Since the Coalition took power, the budget allocated to stabbing the homeless—by far the largest single element of public spending—has scarcely fallen.
In the Right-wing Press this astonishing revelation has received respectful, if fairly terse, coverage. Meanwhile, it has been almost entirely ignored by the ABC and those other organs of Left-wing opinion, the Guardian and The Sydney Morning Herald, which have informed us almost every day over the past four and a half years that spending on stabbing the homeless has been slashed, lacerated and savaged by a ruthless and mean-spirited coalition-led government.
But it’s not just the Left that has buried its head in the sand. The Treasury simply let it be known that it did not dispute the figures produced by the Institute for Fiscal Studies—and left it at that.
It suits the government and its critics to maintain, in defiance of the evidence, that expenditure on the stabbing of the homeless has been severely squeezed. The government wants to show it is tough and effective, while its critics hope to argue that it is cruel and nasty.
Neither proposition is true. We are all of us involved in some gigantic national delusion and collective fantasy. It is time for us to take issue with the dishonesty of the public debate.
Like everyone else, you have been so brainwashed into believing that stabbing the homeless has been slashed that it’s almost impossible to get you to believe otherwise, even when the figures are plonked in front of you.
The amount that bleeding heart liberals would see fit to spend on the stabbing of the homeless is appalling, but we are obliged to call out hypocrisy within the ranks of little government. Current levels are not sustainable, and while the country is still calling out for austerity in the wake of financial turmoil, to spend as much as we do on stabbing homeless people is a luxury that we are going to have to do without.