Ask any waitress, nurse or teacher if they don’t work as hard as someone working in an office all day
The flattening of our progressive taxation system, designed and legislated by the prime minister, Scott Morrison,
will give someone earning $200,000 a year a tax cut of around $10,000 a
year by 2024. Of the $158bn total cost of the tax cuts, around $95bn
will go to the highest income earners.
If you think that sounds a little unfair, don’t worry – there is a good reason for it, according to the PM, because “the harder [people] work, the more they earn, the more they keep of what they earn”.
Get it? People earn $200,000 or more because they work harder! The
top 5% of income earners in this country just put in more hours and make
more effort than the other 95% of us.If you think that sounds a little unfair, don’t worry – there is a good reason for it, according to the PM, because “the harder [people] work, the more they earn, the more they keep of what they earn”.
According to the PM, investment bankers and financial advisers and management consultants and partners in law firms do the most difficult, physically and mentally demanding jobs, work the longest hours and make the greatest contribution to society, so they deserve to be wealthy, and to keep more of that wealth to themselves.
This is, of course, absolute, unmitigated nonsense.
That the prime minister of Australia believes that high-income earners work harder than the ordinary Australians who do the essential, undervalued work that keeps society together exposes a deep class prejudice, and shows that he is completely out of touch with ordinary working people.
"By far the hardest job I ever had was when ... I worked 20 hours a week as an aged care attendant"
I now have an office-based job. I work pretty hard – well in excess of 40 hours a week of paid work, and at least another 25 hours of unpaid domestic labour, even with a very enlightened and supportive partner who does more than his fair share.
I also spent five years working as an adviser to a federal minister, a job that is notoriously demanding, involving 60+ hour weeks, lots of travel and constantly being on call in a high-pressure environment.
But by far the hardest job I ever had was when, while doing my undergraduate degree, I worked 20 hours a week as an aged care attendant. Two evenings a week and all day Saturday from 7am, for just over three years, I put on a nurse’s uniform and comfortable shoes and went to work.
It was the most physically demanding thing I’ve ever done, at a pace that leaves not a spare minute for a break. A recent viral Facebook post by aged care worker Tahlia Stagg detailed the incredible demands of the job. The kind of tired I felt at the end of a full shift is something I’ve only experienced since when extremely jet-lagged, or in those blurry days and nights when my child was first born.
As well, I regularly encountered physical violence and sexualised behaviour from residents with advanced dementia, and, more than two decades later, I still occasionally suffer flare-ups from a back injury I incurred when I broke the fall of a very frail lady whom I was helping in the shower.
On top of all that, the emotional burden of caring for highly vulnerable people as they lived their final years, and then too often witnessing their deaths, dealing with the grief of their loved ones, and experiencing often profound grief myself at the loss of people I had come to care for deeply, was psychologically much more challenging than anything I have dealt with in any job since.
The average salary of an aged care worker in Australia is just $40,605. They are minimum wage earners, and their tax cut from Morrison’s package will be less than $400.
Apparently, they don’t deserve any more, because they don’t work hard enough.
This isn’t a slip of the tongue by the PM; it reflects the values of the government he leads. Last year, when asked by Bill Shorten why a 60-year-old aged care worker in Burnie was entitled to so much less from the government’s tax cut package than an “investment banker from Rose Bay”, Morrison’s predecessor, then PM Malcolm Turnbull, said that the aged care worker was “entitled to aspire to get a better job”.
Both Turnbull and Morrison have tacitly admitted that, to them, a “better” job means one that is more highly paid. The immense social value of the work done by those who care for our elderly loved ones, who teach our kids, who nurse us when we are sick, who keep us safe and pick up the pieces when we are hurt, is discounted in the government’s world view, where material wealth is the only measure of a person’s value.
Is this, then, what the PM means when he talks about the aspiration of the quiet Australians? Because, according to his own words, the only thing worth aspiring to, the only thing that this government believes deserving of reward, is making lots and lots of money – and keeping as much of it as you can to yourself.
• Emma Dawson is executive director of public policy thinktank Per Capita
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