Federal election 2016: handouts will only confirm victimhood

The success of the social media ­appeal that raised $60,000 to buy a toaster for a convicted thug and ABC audience member raises some intriguing questions, not all of them entirely depressing.

Who would have imagined that the soft-hearted Left was such an easy touch? Could they be encouraged to crowd-fund some of their other pet projects, like the ABC ­itself?

More pertinently, one is driven to ask why Bill Shorten felt obliged to portray Duncan Storrar — the object of this unprecedented outburst of virtual compassion — as a victim of a heartless government. He must have known that Storrar’s claim to be paying too much tax was bogus.

“If you lift my tax-free threshold, that changes my life,” Storrar told a sympathetic Q&A audience. “That means I get to say to my little girls, ‘Daddy’s not broke this weekend; we can go to the pictures’.

“Rich people don’t even notice their tax-free threshold lift. Why don’t I get it? Why do they get it?”

In fact, the tax-free threshold is the same for everyone: the equivalent of $350 a week. If Storrar worked a 38-hour week on the minimum wage, his pre-tax income would be $656.90. Even if he were to work full time for a year — which he does not — his weekly tax bill would be a mere $58.31. But a low-wage earner with two children aged between five and 12 would be entitled to family welfare payments of at least $650 a fortnight. Discounting housing and other benefits to which Storrar may or may not feel entitled, his net income should have therefore amounted to more than $900 a week. How much less tax did he want to pay?

Subsequent news stories suggest Storrar’s circumstances were not as simple as we first imagined. Separated from his wife and children, he lives with his mother and is claiming a fortnightly Austudy payment. Nothing came to light, however, that would suggest that Storrar is paying any tax.

Storrar is not a national hero, as a Q&A producer claims, but a pitiable member of the underclass. A son spoke of Storrar’s drug habit. His lengthy record includes assault, drug possession and threatening to kill. He has also breached intervention orders taken out against him by ex-partners.

That a violent, drug-addled criminal should become an object for compassion is a measure of the moral confusion of today’s Left.

ABC radio’s Jon Faine accused The Herald Sun of bullying for drawing attention to Storrar’s crooked past. Storrar, he said, was a man “who quite openly put his own battle with mental illness on national television”. Storrar had raised “a legitimate question about equity and fairness in the distribution of tax revenue”. Others will disagree.

A generation ago, those who didn’t work were called bludgers, a uniquely Australian word coined in the late 19th century to describe a man who lived from the immoral earnings of a woman. In New Zealand such people were known as “sundowners” — slackers who would show up when the day’s work was completed, hoping for a feed.

In today’s hyper-compassionate world, we are discouraged from using such terms. Today we refer to them as victims, meaning that nothing bad that happens in their lives can possibly be their fault. If they make unfortunate life choices, it is because they are forced by circumstances.

“We know that socio-economic disadvantage and crime are linked,” wrote a youthful Fairfax commentator.

“The federal budget offered a tax cut to wealthier income earners, yet little relief or assistance to poorer people.”

Bill Shorten was happy to play along. “We understand, unlike Mr Turnbull, that a lot of Australians are doing it hard … people like Duncan get nothing in their tax and face harsh cuts.”

Labor was once the workers’ party; today it is in danger of becoming the shirker’s party. Its rallying cry could be “Fair go for the feckless” if we were allowed to use that term, which we are not. Even Tony Abbott’s adoption of Robert Menzies’ 1940s distinction between lifters and leaners was criticised as insensitive. While Menzies divided the country into the idle and the industrious, today’s preferred segregation is between victims and their ­oppressors.

Nurtured by academia and reinforced daily by the compassion industry, this feeble narrative packs a powerful punch. Any change to the welfare system — other than chucking in money, of course — raises squeals of resentment. Labor, judging by Shorten’s recent comments, is happy to leave this disempowering, dignity-destroying, poisonous and pernicious system unchanged.

You would have to go back to Australia’s 16th prime minister, Ben Chifley, to hear a Labor leader speak of “freedom from want”. That battle was won largely by a free market economy that harnessed human aspiration to drive the post-war growth in prosperity, with a social security safety net to protect against brute bad luck.

For today’s Left, however, welfare has become more than a temporary means to keep body and soul together. It is a tool for levelling the haves and the have nots, taking from the rich to give to the poor.

No other Labor leader has stoked these fires of envy as energetically as Shorten. No previous leader has tried to make wealth and income inequality the defining issue of an election campaign.

No previous Labor leader would have vacated the ground on prosperity and employment to pursue a vendetta against multi­nationals, millionaires and climate change and allow the Liberals to campaign uncontested as the party of growth, jobs and a secure future.

For Chifley, Labor’s mission was to “affirm for every man the right to receive a fair return for his labour, enterprise and initiative”. For Shorten, it is to affirm the nebulous right to fairness.

Meanwhile, the organiser of the buy-Storrar-a-toaster appeal is said to be nervous about how the money will be spent. Understandably so. One doubts that $60,000 will enable Duncan Storrar to get his life together; indeed it will ­almost certainly make it worse. A shortage of cash is a symptom of poverty, not its cause.

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.