Tag Archives: cost of living

1 In 3 Aussie Parents Go Without Food To Pay Bills

15 Nov

The evidence keeps stacking up.

No need to be concerned that Europe is imploding. America slumping. China slowing. Our housing bubble leaking. Our economy faltering. Our debt rising. And 1 in 3 Aussie parents starving.

It really is a great time to introduce the world’s highest priced, and only economy-wide carbon tax.

From news.com.au:

STARVATION NATION: Parents going hungry to feed their kids

PARENTS in the grip of rising living costs fear they can no longer afford to feed their families and are cutting back on the bare essentials just to survive.

In exclusive Daily Telegraph survey of more than 1000 Australians found one in three people had gone without food in the past 12 months simply to put food on the table for their children.

Seventy five per cent of families had to cut back on buying food or cut some items from their shopping lists altogether.

Staples such as meat, fruit and bread were among the most common items sacrificed.

More than 60 per cent of people said they worried at least some of the time about not having enough money to feed their family.

Are you worried you won’t be able to put food on the table? Join in our Cost of Living survey below and tell us what’s on your plate.

Ironically, a report in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph found grocery prices were decreasing for the first time in a year, thanks in part to the supermarket price wars and improved supply of fresh produce.

But the savings have done little to offset the soaring cost of other major expenses such as household power and water.

Conveniently, those major household expenses just happen to be the primary targets for the banker-designed, Bob Brown-mandated carbon derivatives scam.

And since we already know that Treasury’s “modelling” is about as reliable as reading tea leaves or chicken entrails, there is one thing you can rest assured of in these increasingly uncertain economic times.

Those “major expenses” are set to go up.

A lot.

Thanks Bob.

Thanks Greens voters.

I hope you are as smugly pleased with yourselves over the mouth-watering prospect of many, many more starving Aussie “working families” as you must already be over the genocide of black people in the Third World for the sake of carbon credit schemes to further enrich “green” multinational corporations.

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A Nation Under Stress, A Bureaucracy Under Delusion

8 Sep

From the Australian:

One in four households relies on welfare benefits while one in seven is spending more than it earns, as increasing cost-of-living pressures bear down on families.

Click to enlarge

Of the nation’s poorest households, one in 10 went without meals and 7.3 per cent could not afford to heat their homes in winter during 2009-10, according to a six-yearly snapshot of spending by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Australians are having to spend more than half their income on the basics – housing, food and transport – as the soaring cost of living bites into spending on life’s luxuries. One in eight households could not pay their bills on time.

The ABS household expenditure survey reveals that households are under as much financial stress now as in the lead-up to the 1998 east Asian economic crash.

The “financial stress” afflicted some of the nation’s wealthiest people, with almost one in seven high-earning households failing to pay bills on time and 8.8 per cent seeking financial help from friends and family.

The ABS survey reveals that government pensions or benefits are the main source of income for one in four households, which get by on an average of $557 a week.

The typical Australian household spent $1236 a week on goods and services in 2009-10 – 38 per cent more than was spent during the previous survey period, in 2003-04. Prices rose by 19 per cent, which the ABS said indicated “a rise in real living standards”.

Half the spending was on food, housing and transport.

Now I really have heard it all.

Price rises = “a rise in real living standards”?!?

What a complete and utter load of doublespeaking bullshit.

Now, if the ABS had said “a rise in disposable income indicates a rise in real living standards”, then possibly there’d be some truth in the statement.

But to try and argue that price rises equates to rising living standards, is so utterly nonsensical as to be nothing less than delusional.

Why do we continue to allow our government bodies to so blatantly lie to us like this?

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#JAFA Insanity – Queenslanders Turn Off Power, So Bills Go Up

1 Jun

A little foretaste of our eco-nutbag future:

Consumers hit with 6.6% power bill increase because we didn’t use enough over summer

Queensland households will be penalised with higher power prices for keeping their air-conditioners off over summer.

The state’s electricity price regulator, the Queensland Competition Authority, has announced a 6.6 per cent increase in power prices from July 1.

The increase will add $120 to the average bill of households already under pressure from an array of cost increases.

