ForumGarden

You don't say? as the Prime minister and Treasurer keep telling us "it's the end of the age of entitlement"....we sit here and wonder, What entitlement? We may have higher wages but we also pay more for everything.

The lowest paid full-time workers in Australia earn an hourly minimum wage of $16.37, compared with $US7.25 ($7.75) in the US. President Barack Obama is trying to lift the minimum wage to $US10.10, but Republicans in Congress have blocked the plan.

Read more: Australia the most expensive country in the G20

So plainly explained.



After an ‘anti-entitlement’ Budget, he smokes a cigar. He imagines ‘entitlement’ is the dole paid to jobless youth whose jobs machines have stolen, and special monies paid to the disabled, for whom jobs as waitresses and receptionists and paper boys are impossible. He imagines these disabled do not have two million relatives and two million friends. He imagines these four million will vote for this persecution of cripples.

He imagines ‘entitlement’ does not include the $3 million a year his wife brings home. He imagines it does not include the $¼ million Arthur Sinodinos got for 50 hour’s work, or the $20 million he was promised for three hours more. He imagines it includes the $50,000 or $80,000 a year earned by Holden workers in a business that needed, for a while, what all western car manufacturers get — some government help.

He imagines ‘entitlement’ is what a bricklayer aged fifty-five lately thought he had — a pension at sixty-five. He is entitled now, Joe thinks, only to be ‘retrained’ as a shelf-packer, despite his bad back, or maybe a nurse in a mental hospital.


The stupidity of Joe Hockey