Category Archives: Charity

Critiques of welfare/charity approaches, or issues for the charitable sector

Social Services and Energy Distribution: The Treatment of Surpluses and Profits in Pseudo Markets

Arising from neoliberalism’s obsession to not just analyse the world in market terms, but to make the world into a market, governments in Australia and elsewhere have privatised or outsourced a range of services which had previously been provided by government departments or authorities. South Australia followed this ideological venture in a range of areas, but in this post I simply want to focus on two examples: social service provision and the electricity distribution network.

While the two industries are obviously different, in both cases there was an attempt to mimic or impose market discipline where there was no competition and no real market. Social services are a government monopsony where service users are not the customers so the theoretical link between utility, market demand and price is broken, while energy distribution networks are a natural and legislated monopoly.

Much could be written about the structures and regulation of the “markets” that were established, but I want to focus on just one aspect: the inconsistency in the treatment of profit. This treatment has consequences for social service delivery and energy prices, and ultimately therefore, for equality.

Social Services

The provision of social services, such child and family support, financial counselling, community health, housing and homelessness support, addiction help, and disability services are an essential part of a government’s role in a modern society. But the neoliberal vision and the potential to cut costs by outsourcing services to organisations with lower pay or less regulation led to the creation of pseudo-markets where charities and not-for-profit (NFP) organisations (and some private companies) periodically bid for government tenders to provide services. The successful tenderer is then contracted to provide services at the agreed price, with the government apparently happy in the knowledge that the competition between tenders has ensured value for money.

Heading text from SA government contracts for social services. The terms prevent surplus accumulation.

There are some good reasons for government outsourcing of some social services (and much hubris in relation others), but the treatment of the cost of services and profit in the South Australian government contracts is curious. The government holds most of the cards in any contract negotiation, and generally does not allow for an operational surplus in a contract price. Further, given that the government pays for service provision in advance, it wants to ensure that the money is spent on the services it paid for. And so, the standard SA government contract with NFP service providers has a clause (10) allowing the government to require repayment of any advanced funding which has not been expended in a given year. While there is flexibility for the government not to require repayment, some departments aggressively pursue such repayment.

At best this is a lop-sided contract, with one party (the government) agreeing a price for the provision of a service, and then reducing that price if the service provider manages to make savings – even though the service has been provided as agreed. Despite government rhetoric of outcome-based approaches, the clawing back of unexpended funds is completely input-focused.

However, the ramifications are broader because the lack of operational surpluses and the claw-back of funding means that NFPs struggle to find surpluses to build robust balance sheets and invest in organisational sustainability and development. It is then no surprise that the sector is characterised by an under-investment in technology (as reported in multiple annual surveys) and by short-horizons with a reliance on the next government contract to maintain staff and services.

To be clear, the fact that organisations are not-for-profit does not mean that they can’t lawfully or shouldn’t make a surplus on any service or in any year – it simply means that any surplus has to be put back in to the organisation and can’t be allocated to members as a dividend or other profit distribution. However, the contractual limitations on building and keeping such operational surpluses is detrimental to the sustainability of NFPs and stops them providing more and better services to the people who rely on them.

Electricity Distribution

The pseudo-market created in energy distribution is quite different. By contrast to the government monopsony in social services, the energy companies who bought the privatised energy networks operate in a more standard business framework with the cost of services being paid for by energy consumers (accounting for about 40% of energy bills). However, because the networks have monopoly power, their operations are regulated by laws which limit the aggregate revenue they can get from consumers.

As I have noted in a previous post, the calculation of this aggregate is complex and contested, but it is theoretically based on the cost of service provision, including an agreed rate of return on capital (i.e. profit) – with the regulator determining what costs and profit rates are appropriate.

This allowance of a return on capital contrasts to social service provision in that an agreed rate of profit is viewed as a normal cost of service provision – a cost not usually allowed in NFP contracting (noting that, in theory at least, both have separate allowances for administrative overheads). The result of this is that these private companies can accumulate profit to re-invest to build the company and to distribute to shareholders in a way that NFPs can’t.

However, the difference does not stop there. As I have reported previously, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis has produced reports highlighting the “supernormal” profits energy distribution companies have made when their actual costs have come in below the costs agreed by the regulator. In 2022, this amounted to $199m for SA Power Networks and around $2bn across all network providers nationally. While the differences in estimated and actual costs may be factored into future regulatory determinations, this money is not immediately clawed back by the regulator or consumer – indeed, there is a whole incentive scheme built in to the cost calculation to encourage such cost-savings.

A Modest Proposal

There is no doubt that NFP service providers would love to be able to keep their operational savings and surpluses to reinvest in their organisation and services, or even to have an incentive system which mirrored that which enables energy networks to benefit from cost savings.

For governments to be consistent, they should either allow NFP service providers to retain profit (i.e. money not spent when they have provided the agreed services) as per the energy regulation, or force energy networks to refund to customers the above-regulated profits when their costs of service provision are lower than the regulated amount. Energy network owners would still be better off than social service NFPs as the former would still get their guaranteed return on capital, but in relation to the unexpected savings and surpluses, it is a simple proposition that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. But such outcomes are about power (of the political economic kind), not policy, and I suspect in this case it is energy consumers who will continue to be plucked.

