Consumerism and social status keep our noses to the grindstone

What better time to think about whether we’re working too hard than while we’re enjoying a Monday off, thanks to a public holiday? Wouldn’t it be nice if every weekend could be a long weekend?

Actually, almost 100 years ago, the greatest economist of the 20th century, John Maynard Keynes, pretty much predicted that’s the way we’d be living by now.

In his essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, written in 1930, he envisaged that by now, we’d be able to live comfortably while having to work only 15 hours a week. We could work just three hours each weekday, or clock up our 15 hours in just a few days – say, three five-hour days.

Really? What a duffer. How could anyone so smart be so disastrously wrong?

Well, not quite. What Keynes was saying was that, technological advance – the invention of ever-better labour-saving machines – would increase the productivity of our labour to such an extent that, by now, we wouldn’t need to work very hard to be able to live comfortably.

His point was that, as we’re able to produce more goods and services per hour of work, we become better off. We can take that benefit either as enjoying an unchanged material standard of living while working fewer hours a week, or as higher monetary income – thus allowing us to buy more stuff – while working the same number of hours.

As Jan Behringer and other economists from Germany’s University of Duisburg-Essen have written, in the years since Keynes made that prediction the productivity of labour in the developed economies has improved by more than he expected.

So, we could have been working a 15-hour week had we chosen to but, in fact, we chose to take the money and the extra stuff rather than the extra leisure. Working hours have fallen since the 1930s, but not by all that much.

Behringer and colleagues say the “obstacles to more leisure time are primarily sociopolitical in nature” – by which they mean it’s not purely economic reasons, the shortage of resources, that require us to work more.

I’ve no doubt it has suited the rich and powerful to have us working and spending rather than devoting four days a week to developing our hobbies. That way, the rich and powerful get more so.

But, by the same token, I think the rest of us have been easily seduced by the lure of the materialist, consumer culture. We love buying things that are new, shinier and do better tricks.

In Australia – and in Europe, but less so in America – pretty much all the reductions in working hours, the increases in annual leave and sick leave, and the introduction of that strange animal, long service leave, have happened because union-backed governments have imposed them on unwilling employers.

And every time they have, the employers and their political parties have predicted the death and destruction of the economy.

But, even so, how long since you’ve seen a union telling its bosses they should go easy on the pay rise, but cut working hours? No, I have no doubt that the workers have preferred more bangles and baubles.

Behringer and colleagues, however, have a different take. Their study of developments in the US and Europe over the decades leads them to two conclusions.

First, since the 1980s, average working hours have fallen more slowly as inequality – the gap between high and low incomes – has increased.

Second, in countries with high inequality, employees earning higher hourly wage rates tend to work longer hours than those on lower hourly wage rates.

Both these findings are striking because they contradict economists’ earlier finding that people with higher incomes chose to increase their leisure time.

So, what’s going on? The authors’ explanation is that rising inequality of incomes leads to more “upward status comparisons”. Like most social animals, we are conscious of our social status – where we fit in the pecking order.

And, particularly where there’s a big difference between the top and the bottom, we seek to improve our position.

“The upper middle class emulates the consumption norms of the rich, and sacrifices leisure time to do so. Because the rich also increase their spending on status goods such as housing, education, etc as their incomes rise, the middle class feels pressure to keep up,” they say.

“After all, what constitutes ‘a good place to live’ or ‘a good education’ is essentially defined in comparison to the standards that the upper income groups largely determine.”

Another of their findings is that working hours are more likely to be shorter when wage bargaining is centralised and government social benefits in kind (but not in cash) are more adequate.

One possible explanation, they say, is that centralised wage bargaining reduces status conflict because workers can decide collectively to avoid a “positional arms race” to allow shorter working hours and more leisure.

They find that social benefits in kind rather than cash are associated with lower hours of work. This may be because the direct provision of goods and services by governments reduces the need for status-oriented private spending on goods and services.

Education has many dimensions. It broadens the mind, it helps you get a better-paying job, and it’s a “positional good” – it helps people judge your social status.

"The extent to which the education sector is organised through private markets is found to be associated with longer working hours among workers who themselves have high levels of education,” the authors say.

Get it? If governments provided better healthcare and public schools, more people would be content to use the publicly provided services along with everyone else, and fewer people would feel the need to work longer to afford private hospitals and schools.

