More here ... https://www.theguardian.com/australia-n ... s-together“We are all in this together,” prime minister Scott Morrison intoned solemnly to parliament, as he outlined Australia’s response to the global Covid-19 pandemic. “We are charting the road through. We are all in.”
Some, however, are more “in” than others.
Far from being the great leveller it is asserted to be, Covid-19 has laid bare – as if it needed further exposition – the structural inequalities that exist in contemporary Australia.
Those who are in Australia temporarily – to study, to work, to pick fruit, to be protected from persecution – have had their second-class status brutally exposed by the extremis of Covid-19.
As the government has rolled out massive and unprecedented rescue packages for jobs and businesses – $214bn and counting – for those in Australia on temporary visas there is no safety net at all.
Many work in jobs and industries severely affected by shutdowns. They have lost jobs in their tens of thousands. But they are excluded from all government support measures, including the centrepiece jobkeeper wage subsidy and jobseeker welfare payments.
As the Covid-19 pandemic wreaks its devastation across the world, they face the very real prospect of destitution, of being left homeless, of not having enough to eat.
That they don’t vote is too simplistic an argument, their treatment reflects a more fundamental conception in Australia that people temporarily in the country – who live among Australian citizens as neighbours, work alongside them as colleagues, catch the bus as fellow commuters, and pay taxes as fellow contributors – are somehow less deserving of the country’s protection.
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The government argues that in constructing its rescue packages for the Australian economy it “had to draw the line somewhere”.
But who are its people? Who are the people the government should care for and consider its own? Australia’s government has chosen to define that narrowly – as citizens and permanent residents. It has consciously decided that those in Australia on temporary visas are undeserving of support.
Socialist rubbish. Asylum seekers are already receiving welfare payments and those here to study should be supported by their own governments, wherever they hail from.
Common sense and reality goes out the window with socialism.