If Culture Is Not An Industry, What About Social Service?

Justin O’Connor’s book, Culture is not an Industry, critiques the arts sector embrace of the description of itself as a “creative industry”. The idea and initial adoption was a pragmatic attempt to gain political legitimacy and funding, but it came at a time (in England under Tony Blair, and rolling out from there) when neoliberalism had undone all the structures and legitimacy of industry planning. Accordingly, the creative industry approach commodified culture and functionalised it without arresting any of the impoverishment of art/culture (both in public standing and artists’ livelihood).

I know very little about art and culture, so I do not want to review O’Connor’s book here. Rather, I want to reflect on the relevance of the issues raised to the social service sector where I work.

Book Cover: Justin O'Connor, Culture is not an Industry: Reclaiming art and culture for the common good

Issues in Common

The creative industries frame sees art and cultural work as just one form of “creativity” alongside commercial knowledge creation areas. As O’Connor notes, the creative industry workforce figures drop by more than half when software and industrial design are excluded, and the mantra of creative industries has done little to protect or promote actual cultural industries (live and recorded music, films, games, books, TV and radio, newspapers, theatre, etc). There was never more than token recognition of the unique contribution of art and culture to place, community and the economy, there was no increase in public funding, and art and cultural production became increasingly dominated by the global monopolies of platform capitalism. The result has been a diminishing of creative autonomy, remuneration and security of actual cultural workers.

For its part, the boundaries of the not-for-profit social service sector are similarly hard to define, and the sector often sacrifices the uniqueness of its community base for incorporation into categories which seem to have greater economic importance. For instance, one peak body adopts the ABS-defined “health and social assistance” industry data (which includes public hospitals and health system), while another uses ACNC charities data (which includes universities, environmental charities and cultural institutions). This is misleading, and the claims of economic importance get little political traction anyway.

The parallels in the positioning of the arts and social service sectors can be seen clearly in the following from O’Connor. I have simply inserted alternative text in brackets.

“Anyone familiar with the arts and cultural [social service] sector will know its hand-to-mouth, cunning pragmatism, where one renders to Caesar whatever Caesar wants if it means getting that grant. The grant you need to survive. Given the antipathy to cultural [welfare] funding by many governments, many are content to huddle under the protective umbrella of the creative economy [health and social assistance industry classification], with all those jobs and wealth and innovation metrics, simply in order to keep their heads above water.” [p. 200]

The problem is not simply the need to render to Caesar endless and largely meaningless quantitative data on social and economic impact, it is that this approach fundamentally misunderstands and perverts the mission of the sectors. For O’Connor this means seeing and valuing arts and culture primarily as a contributor to economic growth, rather than as an essential expression of the human experience and a facilitator of a shared cultural citizenship. For the social service sector, it facilitates a model of top-down service provision, rather than a broader agenda of community development and advocacy for structural change.

For both culture and for social service, the embrace of an economic model comes at a cost.

Neoliberalism and Differences in Sector Experiences

For all the commonality above, the arts and social service sector have had a very different experience of neoliberalism’s hollowing-out of the state and abandonment of the public provision of goods and services. These processes impoverished arts and culture, and left cultural workers more precarious, but the not-for-profit social services sector massively increased with the outsourcing of government services (although arguably the demand for and complexity of service provision also increased with the withdrawal of public housing, cuts to public services and the impoverishment of social security payments).

But the differences between the sectors are not just about size.

Another key strand of O’Connor’s book is the analysis of neoliberalism’s privatisation and individualisation of culture. The marketisation of culture along with the growth of platform capitalism leaves us now with mass consumption of cultural product via Netflix, Disney etc. The household, rather than public spaces, become the primary place of cultural consumption as part of a broader neoliberal shift from mass consumption (public goods) to personalised choice (private goods). This shift is based on a false premiss (as even private consumption is socially constructed) and it is damaging to the community as a whole.

This shift is also evident in social services, although the issues and experience may be very different. The much-heralded NDIS is exactly that sort of shift, from the provision of public and institutionalised disability services to a model of service provision as a private good “purchased” by the recipient (or their advisors). The same could be said of the move from institutional aged care to the increased provision of services at home. These systems may not be perfect, but were a necessary departure from their oppressive predecessors.

Of course one should not push this analysis too far. These aged and disability services remain publicly funded welfare supports, and in both culture and social service sectors there has been a common shift from an intrinsic value to a transactional one. Further, as with creative industries, the shift to the consumer model of social service has enabled private profit making and the construction of NFPs as pseudo-corporations – with similar precarious results for workers.

In short, neoliberalism’s reshaping of the cultural sector provides a useful window into what is happening in social services, but the impacts can’t simply be cut-and-pasted from O’Connor’s analysis.

Universality and Social Service Sector Advocacy

The final point I want to consider arises from the above discussion and O’Connor’s passionate advocacy for the provision of social infrastructure and universal basic services (housing, health, education, welfare and transport). This draws on Foundational Economy scholarship that argues that people’s lives and household liveability is not simply based on the market or cash incomes. Rather it is underpinned by three pillars: household income, essential services, and social and cultural infrastructure.

