Tony Abbott has criticised Australia's welfare system saying major cities are fringed by "white welfare villages" while people in regional areas would rather be unemployed than work in jobs such as fruit picking and cleaning.
As the Turnbull government prepares to find further budget savings from the welfare system, the former prime minister said on Wednesday that people needed to take whatever jobs were on offer.
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Too many people are on welfare according to the former PM who says there are not two rules for Indigenous people and everyone else. Courtesy 2GB.
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People need to get to work: Abbott
Too many people are on welfare according to the former PM who says there are not two rules for Indigenous people and everyone else. Courtesy 2GB.
"We have to wake up to ourselves," Mr Abbott told Sydney radio station 2GB.
"This idea that you can be unemployed on benefits in a town where you can't get fruit pickers...it's just wrong."
Mr Abbott said people were turning down jobs because they did not like them, an echo of his 1999 comments when, as employment minister, he called people "job snobs".
"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," Mr Abbott said on Wednesday.
Mr Abbott said he was proud of his government's crackdown on people receiving the disability support pension.
"​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."
Mr Abbott laughed off suggestions he was pursuing a job in Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's ministry, saying it was not a matter for him.
He said he was in a unique position as a former prime minister.
"The fact is, once you've been the PM, you can't go back to what you were before you were the PM," Mr Abbott said.
He was once the "parliamentary assault man", he said, but that that role was no longer appropriate.
Mr Abbott said the make-up of the Senate in the current Parliament was less difficult than it had been when he was prime minister.
He said Pauline Hanson was "a partial and honourable exception" but, on the whole, the crossbench was "dedicated to populism".
Most members of the crossbench were too quick to "succumb to the lure of the limelight, to indulge their inner exhibitionist".
"Some of them just love to make a spectacle of themselves. They love to be the centre of attention [and] the best way to be the centre of attention is to be making things difficult for the government."
Mr Abbott backed Mr Turnbull's decision last week to rule out consideration of any form of carbon price which, he said, would be "a pain in your pocket".
"Let us be the affordable energy superpower of the world," Mr Abbott said.
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