Friends, it’s time for another astonishingly Bad Take™ from former Prime Minister/god damn he wants to be PM again Tony Abbott.
- If you’re healthy and on welfare, and you don’t accept the literal first job you see (regardless of job type, location, your own skill level, and the pay or hours) then you’re a criminal.
- If you aren’t healthy and are receiving a disability support pension, suck it up because whatever it is you have cannot possibly be permanent.
“We have to wake up to ourselves. This idea that you can be unemployed on benefits in a town where you can’t get fruit pickers…it’s just wrong.”
“These might not be the jobs you want to do for the rest of your life but a job is a job…You have to take it, you just have to take it.”
‘Course the problem there being that fruit picking is seasonal and very short-term, reliant largely on youth and physical fitness, entirely dependent on weather and harvest yields, in some cases exploited severely by job providers using the backpacker visa system, and unless people are willing to live nomadically results only in being back to square one a mere handful of weeks later.
“?If people are doing the best they can for themselves and for their families and it is literally impossible for them to find work, fair enough. [But] we were far too ready to put people on the DSP [disability support pension], with bad backs, a bit of depression and so on. These are not permanent conditions.”
That shows a staggering lack of understanding about how mental health conditions actually work, and even less compassion for people enduring chronic pain-related conditions, or those in physical trauma recovery.
Pensions for depression: bad, apparently
Lifetime pensions and free travel for politicians: VERY GOOD, OF COURSE https://t.co/dHK0Q2IUE3
— Josh Butler (@JoshButler) December 14, 2016
good to know this country once elected a man who talks about “a bit of depression” the same way most people talk about a papercut
— Allison Gallagher (@allisongallaghr) December 14, 2016
“A bit of depression” geeeeeet fucked
— Sabine Wolff (@sabinewolff) December 14, 2016
Remember that time we freely elected that bloke? Good grief.
