Costello slips in the boot

Treasurer Peter Costello, in parliament yesterday, slams Labor’s plan to spend tax dollars for an indefinite cause.

IN Labor’s New Directions for the Arts, you find on page six, under the heading Supporting Australian Artists, that Labor will review the current state of artists’ incomes … It says that Labor will “review the current state of artists’ incomes and introduce initiatives that enable artists currently on welfare greater opportunity to produce work“. I will repeat that. Artists who are on welfare need greater opportunity to produce work. You might say to yourself: If you’re on welfare, you would have a lot of time to produce work if you were an artist. The member for Kingsford Smith (Peter Garrett) said that I would never have thought of something like this. Well, blow me down. I never have thought of something like this: that somebody on welfare needs more time to produce art.

It’s the kind of rubbish that the ALP are presenting as policy. Is Garrett going to double their welfare so they can produce double the work? Still, a sentence like that in policy statement may get a couple of votes.