Warped welfare wailing

No amount of pious political hand wringing will ever remove any of these obligations from our national scene, so we must stop wailing about it like spoilt children.

This expenditure must be, and ever will be, the first item recorded in every Federal Budget of Australia every year, ahead of all other items. It is as inevitable as the sun coming up tomorrow morning.

This means that we must stop calling this societal cost by the demeaning title of WELFARE which far too many hope will suitably hurt and humiliate those who receive it because a wholly unfounded belief prevails that they really do need to be punished.

Instead, let us give it the honest title of BASIC INCOME because, in every enlightened nation, this is a fundamental right of all citizens.

This being so, a smart nation will take the very logical step of giving a basic income to every citizen no matter how wealthy some may be. There will be no such thing as welfare any more as every person will get the basic income in their bank account automatically every month and it will become part of their taxable income.

The huge bureaucracy which handles Centrelink and other similar agencies will simply disappear from government payrolls. They will be superfluous to need.

Australia can finance basic income by scrapping Income Tax totally along with all its corrupt deductions and replacing it with a Revenue Tax which everyone will pay on all their earnings above the basic income even if they are operating at a loss. This will catch all the multi nationals before they syphon taxable funds offshore.

All of this will cause a huge revolution, but its time we had one. Like Donald Trump so vividly said, 'It is time to drain the swamp.' However, the concept of basic income is not really original. Finland is giving it a trial run in one of its regions and Scotland will do so this year in two of its counties. The pioneer of this fascinating concept here in Australia is my friend Mark Carnegie. Type his name into Google and read all about it.

Can I say in closing that its time for all the 'holier than thou' people to shut up and stop denigrating those who struggle to handle the enormous pressures of life.

Australia is a far finer nation than the vindictive image those guys so persistently strive to create.

As Adam Lindsay Gordon once wrote, 'Kindness in another's trouble, courage in your own'.