MIDDLE class families in the "burbs" of Tasmania would be too embarrassed to be stuck on welfare and slowly rotting in a housing estate.
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The kids on student assistance schemes, maxed out credit cards, dad could retrain but he did his knee in, brawls with Centrelink, and the few luxuries include a Kevin Rudd stimulus flat-screen TV, dad's aluminum dinghy and trailer, pulled by his secondhand, hotted-up Toyota HiLux.
This family is gridlocked on welfare in a Housing Tasmania estate. On a treadmill to nowhere. Hire purchase agents circling like wolves. Tattslotto lingering like a mirage. A fantasy escape.
Welcome to the Tasmanian government. A chronic case of Centrelink blues; living off the nation and furiously pounding that treadmill to nowhere.
It should frustrate Tasmanians to know that almost two-thirds of our $5 billion state budget comes from Canberra. Western Australia receives only 31 per cent, NSW 41 per cent, Victoria 47 per cent and Queensland 48 per cent.
Only South Australia comes within 10 points of Tasmania's mendicant state malaise.
The best Tasmania can do to help itself is raise 39 per cent of total income to run a bureaucracy that consumes almost half the state budget in wages and other entitlements, before a cent is spent on actual services.
Taxes and fines/fees raise 21 per cent. The government businesses - the row of expensive HiLux utes in the driveway - yield a mere 7 per cent of annual recurring revenue.
Asset sales are no political fix. The Rundle government lost an election in 1998 partly over plans to sell off the energy utilities. Campbell Newman's government in Queensland was slaughtered over the same policy. Previous NSW Labor governments have paid a big price for attempted asset sales and now the current NSW government is taking a fire sale policy to the people on polling day this Saturday.
Premier Mike Baird is popular in NSW. He will need to be. Australians are fearful of price rises resulting from asset sales; plus they have this soppy nostalgia towards post-war energy infrastructure.
The government has few options. It can cut expenditure but Tasmanians don't like that either. The government could raise taxes and bring in new ones but bloated taxpayers, who grew fat and complacent on a decade-long diet of tax cuts, will punish anyone who tries to take the money back.
It seems bizarre that a government on so much welfare could own big assets like the Hydro, TT-Line, the Motor Accidents Insurance Board and the Ports Corporation; entities that return less than $300 million a year in taxes and dividends.
This is the fleet of hotted-up HiLux utes. In the case of the energy assets, a line-up of Beemers, with net assets alone of $3 billion.
Later this year a couple of reviews into federal-state finances will be due. The bigger states that prop up Tasmania wonder why we get 1.63 times our population share of GST grants, which amounts to an extra $747 million a year, at the expense of other states.
It's an unfair comparison. They get billions of dollars in trans-state highway funding and Defence expenditure that we don't.
But they are right in one respect. We're a "povo" state, living off their welfare and without doing some of the heavy lifting they do.
The problem for any government is that the task to change all this is so great and so electorally risky, it's not worth the effort.
The Hodgman government has endured a bumpy first year defending its budget cuts, against the cost of $400 million worth of election commitments, including unnecessary measures such as tax cuts, fuel reduction burns, extra walking track funding and a co-ordinator general.
That's the big problem. If Tasmania can't soberly tackle the gridlock of its finances, without a voter backlash, no state can.