Almost 80 per cent of the increase was blamed on growing network costs, the price passed on to consumers for building and maintaining the power system to cope with increasing demand. However, lower than expected power consumption over the disaster-affected summer meant distributors did not recoup their investment costs.

Those costs have now been attached to electricity prices for 2011-12, meaning households will pay extra for not using enough power this financial year.

So, let’s try and follow the insane (il)logic of the green-preaching, millionaire hypocrite #JAFA‘s like Garnaut and Flannery.

If we’re all good little eco-pawns and use less power, our power bills will go up because we used less power!

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Swan Lies About Mortgage Payments

4 May

Proof below.

Too disgusted to comment.

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

The Reserve Bank’s decision to leave its cash rate unchanged is good news for households and businesses doing it tough in Australia’s current patchwork economy, Treasurer Wayne Swan says.

“Following today’s decision, an average family with a $300,000 mortgage is still paying nearly $160 less each month in repayments than they were when we came to government,” Mr Swan said in a brief statement.

“That’s a saving in the order of $1,880 a year – extra money that’s particularly important given the cost of living pressures many families are facing.”

From the Reserve Bank of Australia Statistics (click to enlarge):

Howard Government – March 1996

Rudd Government – November 2007

UPDATE:

Thanks Wayne. You super little economic manager you:

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Labor Racks Up Half-Century On Electricity Price Increases

27 Apr

Media Release – Senator Barnaby Joyce, 27 April 2011:

Today’s consumer price index figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that utility price increases are accelerating not slowing down under Labor, Senator Barnaby Joyce said today.

“Last week public buildings were burning down in the centre of Sydney while homeless people merely miles away slept on the street. This week we find that good honest hard working people are struggling with the fundamentals of life because the Labor party’s management is incompetent.

“The elixir of the quality of life is the price of power.

“Labor can raise its bat today. Under this Labor government electricity prices have gone up by over 50% in not much more than 3 years. That is a bigger total increase than under the 11 years of the previous Coalition government.

“It doesn’t stop there. Ill-considered investments in desalination have caused water prices to go up by 46% and gas prices have gone up by 30%.

“Last winter my mother-in-law told me that on her meals-on-wheels runs she often finds pensioners in bed, not because they are sick, but because it is the warmest part of the house when they can’t afford the heating.

“Under Labor things aren’t getting any easier and they are not going to with a carbon tax that will push up electricity bills by another $200 per year at least.

“Australians don’t need more excuses to save on power; they have plenty of reasons already.

“But it’s not just household bills that will get hit. Combined with a high Australian dollar, these price increases are hurting Australian manufacturing. Do we want to make life even tougher for them and risk having no manufacturing industry in this country at all?

“All for a plan to cool the planet from a room in Canberra.”

(click to enlarge)

Even after adjusting for inflation:

· Electricity prices have been going up 10% per year under Labor, compared to 1% under previous Coalition government

· Water prices have gone up by 9% per year under Labor, compared to 1% under previous Coalition government

· Gas prices have gone up by 5% per year under Labor, compared to 1% under previous Coalition government

More Information – Matthew Canavan 0458 709433

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Joyce: Labor Fails To Deliver Lower Living Costs

28 Jul

Media Release – Senator Barnaby Joyce, 28 July 2010:

Whilst the rolling Greek tragedy that is the Labor Party continues, the price of utilities continues to take away the spare cash of many Australian families. The Labor Party went to the election saying that they would ease the squeeze and assist with the cost of living but this is another promise which they have never delivered. In fact they were increasing the debt and increasing pressure on interest rates while they made life harder not easier for people. Australians are quickly coming to the conclusion that life under Labor is an erratic roller coaster which the wheels will fly off at any moment.

After promising to reduce the cost of living, since Labor was elected:

Electricity prices have gone up 34%

Water prices have gone up 29%

Gas prices have gone up 26%

Overall, utility bills have gone up 31%

To compare Labor against the Coalition on an annual basis (and correcting for inflation):

Electricity prices are going up 9.3% a year under Labor. They went up 0.5% a year under the Coalition.

Water prices are going up 7.6% a year under Labor. They went up 1.2% a year under the Coalition.

