Cameron England: Australia needs a universal basic income to survive coronavirus pandemic
The economy is in freefall, thousands are losing their jobs, and an end is nowhere in sight. The Advertiser’s business editor says the PM must do something unprecedented that will cost a fortune but might just keep our society intact.
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Australia needs a universal basic income for the next year to ensure that we can come out the other side of this crisis not just intact, but as a healthy, happy, cohesive society.
Don’t get me wrong, we need much more besides.
But a universal income – paid to everyone in Australia – would help alleviate the deeply felt fear which many in our society currently feel around imminently running out of money.
Putting money in people’s pockets at a time like this removes the need for governments to pick winners, and then hope like hell the benefits trickle down to everyone else.
It means we can all relax about having enough money to put the bare essentials on the table, and then we can turn our minds to how we work together to preserve the society we love.
It will cost a fortune. Who cares?
Some rich people will just pay off debt and save the money? Who cares?
People who currently have under $100 in the bank – or are well in the red – will know that they will have enough to buy the bare essentials and won’t be trapped in some Hunger Games-type fight for the few scraps of work around. I care deeply about that.
Infrastructure spending, one-off stimulus payments, business tax relief and other more traditional forms of bolstering the economy, as necessary as they are, simply do not get to the nub of the issue – there will be many jobs in our society which we just won’t be able to do for the near term.
How does a masseuse deal with social distancing? They can’t as far as I can see.
How does a local journeyman band, trying to pack the pub on a Friday night, work from home, or benefit from a few billion being thrown at new roads and bridges?
Hard to know.
It gets right back to the simplest of questions. What do we want Australia to look like when we get through this?
It’s an easy question to answer. We want it to look like it did two weeks ago.
We want to go to the pub and have a cold one with our mates. We want to go to The Fringe and watch a magician pull a card from behind our kid’s ear.
We want to go and get our hair cut, drink a bubble tea, eat a pie from the local baker. The list goes on.
The bedrock of that return to normality is a safe and secure populace.
On top of that you’ve got to build a future for the businesses people work in.
This means pressing pause on a lot of things. Things like business overdrafts, payroll tax, mortgage payments generally, government fees and charges.
And throw money at them.
We need to open the floodgates and do everything we can to ensure as many businesses as possible can open their doors once this crisis is over.
Without businesses there are no jobs to return to, and starting from scratch should not be an option we give an inch to.
We have a saying in our newsroom – “this is your grand final”.
The meaning is obvious.
It’s time to leave nothing on the field, to lean in, to drag up every cliche about giving 110 per cent and live it, as citizens, a society and as governments.
We’re all in it together now, and our policy responses should reflect that.