Sunday, September 14, 2003

Get your forms – and marriage proposals – in quick

With next Friday being the final day for applications for the Mature Age Allowance and Partner Allowance, it’s going to be a busy week at Centrelink. While the former allowance is only available to a fairly narrow, pre-pension-age range, the latter is a cradle-snatcher’s charter, at least for those born on/before 1 July 1955. All that you single, 48 y.o. + boomers who are seeking both early retirement and a pert bed-thang need to do to get almost no-questions-asked welfare is to hitch up with a current, not too rich welfare recipient of at least 21 years old. But hurry!

And yes, I myself am currently single and otherwise eligible – in fact with no assets and no super – so if you’ve got a million dollar+ house (assets test exempt) and at least a few hundred grand in super (also assets test exempt), I am happy – pathetically so, in fact – to entertain your immediate offer. I can’t promise that I’ll give you too much under-the-doona action, but the good news is that you should be able to afford to buy it once-weekly at a decent brothel, what with the extra $350 a fortnight that partnering me simpliciter will bring into your cheque account.

I’m dreamin’, of course. It not that mid-fifties baby boomers aren’t callous, greedy fucks who would do almost anything to squeeze the last remaining drops out of a social security system based on a social contract – aka actually tiding people through economic hardship*. Nor that, in my late thirties, I am not a “good” actuarial risk for remaining unemployed for a solid few years – long enough for my erstwhile partner’s age pension to kick in, so making the partnership then redundant for them, in a dollars-and-cents sense. Rather, it is unlikely that any boomer who took up my proposal could actually live with themselves in the aftermath – true, they were getting something for nothing, but I would be getting to live rent-free in their swanky pad. Like I owned it or something! And we can’t have Gen Xrs with (even temporary) illusions of financial (or job) security, can we?


* A system that provides rorts for the old and affluent, and punishment for the rest, is self-evidently designed to crash, so taking down all idea of the social contract with it.

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