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Your views: on JobSeeker, nuclear waste and vaccination

Today, readers comment on a $3.57 daily increase to jobless payments, a nuclear waste dump and the politics of a COVID-19 jab.

Feb 24, 2021, updated Feb 24, 2021
SA senator and Social Services Minister Anne Ruston with Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Photo: AAP/Lukas Coch

SA senator and Social Services Minister Anne Ruston with Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Photo: AAP/Lukas Coch

Commenting on the story: JobSeeker payments permanently lifted by $25 a week

Well, thank you from the bottom of my heart. An extra $25 a week. 

I guess I can now afford to buy one packet of chops for the fortnight – maybe. 

You people in government have absolutely no idea how to survive on what you so graciously give out as a raise in our payments.

Just once I’d like to see one of you try to live for three months just on what we get, and see how you survive. – Maree French

The truism that you can judge a country by the way it treats its least fortunate is a damning indictment on the way we treat our jobless.

A rise in Jobseeker of $25 a week – an extra $3.57 a day – is possibly the least amount that could be announced with some maintenance of a straight face.

It is little enough to mean next to nothing for its recipients – crumbs from the table – and is accompanied by additional job seeking requirements. Which makes no sense in a time when the number of unemployed (and underemployed) far outnumbers the number of available job vacancies by a factor of somewhere between four to one and nine to one.

The Jobseeker rate is so low that it actively forms a barrier to gaining employment. How can you ace an interview when you are hungry, can’t afford interview clothes, struggle to pay the public transport to get there on time?

The Government has made an informed and deliberate decision to put over one million Australian families and individuals into poverty. They have decided it is OK for children to go without regular meals. It is OK with the Government for Australians – those they are elected to serve – to not be able to afford to pay their electricity bill, or buy the medications they need, to be at risk of homelessness, or indeed to be on the streets. Because that is what this decision means.

This guarantees that nearly one million adults – and their children and other dependents – will remain in poverty. Including those who might previously have been eligible for disability support pension, parenting payment and the age pension but due to previous changes in eligibility, are now on JobSeeker. Including the 40% who have been judged to only have partial capacity to work and so face additional discrimination in the job market. Including the 56% of women and 45% of men receiving JobSeeker who are 45 or older and face additional job discrimination due to age.

When our Government acts with such intentional cruelty against the most vulnerable, least advantaged in our community, against the recommendations of economic modelling, then we have to say we have long ceased being the lucky country. – Louise Miller Frost, CEO, St Vincent de Paul Society (SA)

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Commenting on the opinion piece: Long-term impact of quick nuclear dump fix

Why not use the Ranger uranium site as it is already contaminated and in a stable geological structure? Thus giving employment to Jabiru residents who are used to handling radioactive material. – Dean Harris

Thank you Dr Margaret Beavis for a clear, intelligent article on a second-rate process for a second-rate facility that will be a major future liability for South Australians. 

In addition the problem of transporting nuclear waste to Kimba, in remote SA, raises many concerns which have not been adequately addressed.

But most importantly this Bill  completely overrides  indigenous rights. It is time we, as a society, respected the tradional owners who cared for the land as opposed to the ongoing destruction of our environment. – Margaret Brown

Why doesn’t BHP and The state government make much needed money for the state and put the radioactive waste back into the mined stopes that are 1000 metres below the surface encapsulated in the concrete that already is used to fill the voids in the same patch of ground where the radioactive material was born? – Andrew Nourse

 Commenting on Your views, February 23:

In regard to Bob Korbel’s suggestion that Marshall was queue jumping, perhaps he is in a lose-lose situation.

By going first, he is a role model who may impress upon doubters that being vaccinated is the right thing to do. If he had waited, perhaps people would have been writing in questioning the motives of a Premier who tells others to have it, whilst not doing so himself. Cathy Chua

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