Last night on the nation’s nightmare, Q and A, Kelly O’Dwyer mentioned helping a small business buy a $6000 toaster. Which is just perfect, after Malcolm Turnbull suggesting parents loan their kids money to buy their first home (???!!) which is, obviously, very possible.
Anyway, here are some things No Award could buy with $6000 from the government:
- a billion hours of therapy for the nomcat
- 40 hours of therapy for human Australians – BEFORE the $124.50 Medicare rebate
- a quite decent secondhand car
- two MacBook Pros
- two months off work
- 153 of Kmart’s fanciest toasters
- or one of Kmart’s fanciest toasters and 1987 loaves of fresh bread
- maybe make it 1985 loaves and get some butter/Nutellex and Vegemite as well?
- rent for many months on either of our apartments
- or rent for a week in Sydney AHAHAHAHAHAHohgod
- 40 nights in crisis accommodation for a family at Melbourne City Mission (and many evenings of beds in other accommodations such as Homeground)
- a lot of food for the ASRC food bank
- funding for an artist to conduct a six month residency
- keep an asylum seeker in detention on Nauru for 54 days (we wouldn’t though, AUS GOVT and NOR SHOULD YOU)
- OR, support an asylum seeker in the Australian community for six months
- 857 large jars of Nutella
- 24 vintage ladies bikes
- or some other amount of better bikes
- about 2000 rolls of washi tape, give or take
- 500 months of Netflix
- 63 – 240 months of Foxtel Play
- Approximately 2033 packages of coloured reflective doodads for your bike/wheelchair
- About 2777 flashing armbands for raves/night cycling/scaring the cat
no-award.net 
They’re not talking about some silly oligarch-toaster covered with diamonds and rubies, they’re talking about an industrial sized machine for a catering business. Which yes, does cost that much.
I used to work as a librarian in a library aimed at people who wanted to start small businesses, and it taught me that most people who have only worked as an employee, or in occupations that don’t require a lot of special equipment, have no idea HOW MUCH it costs to set up a retail or manufacturing small business from scratch. Which used to make me melt down with rage when Tory politicians in the UK would tell long-term unemployed people that it was their responsibility to be entrepreneurial and just set up a shop or a cafe or something.
Yeah, we know it costs a lot to set up small businesses with their appliances. I hope people who are making fun of the toaster (as we are) know that the point isn’t how much it cost; the point is that she felt that was an appropriate response to a thing that wasn’t about small businesses. I guess that bit’s hard to tell from the twitters we excerpt.
Sorry, you hit a personal sore spot with me. Partly the former job experience, but also because the post looked like a “the government is spending YOUR TAX MONEY on pointless stuff!” story, which I think is an essentially right-wing trope, and if leftists want to use it they need to be very clear about why the spending they’re attacking is unnecessary or corrupt.
No Award is very firmly on the side of Big Government. The BIGGEST of governments
except for big government on tropical torture gulags, we are anti big government there
Yeah, we should have given more context for non-Australians, but “We have subsidised a $6000 toaster for a small business” was the ‘answer’ to the question, “How do tax breaks for the wealthy assist people who are struggling to raise families on minimum wage?”
Maybe we could look into the cost of remedial lessons for Liberal Party politicians to teach them how to answer the question they were actually asked, rather than the one they wanted to hear.