At the same time, the Government is trying to placate pensioners over their GST compensation, while confronting the potentially embarrassing issue of politicians' generous superannuation payouts Political editor Fran Kelly reports. We got dudded and dudded completely. That's why we're so angry and why we have to have meetings day after day after day. That's how they feel and it doesn't matter how many times Senator Amanda Vanstone says things like this.
Reform is hard but failing to reform is even harder.
In a speech at the Sydney Institute last night, Employment Minister Tony Abbott lamented the growing mood of dissatisfaction and blamed the media, the Opposition and the pace of reform for the feelings that things are crook. Three forces, it seems to me, are driving a sense of crisis. Long-standing popular disquiet about the pace of change and human cost of economic restructuring, elite resentment of the Howard Government's social conservatism and, of course, calamity Kim Beazley and his team of economic ghouls seizing on every bit of bad news to talk Australia down. That analysis comes close to telling pensioners on the street their feelings are illusion, not reality. Tony Abbott and Amanda Vanstone will get their chance to present a kinder face of the Howard Government when the blueprint for welfare reforms is delivered in the May Budget.