Let's do a little thought experiment.
Your doctor has just handed you a cancer diagnosis and you're feeling understandably shellshocked. You look to your doctor for advice on what to do next. And she looks straight into your eyes and says "Well, if you want to beat cancer, you need to start from a place of being so healthy that you don't develop cancer."
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Sukkar: Get a 'highly paid job'
Michael Sukkar, a Coalition MP assigned with the job of tackling Australia's housing affordability problems, offers his advice on how to get on the property ladder.
Naturally you feel somewhat aghast - since you're looking at the diagnosis, the window for already-being-well has already closed, surely? However, your doctor doesn't care for this defeatist attitude.
"You can't solve a problem like cancer simply by throwing medicine at it," she declares. "If patients like you are not prepared to show a little personal responsibility for your condition and fight this insidious culture of chemo-dependency then it's not up to us to subsidise your idle convalescence. Oh, and if you're under 25 then it's a four week wait for medication. Next!"
!["Just be more rich, poor people - then you won't be so darn poor all the time. Why must you make this so difficult?"](/web/20170513235138im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/h/b/s/g/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.guhmiu.png/1489444532084.jpg)
Now replace cancer with poverty and that's pretty much the attitude that the government takes with the nation's non-wealthy.
Oh sure, you hear inspiring tales of people who started from nothing and built their mighty empire, just like you hear stories about people going into spontaneous remission. The reason these are stories is because they're rare enough to be noteworthy and in both cases people attribute all sorts of spurious, flattering reasons for their success (Immense talent! Hard work! Divine intervention!) when it's almost entirely down to sheer good luck.
It was on display once again as Victorian Liberal MP Michael Sukkar decided that now was the time to channel former treasurer and laughingstock Joe Hockey and insist that the problem of housing affordability could be addressed by young people just going out and getting high-paying jobs.
"Enabling young people to get highly paid jobs … is the first step to buying a house," the Assistant Minister to the Treasurer blithely told Sky News on Monday night, after mentioning he owned two properties by the age of 35.
"I want to see young people, like me, leave university. I was a terrible university student but I left university because the economy was so good, I got a great start and I was able to forge a career."
Inspiring, no? Then again, Sukkar might be overstating just how bad a student he was: his own official bio says that after school "he went on to complete a Bachelor of Laws and Bachelor of Commerce at Deakin University in Burwood [before] completing a Master of Laws at the University of Melbourne," followed by high-powered jobs in commerce and law. Much as he'd like to suggest he's a self-made man, it's not that difficult to own two houses if you've started with a job at PriceWaterhouseCoopers and ended up on the $200k+ salary of a government minister.
But this is the government's argument for all poverty-related issues: we need to grow the economy! If everyone is working and earning good money, then everyone can buy all the houses they like!
It's still the idea behind the Turnbull government's beloved idea of a tax cut for business. Leaving aside the government's own figures suggest the benefit to the economy will be modest-bordering-on-nonexistent in return for taking $50 billion out of government revenue, it's based on the silly premise that if businesses have more money they'll immediately use it to hire more people rather than, say, reinvest in their business, pay down debt, save it, pay shareholder dividends, or just plain keep it.
Then trade minister Steve Ciobo bought into this argument during his Q&A; appearance in 2016 where he told a bemused cafe owner that he would use his tax cut to hire more people despite said owner's protestations that he already had all the staff he needed and would be better off with his customers not paying extra for Medicare and therefore having more coffee money.
And the government's ongoing policy of telling you that you don't deserve a house because you're not working hard enough is just one piece of the larger it's-all-the-victim's-fault attitude that makes support for disabled people conditional on slashing welfare, or manifests in shrugging at the missed targets of the Closing the Gap report on indigenous health and welfare, or not intervening in the Centrelink "robodebt" debacle whose mistakes have been implicated in having contributed to at least one suicide.
The idea that individuals are responsible for overcoming all the disparate forces of the economy - of the policies and legislation that allows and encourages the wealthy to accumulate more wealth, the cuts to services in the smaller towns and regional areas that force people to the more expensive cities where housing is unaffordable, the effect of long-term and intergenerational poverty - makes exactly as much sense as telling cancer patients that they can save their lives with good old fashioned gumption. The Liberals may argue that a rising tide lifts all boats, but the evidence suggests that only works for those rich enough to be boat owners.
The rest of us are just standing in brackish water and really hoping that approaching fin is merely an inquisitive dolphin.
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