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In politics and the economy, Christianity is increasingly suspect

A question for Easter Monday: would Australia be better governed if our political leaders were practising Christians? Would the economy work any better?

One thing that’s changed since last Easter is that we’re no longer led by a prime minister happy to let his Christian faith be known. By contrast, I wouldn’t know what Anthony Albanese’s religious views are, if any.

Another thing that’s changing is the decline of adherence to Christianity in its many denominations. This is partly the immigration of many people of other religions, but mainly the growing indifference of many from formerly churchgoing families. And, perhaps, the growing number of university graduates.

According to the 2021 census, the proportion of people identifying as Christian has fallen from 61 per cent to 44 per cent in a decade, with those reporting “no religion” rising from 22 per cent to 39 per cent.

So, it’s no exaggeration to say we now live in a post-Christian society. Nor that a growing number of people have a low opinion of those who profess to be Christians. They’ve said or done something bad – well, what would you expect?

Actually, that’s a good question: what do we expect of Christians? How differently would a professing prime minister behave to one who kept their religious opinions to themselves?

I think the main expectation of most people – certainly, most young people – would be for Christians to be always on about their opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage and gender-changing.

Plus, their God-given right to discriminate against those in their churches, schools or hospitals who don’t conform to these views.

Is this the view of themselves and their mission – and their God - that Christians and their leaders are happy to convey to the rest of the nation? That Christ died on the cross to preserve a narrow view of sexual morality?

To be fair, it’s only when clergy speak on such controversial matters that the media take much notice of what they say. An archbishop preaching a sermon on Love One Another gets a headline only on Good Friday.

But I suspect it’s only on matters of (their view of) sexual morality that the churches go out of their way to attract media publicity. By default, this is the churches’ burning message to the nation.

If that’s all Christianity has left – if it now sees itself as an oppressed minority fighting to protect its right to discriminate on religious grounds – then whether our prime minister is an out-of-the-closet Christian is of little consequence for the governance of the nation and the health of the economy.

As we saw with Scott Morrison, such a prime minister won’t prevail against the weight of the nation’s support for sexual freedom and opposition to discrimination on sexual or religious grounds.

The worst we could expect is feet-dragging on the goal of increasing women’s role in politics and the paid workforce.

But this is not the Christianity I grew up with, nor does it fit with the values and behaviour of the many Christians I still mix with. Everything I know about the church and its Saviour tells me sex is just a small part of its definition of what it means to live a “moral” life.

The imitation of Christ is about loving your neighbour as yourself – and defining “neighbour” very broadly. It’s about honesty and meticulous truth-telling, about justice tempered by mercy, about forgiveness and fairness.

And, from what I read in the New Testament, it’s about Jesus’ preoccupation with the poor and strictures on the rich: “Sell everything you have and give it to the poor.”

When I heard a secret recording of Morrison speaking at a prayer meeting, the sentiments and phrases reminded me of my parents and all the prayer meetings I had attended.

But in watching Morrison’s words and actions as prime minister, my recurring feeling over the four years was that nothing about them reminded me of Jesus.

He was not the only prime minister to pander to, and play on, the worst features of the Australian character. Punishing boat people who arrive without an invitation. Telling the underprivileged that “those who have a go, get a go”.

Ignoring the law to use robo-debt to falsely accuse people the mean-spirited regard as dole bludgers. And insisting on keeping unemployment benefits well below the poverty line.

If we could get a prime minister who acted in a less un-Christian way, it wouldn’t matter much who or what he believed in. The economy would be fairer, and we could all enjoy our prosperity with a clearer conscience.

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Stop kidding: the 2024 tax cut will be economically irresponsible

It’s a safe bet that, once we’ve seen the mid-year budget update on Thursday, we’ll hear lots of economists and others saying the government should be getting on with budget repair: spending cuts and tax increases.

That’s despite the update being likely to show that the outlook for the budget deficit in the present financial year and the following three years is much better than expected in the budget last May.

It’s also true even though the case for “repairing the budget by repairing the economy” is sound and sensible. The federal public debt may be huge and getting huger, but, measured as a proportion of gross domestic product, the present record low-interest rates on government bonds mean the interest burden on the debt is likely to be lower than we’ve carried in earlier decades.

It’s true, too, that recent extensive stress-testing by the independent Parliamentary Budget Office has confirmed that the present and prospective public debt is sustainable.

