Crikey lashes aged pensioners

Crikey adopted a hard-hearted attitude towards Australia’s aged pensioners, but bled for the politically correct poor in the newsletter’s editorial last Friday.

Protesting pensioners were “rent-a-whingers” with “indexed stipends” who are “railing against the obsession with portion size in the parliamentary canteen,” according to Crikey’s Friday editorial.

They are also “vocal, well organised and readily accessible to a conservative media,” it went on.

By highlighting the plight of pensioners as the Melbourne Herald Sun did last Thursday amid the controversy over federal MPs dissatisfaction with portion sizes at the parliamentary cafeteria, Crikey concluded that the newspaper had deemed that “grannies living on sausages form an acceptable face of social disadvantage,” but that single parent families “scraping by in the back seats of cars” did not.

“Pensioners are hard working Aussie battlers after all. Homeless, single mother, violence victims? They should get a job,” Crikey’s leader writer sarcastically asserted.

So there you have it.

The products of 30 years of left wing social engineering are worthy of sympathy. The aged, who have contributed a lifetime of taxation, probably at much higher rates than anyone at Crikey is paying today, are not, according to the e-newsletter.

For its exercise in pensioner bashing, Crikey used the 2008 Australian Catholic Social Justice Statement which, it claimed, was “being all but ignored by the Australian media”. The statement, Crikey reported, identified the worthy poor as “the disabled, the homeless, the mentally ill, the indigenous and asylum seekers.”

It is possible to detect another agenda here. Crikey’s attack on pensioners also looks like a salvo in the generational war over entitlement. More money for pensioners might mean less money for x-generation-targeted middle-class welfare in the form of paid maternity leave and expanded childcare subsidies.