Government approves Santos Barossa pipeline and sea dumping

The Australia Institute Media Release Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek’s Department has approved a…

If The Jackboots Actually Fit …

By Jane Salmon If The Jackboots Actually Fit … Why Does Labor Keep…

Distinctions Without Difference: The Security Council on Gaza…

The UN Security Council presents one of the great contradictions of power…

How the supermarkets lost their way in Oz

By Callen Sorensen Karklis Many Australians are heard saying that they’re feeling the…

Purgatorial Torments: Assange and the UK High Court

What is it about British justice that has a certain rankness to…

Why A Punch In The Face May Be…

Now I'm not one who believes in violence as a solution to…

Does God condone genocide?

By Bert Hetebry Stan Grant points out in his book The Queen is…

As Yemen enters tenth year of war, militarisation…

Oxfam Australia Media Release As Yemen enters its tenth year of war, its…

«
»
Facebook

Tag Archives: The age of entitlement

An Open Letter to Joe Hockey

Dear Joe Hockey,

Back in 2012, when you said the age of entitlement was over, I was so relieved. I was relieved that highly-paid politicians like Tony Abbott would no longer think it acceptable to charge tax-payers for personal book tours. I was relieved that filthy rich politicians like Malcolm Turnbull, and like yourself, would put an end to ethically-suspect rental schemes, where your tax-payer funded Canberra housing allowance is paid to your spouses for investment properties they have cleverly put in their names. Which you will no doubt benefit from once again when they sell. I was also relieved to hear that this sense of entitlement would also be finished for the families of rich politicians, when the likes of Tony Abbott would say it was not acceptable to accept a secret scholarship for his daughter’s education. Nor a refund on a non-refundable deposit paid on a rented flat without proper due diligence that any other non-entitled member of the public is in no position to demand. Nor lavish trips to the Melbourne Cup to hob-knob with celebrities which even you can no doubt see is not in the public interest and therefore not an entitlement that should be charged to the tax-payer. Because these are the best examples I have ever seen of a sense of entitlement which is so entrenched and seemingly innate that it’s like an incurable disease that seems to have no end. So again, congratulations on declaring an end to it.

And oh how I wish I could leave this letter here. But I can’t. And you know why I can’t. Because I am mistaken. I am not mistaken that you wish to end the age of entitlement. What is clear is that you do in fact want to end what you call entitlement. The problem is, your definition of the problem of entitlement in our culture, and my definition, are completely different things. From the budget you’ve handed down, and from your recent statements about poor people’s spending habits on petrol (which no one misinterpreted, you really should own your mistakes Joe), it’s clear that you think entitlement is our community’s idea of rights. Rights to quality education. Rights to quality healthcare. Rights to a clean and sustainable environment. Rights to a social safety net when things go wrong. Rights to live in a community where it’s possible to be born poor, but to better our circumstances through hard work, encouragement and support from those around us. All these rights are what you call ‘a sense of entitlement’ aren’t they Joe? And aren’t these rights the things you would ideally like to end? Isn’t your budget, built on a foundation of lies about a non-existent budget-emergency, your campaign to kill the very culture that provides Australians with rights to all of these things that any first-world, educated, well-resourced and fair country like Australia should strive to protect? Isn’t your end of the age of entitlement just code for a user-pays capitalist small-government, tax-free wonder-land?

Well, had I known you meant to end this definition of entitlement, I would never have felt relief. You need a reality check Joe. Rights are not entitlements. And someone like you, with your family background, would surely understand this if you ever cared to think about it, perhaps while you’re enjoying a quiet sit and a cigar. On the profile on your website, you have published this:“Joe Hockey was born in North Sydney, as the youngest of four children. His father was born in Bethlehem of Armenian and Palestinian parentage and his Mum in Chatswood. His family worked hard running a small business on the North Shore, beginning with a deli in Chatswood and later, a real estate agency in Naremburn.” So you like to portray your family story as the classic ‘we pulled ourselves up from the bootstraps’ tale of social mobility. And like so many who have come before you having found riches and success in your careers, you now seem hell bent on destroying mobility for others by burning the ladder of opportunity that you climbed to the top. And that’s what you really meant when you said it is time to end the age of entitlement.