It remains the case, however, that both this year’s Intergenerational report and the budget office project no return to budget surplus in the coming decade, or even the next 40 years – “on present policies”.

So, it’s not hard to agree with former Treasury secretary Dr Ken Henry that doing nothing to improve the budget balance is more risky than it should be, too complacent. It leaves us too little room to move when the next recession threatens.

And, indeed, the Morrison government’s revised “medium-term fiscal strategy” requires it to engage in budget repair as soon as the economy’s fully recovered.

But there’s no way Scott Morrison wants to talk about spending cuts and tax increases this side of a close federal election. Nor any way Anthony Albanese wants to say he should be.

Of course, that won’t stop Morrison & Co waxing on about how “economically responsible” the government is – especially compared to that terrible spendthrift Labor rabble. Nor stop Labor pointing to all the taxpayers’ money Morrison has squandered on pork barrelling, and promising an Albanese government would be more “economically responsible”.

But here’s my point. There’s a simple and obvious way both sides could, with one stroke, significantly improve prospective budget balances, and because it would be front-end loaded, disproportionately reduce our prospective public debt over years and decades to come.

There’s no way such a heavily indebted government should go ahead with the already-legislated third stage of tax cuts from July 2024, with a cost to the budget of more than $16 billion a year.

Those tax cuts were announced in the budget of May 2018 and justified on the basis of a mere projection that, in six years’ time, tax collections would exceed the government’s self-imposed ceiling of 23.9 per cent of GDP. That is, the government would be rolling in it.

It was said at the time that it was reckless for the government to commit itself to such an expensive measure so far ahead of time. It was holding the budget a hostage to fortune.

But so certain were Morrison and Josh Frydenberg that the budget was Back in Black that, soon after winning the 2019 election, they doubled down on their bet and insisted the third-stage tax cuts be legislated. Desperately afraid of being “wedged”, Labor went weak-kneed and supported the legislation.

If, at the time, a sceptic had warned that anything could happen between now and 2024 – a once-in-a-century pandemic, even – they’d have been laughed at. But they’d have been right.

Just last week, Finance minister Simon Birmingham righteously attacked his opponents for making election promises that were “wasteful and unfunded” – by which he meant that they would add to the budget deficit.

But the tax cut both sides support is now also “unfunded”. We’ll be borrowing money to give ourselves a tax cut. That’s economically responsible?

It might be different if you could argue that the tax cut would do much to support the recovery, but it wasn’t designed to do that, and it won’t. Stage three is about redistribution, not stimulus and not (genuinely) improved incentives.

The budget office has found that about two-thirds of the money will go to the top 10 per cent of taxpayers, on $150,000 or more. Only a third will go to women. So, the lion’s share will go to those most likely to save it rather than spend it. Higher saving is the last thing we need.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Get real. There’s no way either side would want to repeal a tax cut, especially just before an election.

Regrettably, that’s true. But, this being so, let’s tolerate no hypocrisy from politicians – or economist urgers on the sidelines – making speeches about “economic responsibility” without being willing to call out this irresponsible tax cut.

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How strange could money get if the worst came to the worse?

With our official interest rate heading ever closer to zero, there’s much talk that the Reserve Bank may be forced to join other central banks in resorting to “unconventional monetary policy,” including QE – “quantitative easing”. But how likely is this? What might it involve? Are there alternatives? And would it be good or bad?

These questions were debated by Dr Stephen Kirchner, of the United States Studies Centre at Sydney University, Dr Stephen Grenville, a former deputy governor of the Reserve now at the Lowy Institute, and Lyn Cobley, boss of Westpac’s institutional bank, at a meeting of the Australian Business Economists in Sydney this week.

But let’s start with what the Reserve’s governor, Dr Philip Lowe, said on the subject to the House’s economics committee earlier this month.

He said it was possible the official interest rate would end up at zero. Here’s the key quote: “I think it’s unlikely, but it is possible. We are prepared to do unconventional things if the circumstances warranted it.”

The Reserve had been doing a lot of thinking about unconventional policies, so as to be ready if they proved necessary, not because it thought them likely to be needed.

“I hope we can avoid that,” he said. Which I take to mean that, should they prove needed, the economy’s prospects would be much worse than they are now. But also that the Reserve doesn’t fancy having to use unconventional methods.

