January 2014