Maltese immigrants arrive in Sydney in 1948.

By Warren Nunn

2 The confusion  | 3 The tension4 My vote | 5 Policy problems | 6 Handouts | 7 The needy |  8 Too much? |  9 The truth? |  10 The dissenters |  11 Intolerance | 12 Few decide

No 6: Having considered my voting intentions, I turn back to  what Nicole McInnes wrote.

Hard-working people don’t want help

But now back to some of the points that Nicole McInnes reflected on. She described how hard her parents worked to make their life comfortable and not have to rely on Government support.

The details are worth reflecting on but you would need to read the article to get the full impact of that. It seems her family and many others feared that some ALP policies would take away some of what they had worked for.

As Nicole said, “If successful this election, this was a family that the Labor Party would have deemed wealthy enough to punish for their hard work, preferring to reward those that are a drain on society taking a pension.”

And points like this bring a perspective you won’t read about on newspaper front pages these days. “These are quiet ones that have never taken a handout. Even when they arrived in Australia after months on a ship from Europe to escape the war in 1937, they didn’t expect help,” she wrote.

Nicole is right. A great many people have always been prepared to work hard for what they get. They will pay their taxes; and they will contribute to their community way beyond their working life. They don’t want a handout; they want to stand on their own two feet. And they’re not happy that their tax dollars are being wasted.

As she put it, they don’t want a handout from “guilt-ridden, eastern suburbs residents who look condescendingly on anyone outside the 5km ring from Bondi Beach”.

Next: The needy.