Conventional monetary policy involves the central bank using its “open market operations” (selling or buying Commonwealth bonds from the banks) to push its official interest rate, and hence the banks’ short-term and variable interest rates, up or down so as to discourage or encourage borrowing and spending (“demand”) in the economy.

Lowe’s list of unconventional measures includes the “negative” interest rates applying in Switzerland, the euro area and Japan (where lenders pay the borrowers tiny interest rates; don’t hold your breath waiting for this one), the central bank lending funds to banks at below-market rates provided they lend them on to businesses, the central bank buying corporate bonds or mortgage-backed securities, or intervening in the foreign exchange market to push the value of its currency down.

But the measure Lowe seemed least uncomfortable with is the central bank buying long-term government securities to try to lower risk-free long-term interest rates. This is similar to conventional policy, just at the long end rather than the short end.

Lowe also said that, if it became necessary to start buying long-term securities, you wouldn’t need to have cut the official interest rate to zero before you started. He implied he might go no lower than 0.5 per cent.

Why stop there? Because by then the banks’ deposit rates would be too low to be cut any further, meaning they couldn’t pass the cut on to their home-loan and business borrowers.

However, he admitted, if things got so bad internationally that all the other central banks had cut their official rates to zero, we might be obliged to follow suit. Another possibility would be if our economic growth slowed even further – say, into the 1 per cent range – though in that case a response would be needed from fiscal policy (the budget) as well as monetary policy.

Turning to this week’s debate, Westpac’s Cobley made it clear the banks would have trouble coping with most of the unconventional measures. Even cutting the official rate any further would hit the banks’ profits (sounds of weeping and breast-beating by the bank customers present).

Kirchner, who is among the minority of economists who believe fiscal policy is ineffective in managing demand, saw no problem with using unconventional measures, which could easily have the same effect as cutting the official rate by a further 2.5 percentage points.

He said the consensus of academic studies was that unconventional measures in the US had been quite effective. Grenville agrees with him that, for the central bank to switch from buying short-term securities to buying long-term securities in no way constitutes “printing money” (even metaphorically).

Grenville disagreed with his claim that unconventional measures don’t promote inequality by helping the rich get richer, however. They lead to higher prices in the markets for shares and property, which help expand the economy through a “wealth effect” – working best for the wealthy.

Except where unconventional measures were used to rescue financial markets that had frozen at the height of the financial crisis, Grenville was unconvinced they achieved much. The academic studies made too little distinction between different episodes.

So he opposes taking interest rates lower and moving on to unconventional measures. Rather, the Reserve should tell the government monetary policy had gone as far as it reasonably could – was already “pedal to the metal” – so now it was over to fiscal policy.

Unconventional measures (I think “quantitative easing” is misleading) would probably achieve lower long-term interest rates, inflate asset prices (particularly shares), encourage financial risk-taking and lower the exchange rate, Grenville said.

None of those things seemed particularly desirable, he said. Lower long-term interest rates wouldn’t help much because, unlike in America, Australian households and businesses borrow at the short end. We’ve had plenty of asset-price inflation already.

A lower dollar helps our exporters, but it’s a “beggar-thy-neighbour” policy (inviting others to do the same to us) and, in any case, the dollar is already low enough to make any viable exporter profitable.

When unconventional measures are discussed, some people think of “helicopter money” – governments distributing cash to ordinary punters, from a metaphorical helicopter. But central bankers insist such a measure is not monetary policy and would have to come from the government as part of fiscal policy.

If the government covered the cost of the cash by borrowing from the public in the usual way, such a stimulus measure would be quite conventional – a la Kevin Rudd’s 2008 “cash splash” into people’s bank accounts.

If the government simply ordered the Reserve to credit people’s bank accounts, that would be “printing money” and highly unconventional. Again, don’t hold your breath.

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The price we pay for funding schools based on religion

You can tell we’ve had generational change among our federal leaders when the latest prime minister through the revolving door knows to pronounce the “d” in congratulations. No doubt he’ll have many impordant things to say to us.

So far, the message seems to be that he’s just an ordinary, fair dinkum, baseball cap-wearing, pie-eating, beer-swilling kinda guy. Egalitarianism is back and Jack is as good as his prime minister.

Or maybe not. A great disappointment with the Coalition government is the failure of its attempt to have a second run at the Gonski reforms proposing needs-based, sector-blind funding of schools.

