I'm encouraged by the extent to which Australians are starting to wake up to the fact that we can't live with the handout mentality forever.
I mentioned last week 42.2 per cent of Australian families, well over four million Australian families, receive more in welfare than they pay in tax. Now this can't be for real in a country as wealthy as we are.
How can we have 700,000 Australians on a disability pension?
Now I'm not talking about legitimate pensioners who can't afford to live on $562 a fortnight. That is another story.
It oughtn't to be impossible to determine which Australians have worked all their lives, paid their taxes and are now in retirement. Those people who've given deserve more than $280 a week. Subject, I might add, to an income test and an assets test.
But there are a couple of other issues here.
Pensions have increased in the last decade by 48 per cent, compared with a 30 per cent increase in the CPI. And when we're talking about pensions, a few facts are forgotten.
There are many surveys which show that only 1.8 per cent of older people, three quarters of whom rely on pensions, categorise themselves as poor or very poor.
Now there are no doubt many who find it difficult to live on the base pension. However, in talking about pensions, what is rarely discussed are the ever-widening concessions available to pensioners from State and Federal agencies.
Dental and other health services, aged care, public transport, council rates, water and energy costs, vehicle registration, telephone costs, all manner of concessions available on these costs.
Then there's a $500 lump sum payment, a $500 utility allowance, a $1000 carer payment, a $600 carer allowance.
These add significantly to the income of older Australians.
Sad to say though, they too have had their expectations raised consistent with the view of everybody, it seems, that someone else is responsible for my wellbeing.
Studies conducted in New Zealand a few years ago established that people collecting the age pension since the establishment of the welfare state received something like seven times more in benefits than they were ever paid in tax.
And as Professor Peter Saunders wrote recently, there is another side to the argument.
Succeeding generations will pay more in tax and receive less via welfare and benefits.
So as he makes the point, the consequence of this is you get a one or two generation privileged generation which has been supported by the public purse, in a way which will never be able to be repeated for future generations.
What he was saying is, Professor Saunders, that this generation has been able to argue its case for extraordinary support by virtue of the fact that it had suffered the great Depression and the World Wars.
Now we have unemployment figures at 30 year lows and total welfare dependency at record highs.
So an Australian workforce of 10 million is supporting two million welfare claimants of working age, plus another two million aged pensioners.
It can't go on.
The cost is more than $70 billion in social security and welfare payments alone.
40 years ago only three per cent of working age adults relied on welfare payments as the sole source of income.
Three per cent.
Today that's around 16 per cent.
As a first step, perhaps retirees should be compelled to convert their lump sums into annuities in order to maximise their income stream and reduce their call on the age pension.
What we know from welfare is one thing, and that is for certain.
We can't buy our way into a more caring society.
There have to be other answers.
One of them is to stop spending money on people who could easily support themselves.
And the other answer is, many more Australians could easily support themselves if taxes weren't so high.
Things have to be done differently in the future.
