The previous government was extraordinarily generous to families.  According to calculations I did from Treasury’s Intergenerational Reports, the FTBs alone increased, in per person terms, 29% per person between the 2002 and 2007 reports. And that’s not counting the baby bonus or childcare handouts.

Yet according to the 2007 Australian Election Survey, only 41% of respondents thought that the Howard government had become more generous over the last 10 years to ‘working couples with children’. 23% of Australians, who must have been holidaying on another planet during the Howard era, even thought that they had become ‘tougher’ on these working families.

But in this familist time, is there any end to the demands of ‘working families’? According to the AES, 49.5% of respondents agree that ‘working couples with children’ deserve more or much more from the social welfare system. My answer, that they deserve ‘much less’, is supported by a miserable 0.8% of respondents. Even the answer that they deserve ‘less’ support has only 4.5% support. And I thought I had a tough task selling higher education reform.

But some hope comes from this morning’s Newspoll reported in The Australian. About two-thirds majorities support means testing the baby bonus and FTB B, and 57% support means testing childcare tax rebates. And there is majority support for the testing to begin at $70,000 a year, which if based on household income would start to make some serious savings.

Of course I think these savings should be directed to tax cuts, which would in part benefit those same families. Yet this Newspoll, like other recent polling on the subject, finds that support for tax cuts drops (in this case from 66% to 36%) if respondents are told that tax cuts might cause interest rates to increase. But tax cuts financed from reduced family spending ought to be neutral for interest rates, since the total amount ending up in consumers’ pockets will be the same.