Gonski was our chance to do something other countries did decades ago: remove sectarianism from federal and state funding of schools. To stop determining how much government funding a child receives according to the religious affiliation (or lack of it) of the school attended. Need should be the only criterion, regardless of religion.

Julia Gillard threw a lot of taxpayers’ money at the reform to avoid conflict with non-government schools, but couldn’t pull it off. She ended up doing side deals with the Catholic schools and other groups.

Malcolm Turnbull’s reworking of Gonski seemed to be more principled, but the Catholic hierarchy kept the pressure up – we want to share the money our way, not your way – and the government buckled. The Catholics got their special deal and the (mainly Protestant) independent schools got something similar to stop them kicking up.

What a country we live in. We can happily agree to same-sex marriage, but when Catholics put the frighteners on, politicians on both sides get weak-kneed.

Some relevant information has just arrived from Paris. A report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has used its PISA worldwide testing of 15-year-olds on maths, reading and science to assess progress on Equity in Education.

Prime ministers love boasting about our economy’s high standing in the world, so how about this: Australia now has the equal-fourth most socially stratified education system among the OECD’s 35 member-countries.

Only Mexico, Hungary and Chile can claim to have a more social class-segregated school system than ours. For a country that still likes to think of itself as class-free, that’s quite an achievement.

The report classifies students according to their parents’ socio-economic status, taking account of economic, social and cultural factors. Socio-economically disadvantaged students are those in the bottom 25 per cent of students in their country. Socio-economically advantaged students are those in the top 25 per cent.

Similarly, socio-economically disadvantaged schools are those in the bottom 25 per cent of the distribution of schools, based on the average status of their students.

If all schools perfectly reflected the socio-economic composition of the total population, each school would have 25 per cent of students in the disadvantaged category, 25 per cent in the advantaged category and the rest in between.

Of course, no country’s schools are anything like that lacking in social stratification. In Australia, however, the proportion of disadvantaged students attending disadvantaged schools is not 25 per cent, but double that: 51 per cent.

By contrast, the proportion of disadvantaged students attending advantaged schools is not 25 per cent, but 4.6 per cent.

The report also measures the change in the proportion of disadvantaged kids in disadvantaged schools between 2006 and 2015.

On average, it fell a fraction, with 22 countries improving and 13 getting worse. Another international distinction for Morrison to boast about: we won silver with a worsening of 5.2 percentage points. Only the Czechs did worse.

But why does it matter if our schools become more socio-economically stratified?

It matters because, on average, disadvantaged students attending disadvantaged schools don’t do as well as they would if they attended advantaged schools.

Such students face a double disadvantage: one coming from their parents’ circumstances and another from the less conducive learning environment at school.

Trevor Cobbold, of Save Our Schools, says information published by the OECD in June shows disadvantaged schools (95 per cent of which happen to be public schools) have more students per teacher, more teacher shortages, more teacher absenteeism and more poorly qualified teachers.

It matters because it helps show the price we’re paying for decades of funding schools on the basis of religion rather than need. The Kiwis stopped doing that ages ago, and they have the fourth lowest proportion of disadvantaged students at disadvantaged schools.

It matters if you don’t want what we’ve got: a yawning gap between our strongest students and our weakest.

It matters because it has broader implications for society. “Social segregation in schools breeds social intolerance in communities and workplaces and undermines social understanding and cohesion,” Cobbold says.

“Schools segregated by class make it more difficult for children to develop a real understanding of people of different backgrounds and to break down barriers of social intolerance.”

And then we wonder why politics is getting more polarised.

Of course, many factors besides schools are contributing to the growing social stratification of our cities. But schools are something we can influence by adopting better policies.

And if you believe in equality of opportunity, the first thing you fix is schooling. As the OECD says, “children from poor families often have just one chance in life, and that is a good school that gives them an opportunity to develop their potential.

“Those who miss that boat rarely catch up.”

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Inequality not as great as claimed, worse than others admit

This week the Productivity Commission issued a “stocktake of the evidence” on inequality in Australia. Its findings will surprise you. But it wasn’t as even-handed as it should have been.

Its report forcefully dispels the myths of the Left – that inequality is great and rapidly worsening – but is much more sotto voce in telling the Right there’s still a problem and that the reason it’s not as bad as some think is that governments have taken corrective actions the Right usually disapproves of.