You’ve got it so wrong Joe. Social mobility is not an entitlement. Access to social mobility is a right. And it’s a right Australians will, when they wake up to you, fight to save. You and your rich Liberal Party chums portray the true meaning of entitlement through your little glass tower of privilege where you think it’s ok to simultaneously reap the rewards of tax-payer funded wealth, while destroying the rights of the community by wrecking the public policies designed to keep the playing field level. Shame on you Joe Hockey. Shame on you and your entitled Liberal government.

Yours Sincerely

Victoria Rollison

Entitlement

Does your success owe nothing to luck, or circumstance? Then you probably think the poor actually deserve to be poor. Peter Barnes examines the conservative mentality that underlies the coming budget.

One of the great things about Australia is that any child can grow up to be Prime Minister.

Travel to any Western democracy and you’ll hear the same thing, with slight variations; the great thing about the USA is that any child can grow up to be President, and so on.

Any child. Even a girl – in Australia, but so far not the USA. Even a person of colour – in the USA, but so far not Australia.

Which really makes you stop for a moment, because, hang on, isn’t half the population female? Isn’t that a bit weird, over a hundred years of Prime Ministers – twenty eight Prime Ministers – and so far only one girl has made it? Two hundred and twenty odd years of Presidents in the US – forty four Presidents – and so far only one person of colour has made it, and no girls at all?

Yet half of children are girls.

Perhaps there’s more to it than being a child and growing up.

While our constitution, our voting systems and our laws don’t prohibit any child from becoming Prime Minister, it’s painfully obvious that those aren’t the only things stopping at least half our children from achieving that goal. As Anatole France said a long time ago “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids both rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal bread”.

Perhaps it helps to be a particular kind of child?

While we all may be born equal under the law, we are certainly not born with equal opportunity. Nobody can deny that a male caucasian child born to a rich family living in a capital city has some advantages; you only have to look at the faces in Parliament to see the truth in that. That’s not to say that any other child still cannot become Prime Minister; it’s just an unarguable fact that, so far, only one has succeeded.

That’s not the entitlement this article is about, however.

So, what other entitlement is there? Few would argue that, in general, your race, colour, gender, wealth, location and many other factors make it easier, or harder, for you to succeed.

It seems obvious, then, that circumstance and luck will play a part in any success – or so you’d think. But here’s the strange thing. Successful people don’t believe that. They might agree about it in general, but never in their own particular case.

The entitlement I’m talking about is the entitlement assumed by the “successful”, and its consequences for their behaviour.

How does it work?

Many of those who succeed truly believe that their success is not because they had greater advantages, or luck. They believe it’s because they are truly better. More, they believe that they deserve everything they have, because they’ve earned it by being better – no matter how much they’ve got.

There’s more. Having succeeded, they truly believe that anybody else could also succeed, if only they wanted to or tried hard enough.

In fact, they actually believe that those less fortunate deserve their misfortune! Why? Because they didn’t try hard enough.

The following poll comes from the USA, however the basic distinction between conservatives (Republicans) and liberals (Democrats) is also true in Australia. The poll asks the simple question: are poor people poor because of circumstances, or because of lack of effort?

Roughly half of Americans believe that poor people are poor because of their circumstances. However there’s a massive difference when you break that down by party affiliation. Less than 30% of Republicans think it’s because of circumstances, while over 60% of Democrats do.

Put another way, 57% of Republicans believe that poor people are poor simply because they don’t try hard enough.

Think about that. Nearly two thirds of conservatives think that poor people’s poverty is their own fault.

