You won’t find me making babies with this budget!
I think this article below says everything I could ever say about this budget.
I don’t earn over 52K a year, I would like to, I don’t have children, not sure if i would like to, but being paid $3000 for a child is not enough incentive for me to utilise my ovaries for the good of the country.
There is absolutely nothing in this budget, which gives me any incentive AT ALL, to vote Liberal. Not that I would anyways, I would have to be tied up, beaten and have my eyes put out with hot pokers before I would consider voting for the Fascists currently in Government.
Budget pits families against childless
By Sue Dunlevy
May 13, 2004
ONE in two Australians will get no increase in their weekly income from a Federal Budget that pits families with kids against the childless. Contrast … the Budget fortunes of young families and young singles are vastly different.
Ten million Australians will miss out on both the tax cuts and the family benefit increases, an analysis by University of New South Wales tax expert Associate Professor Neil Warren shows.
Three out of four, or seven million of the nation’s nine million taxpayers, will miss out on the tax cuts, which go only to the 2.3 million taxpayers earning more than $52,000 a year, he said.
Around six million Australians will miss out on the family tax benefit increases because they are single or have no dependent children.
The families with children who benefit most from the Budget represent less than half all families (48 per cent) and are declining as a proportion of all families. The Australian Bureau of Statistics says the number of families with dependent children fell by 4200 between June 2002 and June 2003 - or from 49.3 per cent of families to 48 per cent.
Professor Warren yesterday described the Budget strategy as risky and “a bit divisive”. Already single people were complaining to talkback radio that they had been left out, he said.
The Opposition yesterday grabbed the political opportunity to champion those who missed out, borrowing the Sir Robert Menzies tag “the forgotten people”. “Why does the Budget fail to provide tax relief for the four out of five earning less than $52,000 a year - sales reps, the shop assistants, the technicians, the childcare workers, the teachers, the backbone of the Australian economy?” Mr Latham asked Prime Minister John Howard in Parliament.
Treasurer Peter Costello defended his decision to concentrate his $15 billion spending spree on two groups - families with children and those earning more than $52,000. He said lower income earners had been rewarded when the Government introduced the GST in 2000 and cut the bottom tax rates.
Mr Howard boasted that it was “the most family-friendly Budget this country has ever seen”. “It is also a Budget that says to the people who want to better themselves, who are prepared to work harder, to do a bit of overtime, to strive to improve themselves: ‘We are no longer going to clobber you with a tax rate of 42 cents in the dollar when you hit $52,000′,” he told Parliament.
Mothers welcomed the budget, which delivered $3000 maternity pay, 30,000 new after-school care places and two $600 per child family tax benefit increases. Motherinc spokeswoman Claudia Keech said: “At last we’ve got a government showing a complete awareness of the needs of families.”
But Lone Fathers Association spokesman Barry Williams said divorced dads would be “slaughtered” by the Budget because they didn’t have custody of their children and would miss out on tax cuts.
The Daily Telegraph