This has allowed the conservative commentators of the national press to greet the report with great glee. One in the eye for their ideological opponents. Inequality? Nothing to see here.

The report looks at three different measures of economic inequality – the distribution of income, consumption and wealth – over a long period: the 27 years from 1988-89 to 2015-16. It focuses on the experience of households rather than individuals, and eliminates the effect of inflation.

The report concludes that inequality has risen only slightly over the period. Measured by the Gini coefficient – where zero means perfect equality and 1 means one household has everything – the distributions of both income and consumption have risen slightly.

The distribution of household wealth (mainly owner-occupied housing and superannuation savings) is most unequal of the three. It, too, has become a bit more unequal over the period.

But, particularly for income, inequality increased during the resources boom of the mid-noughties, then decreased in the years following the global financial crisis of 2008.

Over the 27 years, the disposable income of all households rose at an average rate of about 2.2 per cent a year in real terms.

The annual incomes of households in every decile (10 per cent group), from the bottom to the top, increased. It won’t surprise you that average incomes in the top two deciles rose by more than the economy-wide average. The top decile’s average income rose by more than 2.5 per cent a year.

It will surprise you that average incomes in the bottom decile rose at the same rate as the economy-wide average. So it was households between the bottom 10 per cent and the top 30 per cent whose incomes rose by less than the national average.

Many people would be surprised by all this. Why? Because they hear what’s happened in America and assume it must be pretty similar here. Wrong.

The report notes that our progressive income tax and highly means-tested welfare payments do a lot to equalise household incomes (as I’ve written recently in this column).

Our income inequality in 2015 was about average for the rich countries. In 2017, our wealth inequality was eighth lowest among 28 rich countries.

Australians’ chances of moving between higher and lower income groups – a rough measure of equality of opportunity – “compare favourably with many other developed countries”, the report says.

It tells us that, at 9 per cent of Australians – 2.2 million people – our rate of poverty (measured as people with incomes below half the median income) is no higher than it was 27 years ago.

But if all these truths tell you we don’t have much to worry about, you’ve been misled. The report is much less up-front in reminding us of the qualifications to its findings.

It leaves the strong impression that, if inequality hasn’t increased much, and isn’t as great as in some other countries, there’s no great problem. This implies the inequality we started with was fine.

As Professor Peter Whiteford, of the Australian National University, has noted, the report does too little to remind us that all the averaging involved in Gini coefficients and decile groups rolls households who’ve gained together with households who’ve lost and tells us little has changed.

For instance, the report downplays the issue of the huge increase in the incomes of the top 1 per cent of households. Their extreme gains are averaged with the more modest gains of the next 9 per cent to give a rise in the incomes of the top decile that’s high compared with the rest of us, but not greatly so.

Since the increase in inequality occurred during the resources boom, the report notes quietly that, contrary to what conservative politicians keep telling us, “[economic] growth alone is no guarantee against widening disparity between rich and poor”.

True. Then we’re reminded that this increase in inequality went away in the long period of weak growth following the financial crisis.

So what does the Productivity Commission want us to conclude? Let nature take its course? Don’t worry about increasing inequality because the next recession will fix it?

The report’s fine print acknowledges the truth that a country’s degree of inequality is greatly influenced by its economic institutions (such as its tax system and the rules of its welfare system), by government policy changes, and by the public’s attitudes to inequality.

I happen to agree with the commission’s value judgement that the growing gap between the top 1 per cent of incomes and middle incomes isn’t of as great concern as the gap between the bottom and the middle.

But I don’t accept another implicit value judgement that not much more could be done to reduce income and wealth inequality (presumably, for fear the rich would stop wanting to get richer) and that, at the bottom end, the government should limit its intervention to assisting those poor people whose disadvantage has become “entrenched”.

In other words, don’t acknowledge that poverty is being kept high by successive governments’ refusal to lift the freeze on real unemployment benefits.

The report proudly informs us that the bottom decile’s income has kept pace with the economy-wide average, but does little to explain how this amazing truth came about.

The chief suspect is the Rudd government’s increase in the base-rate of the age pension, a boost so big it seems to have more than offset the adverse effects of the real dole freeze and the bipartisan policy of moving disabled and sole-parent pensioners onto the much lower dole.

Still think there’s nothing to see here?

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