The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has released its biennial Society at a Glance report into the state of member economies.

Subtitled “The crisis and its aftermath”, the report indicates that Australia is going backward on a number of fronts. Child poverty is rising and inequality is above the OECD average. The number of people living in poverty is 14.4 percent of the population, compared to the OECD average of 11.3 percent. One in 10 say that they cannot afford to buy enough food.

And despite all the hysteria from the Liberals about a “culture of entitlement” and out of control government spending, the report also found that Australia’s social spending as a proportion of GDP is lower than other developed countries.

This is damning, given that Australia is being compared with countries that were crippled by recession during the past five years and where mass unemployment continues.

The number of people looking for work in OECD countries is now 48 million – up 15 million since September 2007. In Greece, Spain and Ireland, the number of households surviving with no income at all doubled. Low income earners, youth and children have been hit hardest by these trends.

Not surprisingly, the number of people dissatisfied with their lives has increased sharply. Inequality was already on the rise prior to the latest problems. The report notes, “The crisis of the past years has added to … long term trends. Many of those who benefitted least from growth before the crisis also bore a heavy burden in the recession.”

In the US, the rich have managed to overcome crisis-related losses and then some. While the recession took a small bite out of their profits, the revenue of the top 1 percent now exceeds pre-recession levels.

Liberals’ agenda

Social services minister Kevin Andrews has flagged that the government is looking to rein in spending on the disability support pension sometime after the May budget. Currently, the pension pays slightly more than unemployment benefits and is tied to increases in wages, as opposed to Newstart, which is pegged at the lower rate of inflation.

“In the longer term, the government has to take into account the fact that there is now a perverse incentive for people to get on to the disability pension rather than on the Newstart allowance, because it pays more”, Andrews told ABC television.

Clearly the government’s agenda is to make us all equally poor.

Peter Whiteford of the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University points out that the Australian “level of payments for the unemployed is one of the lowest in the OECD”. He also notes that the previous ALP government moving single parents onto the Newstart payment is one of the factors that have contributed to greater poverty in families with children.

Although the aged pension has been excluded from a proposed review of Centrelink payments, both the Productivity Commission and the Grattan Institute recommended in reports released late last year that the age pension be indexed to increases in life expectancy.

The government is open to such changes, which would result in poor and working class people working longer before they could qualify for the pension.

Proposed cuts to higher education and health will also price the poor out of the medical system and make university a luxury only for the rich.

Trends don’t look promising under this Liberal government.

[Follow Kim on Twitter @kim_doyle1]