The Fiscal Responsibility Act encourages a shift away from Government expenditure towards creating a bigger surplus. One way to achieve this is to reduce state spending on education and then lend the enlarged surplus to students. While the reality of actual spending may not be different, the fiscal outturn looks more responsible as these loans appear as assets on the Crown's balance sheet. This is another piece of our framework developed without consideration of the impact on children at all. It has allowed the development of low paid and casual work with poor conditions, affecting the ability of many low income working parents to provide for their children.
Children are invisible in our economic framework.
You won't find the word 'children' in any of those three Acts that I've mentioned. Now let's look at social welfare reform. Since the early nineties there has been an emphasis on getting people into paid work, regardless often of the quality of that work or the ability of parents with children to perform it. Tax reductions have also been promoted to get us working harder, growing the GDP cake, with no mention of the impact on children at all. One of the implications of tax cuts is that interest rates end up being higher than otherwise as the Reserve Bank tries to contain the excess spending.