CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
Tax cuts for millions of Australians, cash payments for welfare recipients and major asset write-offs for nearly all businesses, but particularly the big ones that donate to the right political parties.
That was Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s second Federal Budget.
It’s nowhere near as psychopathic as Joe Hockey’s ‘lifters and leaners’ budget of 2014, but it does still prioritise quite a lot of things that you would only give a fuck about if you spent your entire life aiming to please your fellow alumni from some elite Sydney boys schools.
In the face of the biggest deficit since World War II, Frydenberg has overseen the budget deficit blow out to $213.7 billion or 11 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP).
With entire industries still in pandemic-related lockdowns right across Australia, question marks again swirl around the obsession with religion in schools.
$61.4 million will be committed to funding school chaplain programs in non-religious schools, an initiative that the Liberal Party has been a big supporter of since the Abbott Government.
This adds to the quarter billion dollars already designated towards this weird Christian answer to youth mental health programmes since 2014.
As the most likely perpetrators of child abuse in Australian schools, those involved in the school chaplaincy programs can’t believe they are still getting this much love.
Betoota Boys High school chaplain, Father Rocco Spighter says this was a very welcome boost to funding in his unwelcome program to the secular high school full of vulnerable students.
“I really didn’t think we’d be getting this much funding, you know, after the Royal Commission that found over 20% of Australia’s Christian clergymen had either perpetrated or aided the perpetration of child sex crimes.
“Haha. I thought we’d eventually be left to just ply our trade at the remaining religious private schools, which also got more money per student that the public schools”
“But I guess Scotty From Hillsong is the real deal. I love this new GodKeeper Program!”
“These are the kind of resources I need to tell gay teenagers that the feelings they are experiencing are just a phase and something they should ignore”
Other interesting stats to come out of this year’s budget include the revelations that Indigenous Health is being allocated one quarter of what the school chaplains are.
Older women still remain the most likely demographic to fall from the middle class to homelessness. The budget has allocated 40 dollars per working Australian female.