Gas prices are going up 6.5% a year under Labor. They went up 1.3% a year under the Coalition.

Overall, utility prices are going up 8.2% a year under Labor. They went up 0.8% a year under the Coalition.

Australia can’t afford another three years of Labor.

(Figures sourced from ABS)

More Information – Jenny Swan 0746 251500

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Joyce: The Labor Government Is Dodgy

15 Jul

Media Release – Senator Barnaby Joyce, 15 July 2010:

In trying to think of a metaphor to describe the Labor government in one word, it is this – dodgy! Their figures are dodgy when they talk about a $7.5 billion reduction in revenue but apparently only causing a $1.5 billion reduction in income. Their approach is dodgy when they talk about net debt as if the people who lent us the money don’t want the money back in gross terms and just for the record, we currently owe $150 billion and are currently borrowing an extra $150 million a day.

They are completely dodgy with how they change Prime Ministers in the middle of the night without telling the Australian people. They are even dodgy amongst themselves with the deals they make, such as the one between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard on the process of leadership transition which Julia obviously didn’t honour because the backroom boys told her not to. They are dodgy in how they talk about future surpluses, yet their past prescriptions about current surpluses have been so totally wrong and actually end up as deficits.

They are dodgy in how they describe solutions for the processing of boat people in East Timor when they haven’t actually done the homework to get the deal through East Timor. They are dodgy in how they employ mates such as Mr Kaiser for $450,000 a year without even putting an advertisement in the paper so that other Australian’s can apply for the job. They are dodgy in how they go forward with a $43 billion capital infrastructure program such as the NBN without doing a cost benefit analysis as to whether it will actually work.

They were dodgy in the way that they allowed the importation of beef from countries with Mad Cow Disease until we found out about the deal and then they changed the decision around again. They were dodgy in how they told people that the ETS was the greatest moral challenge of our time, but the person who was crucial in changing that moral paradigm is now enjoying the benefits of the Prime Minsters office. They were dodgy when they inferred that an ETS would change the climate when quite obviously it was never going to.

They were dodgy with how they told the Australian people that they would fix the hospital system by July 2009 or they would take it over and in the end, they did neither. They were dodgy when they decided to build school halls across our nation for $16.2 billion whether you wanted them or not and at three times the price. They were dodgy when they decided to put ceiling insulation into roofs and burnt down over 180 houses causing tragically the deaths of 4 people that we know of.

However, where they are really dodgy is this – they told people that they would assist with the cost of living. They had the dodgy fuel watch scheme and the dodgy grocery watch scheme which were announced with fan fare but achieved zip.

The cost of living in Australia is going through the roof because this crowd in government is dodgy and has absolutely no idea how to get the basics right. You cannot keep borrowing money at the rate they are, putting upward pressure on interest rates, and squeezing the last drop of blood out of working families and then claim to know something about the cost of living.

You cannot talk about reducing coal fired power replacing it with renewables at many times the cost and not expect that this is going to make working families poorer. You can’t fail to develop the inland and not expect the result to be far greater pressure on the social and economic infrastructure of urban Australia. If you don’t develop water infrastructure then you have to expect the price of a limited resource, water, to go through the roof. If you keep on making it difficult for farmers to farm, with continual new laws on vegetation, and everything they do from sunrise to sundown and in between, while at the same time failing to oversee that farmers are getting a fair price at the farm gate, then the farmers will disappear and the price of food will go through the roof. You can’t borrow hundreds of billions of dollars from overseas and not expect that it has to be repaid by people who have to pay taxes, working families, who could have otherwise put that money in their pockets.

In summary, many people at the supermarkets and at the pubs and clubs and at the church on the weekend and at the sport with their kids understand one thing – that they seem to be poorer under this crowd then they were before, they have less money than they did before. They seem to be watching a political soap opera that has more episodes than Blue Hills standing in proxy for decent government.

My statement to the Australian people on behalf of the National Party in the Senate will be this – Do you honestly believe that you can carry on with this crowd for another three years? What do you think will be left of the show if you do?

More Information – Jenny Swan 0746 251500

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