Hypocrisy over carers

The Coalition leader may now say “for God's sake, if ever there's a group of people in this community that deserve to be reassured that they're going to continue to receive financial assistance in an affluent country it's got to be carers”, but he wasn’t saying it then.

Carers themselves, while grateful for the Coalition’s last-minute budget-balancing exercises, were never happy about the way in which they were being treated. The head of Carers ACT Dee McGrath told the Canberra Times last week that “the problem with the bonus payments was they were non-recurrent and this was setting up false expectations and that is always a very dangerous thing”.

It is the Coalition which should be condemned for the way it treated carers, not the Rudd Government.

Had it recompensed them properly it would have cost it a lot more than an extra $1,600 per carer per year and it would have been a permanent part of the budget, impossible to remove and not the subject of hypocritical hand wringing and silly headlines such as “PM punishes the vulnerable”.