05/10/2026
We can afford it. The government just chooses to invest our taxes elsewhere.
We can afford the care. We just prefer Mum to pay.
Whenever I suggest we should properly support people with disability or pay family carers, someone says, “Lovely idea. Unfortunately, we just can’t afford it.”
They say this like Australia’s budget was discovered under a rock.
“Oh dear. There are only six dollars in here. Nothing we can do. Mum will have to keep providing round-the-clock care until her spine resigns.”
But our tax system didn’t arrive with the tides. People designed it. People decide what to tax, what to subsidise, what to leave alone and who gets to explain why their particular concession is essential to civilisation.
We can discuss taxing wages, land, inheritances, profits or economic rents — the money someone can collect because they control something scarce or have very little competition. We can decide how much of the country’s wealth goes towards care.
These are decisions. There isn’t a mountain somewhere with “THOU SHALT TAX WORK MORE ENTHUSIASTICALLY THAN WINDFALL GAINS” engraved on it. No matter how much the Financial Review might wish there were.
Yet suggest changing any of those decisions and suddenly everyone becomes a delicate economist.
“We must consider the incentives.”
Absolutely. Let’s consider the incentive currently offered to family carers: do an exhausting job for free, lose your career, damage your health, and occasionally receive a brochure about mindfulness.
I’m surprised recruitment isn’t stronger.
Apparently paying someone to provide care is an expense. Having their mother provide the same care for free is a saving.
The work is still happening. The bill has simply been redirected to her body, her sleep, her superannuation and whatever remains of her Tuesday (and every other day of the week).
You could make a hospital look very cheap using the same method. Stop paying the nurses and tell their spouses to cover the groceries. Outstanding efficiency. Someone give the consultant a bonus and a penthouse apartment.
Of course there are real limits. We need workers, training, services and sensible ways to raise revenue. You cannot put a tax reform proposal beside someone’s bed and expect it to do the overnight shift.
But “this will take resources and planning” is a very different answer from “we can’t afford it.”
We could choose to give carers enough support to return to paid work. We could choose to pay family members for substantial care they already provide. We could build in time to sleep, rest and have a life.
Even leisure. A few hours in which nobody needs medication, supervision, toileting or a document uploaded in a format the portal immediately rejects. Apparently Australians average 5 hours of leisure per day. I’d settle for two.
I realise this sounds extravagant. A mother sitting down recreationally. Treasury may need a moment.
There are costs to funding care. There are also costs to leaving carers exhausted, pushing them out of employment and waiting until a family collapses before offering help.
Those costs count even when they don’t appear neatly in the government’s column.
So when someone says, “We can’t afford it,” I’d like to hear the rest of the sentence.
“We can’t afford it under the tax and spending choices that we are willing to support given our current social mood.” A mood that has shifted further and further away from broad based cooperation and long-term goals and towards short-term, narrowly selfish interests of specifically those people best able to advocate for them.
Then we can have an honest argument about those choices.
The budget is written by people. In a democracy. We’re allowed to ask for edits.
