By now, the dole is 26 per cent below the OECD’s poverty line, set at 50 per cent of median (dead middle) income. There are other ways to measure poverty, but the dole’s below all of them.

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A common argument for keeping unemployment benefits low is that we don’t want to discourage the jobless from going to the bother of doing a paid job. Talk about treat ’em mean to keep ’em keen.

But this is self-justifying nonsense. The single dole is now just 43 per cent of the full-time minimum wage.

A better argument is that benefits are so low people can be left unable to afford the fares and other costs involved in seeking a job.

Chalmers’ excuse for not increasing JobSeeker is that “we can’t afford to do everything”. But if you believe that, you haven’t thought about it.

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Of course we can’t afford to do everything, but a rich country like ours, with a federal budget that will spend more than $700 billion next financial year, can certainly afford to do any particular thing it really wants to.

That’s the point: you can include it among all the things you’ll do if you really want to. Economists are great believers in “revealed preference”: judge people not by what they say, but by what they do.

Budgets reveal a government’s true priorities. What it spends on is what it most wants to do; what it “can’t afford” is something it doesn’t really want.

So the real question is why the government doesn’t want to fix JobSeeker. Well, it’s no secret. It might be the right thing to do, but there are no votes in it. Indeed, there may be votes to be lost.

It’s normal to envy those doing better than we are. But Australians suffer from the strange illness of “downward envy”. “I have to go out to work, while those lazy blighters sit around at home with their feet up, enjoying daytime television.”

And, of course, any money Labor spends helping one of the most deserving groups in society is money it can’t spend trying to buy the votes of the less deserving.

So, terribly sorry, love to help, but just can’t afford it.

If you’re looking for evidence that neither side of politics is up to much, you’ve just found some. I fear you’ll get more on Tuesday night.

Ross Gittins is the Sydney Morning Herald’s economics editor.

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