Which, when you think about it, could be translated into saying that the reason why we’ve had twenty eight Prime Ministers and only one female Prime Minister is that basically women just aren’t trying hard enough…

Another way to look at it is to observe that in the USA the top 0.01% of households earned an average of US$10.25 million per year. The overall average for the US was US$51,000. As Matthew Hutson points out in his excellent article, “Social Darwinism Isn’t Dead“, that logically means that the top households are 200 times smarter and work 200 times harder than the average household . . .

You hear stories about poor people who are successful “against the odds”, but strangely those odds don’t get mentioned when the more privileged are successful. It’s the same for arguments about intelligence, hard work, or any other quality. They don’t guarantee success, and successful people don’t necessarily have them.

Let’s face it, if you work hard and are successful you’d much rather believe that your success was due entirely to your own efforts and intelligence, and not just luck or good birth. It’s only human nature. It’s what follows that belief that’s dangerous.

There’s a lot of other research into this, here, here, here, here, health here and here.

So what’s the problem?

The problem comes when people with those beliefs – particularly when rich, successful conservative politicians – decide policies about social welfare, health and education.

Research here, and this article here, document how poorer people give more than twice as much to charity, proportional to income, as rich people. Simply put, the poor are generous because they know what hardship and privation are. The rich are not, either because they have no experience, or because they actually don’t think the poor deserve it.

Recent figures indicate that the world’s richest 1% own 46% of the world’s assets. And this research shows that, largely, they think they got that wealth because they’re better, and they deserve it. And the poor are poor because they don’t work hard enough.

If you’re conservative, or rich, or both, you’ll probably hold those beliefs. It’s not very hard then to see why you might not believe in age pensions, subsidised health care, unemployment benefits and many other publicly funded services. It’s not very hard to see why you would have no qualms at all in cutting back those schemes simply based on your personal beliefs and ideology, regardless of the economic circumstances.

The very way Joe Hockey uses the term “entitlement” clearly indicates that he thinks it’s optional, and its time is over. Of course an entitlement is a right, and most Australians believe our society has agreed that things like pensions and medical care are rights.

The following graph, again from the USA but likely to be repeated here, particularly on predictions of the coming budget, shows the change in cost of various goods and services over the last ten years. Chillingly, while “things” are getting cheaper, critical services like health and education are increasing in cost. Poor, unhealthy, uneducated people are not going to escape from this trap.

poorcosts

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

However the entitled don’t believe in a poverty trap.

In the article “Noblesse Oblige? Social Status and Economic Inequality Maintenance among Politicians“, Michael Kraus and Bennett Callaghan examine the policy and voting patterns in US government.

Their study shows that Republicans tend to support legislation increasing economic inequality regardless of their social status. For Democrats, their social status – measured in terms of average wealth, race, or gender – was a significant predictor of support for economic inequality. That is, even amongst Democrats, if you’re rich and successful, you’ll vote for legislation that continues or increases economic inequality.

A scan of the benches in Parliament reveals many rich white males making our current policy decisions. Although parliamentarians represent us, they are not representative of us. For example, in the Australian population, about half a percent are lawyers by occupation. In the current Parliament, 60 parliamentarians, or 25%, are lawyers.

This is not a call to class warfare. Neither is it an assault on wealth. What I’m trying to point out is that there are well documented, honestly held beliefs held by conservatives and the successful that simply do not match up with reality. Those real beliefs, in turn, lead to policies that are generally harmful to people who are already vulnerable. If there’s class warfare, that’s its source. If there’s an unreasonable distribution of wealth, that’s where it starts.

So the Age of Entitlement is not over. It is over for the sick, the poor, and defenceless. It’s alive and well and built into the belief systems and psyche of a large majority of conservative politicians, and the conservative voters who support them.

We can trace the upcoming budget and all social legislation far more easily to the government’s personal and ideological beliefs than to any reality in the economy or the needs of the poor, the sick, the aged or the young. If those groups have problems, it’s their own fault!

In Australia a girl of colour from a poor background may one day be Prime Minister, but not while the current, entitled, incumbents govern, and the current incumbents truly believe that they’re entitled.

This article was first published on Peter’s blog infinite8horizon and has been republished with permission.