Foundational Economy Diagram of the three pillars of household liveability: essential services, social infrastructure and disposable income.
(Diagram from the FE Collective, not from O’Connor’s book)

Given this, and his concern about the privatisation and the neoliberal fracturing of culture, O’Connor argues that increasing services or supports in a way that further privileges household consumption at the expense of any wider social connection or solidarity is not an unproblematic advance. Indeed, O’Connor is suspicious of calls for a Universal Basic Income, for a variety of reasons, but including because it replaces social activity (work) with atomised individual activity (consumption).

While decent wages and income supports are obviously important, O’Connor’s argument provides a significant challenge for social service advocacy, which over the last decade or more has been very focused on raising the rate of income support payments like Newstart/Jobseeker.

In a world of limited resources (and even more limited advocacy power), there are real policy choices between income supports, essential services and social and cultural infrastructure. Should we be advocating for more public libraries and public wifi, or simply higher incomes so people can better afford to purchase data and devices? Is government housing support better delivered as direct rent assistance payments or by increasing the provision of public housing? Should we be investing in the “communal luxuries” of theatres and galleries, sports fields, public institutions and public spaces, or simply increasing incomes so people can support their own culture and leisure choices?

I saw some of this tension play out in a recent ACOSS Post-Budget Event. Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers tried to deflect criticism of the failure to increase JobSeeker by pointing to a range of other budgets measures which would support people on very low incomes. The audience did not buy it and remained focused on income-support payment levels.

Of course, when pressed, our sector would go for the “all of the above” choice avoidance, but in reality, social sector advocacy tends towards income-based solutions to poverty and disadvantage (or small-scale, after-the-fact services) rather than public infrastructure and universal public services. This is not just in what we advocate for, but also how we understand the problem. Our preferred descriptor of “income support” reflects a more individualised focus than the older term of “social security”, while our basic measures of poverty and inequality relate to only to income (e.g. a poverty line of $x per week). This is despite the fact that:

  • the limited data available suggests the inclusion of a range of universal public services as “social transfers in kind” in the income data radically reduces measured inequality, and
  • old ABS data shows that accounting for these service (along with inputed rent) decreases the poverty rate by about two-thirds (from 12% to 3.9% in 2013-14).

This is surely an argument to focus more on collective solutions through universal basic services, rather than only on payments. Yet despite this, and the strength of O’Connor’s arguments, I was surprised that I was still uncomfortable about the universalism and subsequent cost of such service provision. I kept going to the need to provide for the poorest first and to target funding. For instance, free public transport would be a subsidy to middle class office workers, managers and city professionals who can afford weekly tickets. Surely concessions for those on low-incomes would be cheaper and better targeted?

Given that I have just spent three years campaigning for better state government concessions, my head is very much in that income-support space. But O’Connor’s and the foundational economy approach is a useful reminder that a tactical win is not systemic change or the end goal. Some of the best supports we can provide to those with limited income or resources may not be directed to those people at all, but may be about creating better services for all.

Conclusion

I have some quibbles about some of the theoretical propositions in O’Connor’s book, and more questions about the Foundational Economics approach. I may return to these at a later date, but overall I found Culture is not a Creative Industry both readable and challenging. I will be interested to see its reception among arts and cultural practitioners, but for me it was well worth the read for its insights and applicability beyond that space.

Thomas Piketty, Councils of Social Service and Equality Advocacy

This piece considers the implications of the writings of Thomas Piketty for the work of the Councils of Social Service in Australia, but it is also relevant to other organisations and individuals fighting inequality.

Picture of two books: Capital in the Twenty-First Century; and Capital and Ideology Implications for Councils of Social Service

I have summarised Piketty’s major work in a separate article, and those who are unfamiliar with his work may want to read that first. Here I draw on my understandings of Piketty to challenge some familiar assumptions, data and policy prescriptions.

WHO AND WHY

Thomas Piketty became a “rock star” economist after the publication of his ground-breaking Capital in the Twenty-First Century in 2013/14. The book provided a macro-economic analysis of issues raised by the political mobilisations of the Occupy movements of the previous decade, and it helped put questions of inequality on the cultural and political agenda around the world.

The book contains new intellectual and data tools (resourced and built upon by a team of academics across a range of countries and presented in the World Inequality Database). It is also highly critical of the official data produced by agencies like the ABS and relied on by many of us. For this reason, it is a body of work we need to engaged with.

Piketty’s work was decried by right-wing think tanks (e.g. the Free Market Foundation, and the Cato Institute), but also threatened to be banned in China. And perhaps most famously, alongside an obsessive array of data, he used the nineteenth century novels of Jane Austen and Honore de Balzac as evidence of inequality.

What could be more inviting?

FOCUS ON WEALTH

Much of the public discussion of poverty, cost-of-living, concessions and income support (including my own work at SACOSS) focuses on inequality of income. However, Piketty’s work demands a new focus on wealth accumulation and inequality. His data highlights inequality of wealth, while the famous r>g formulation focuses on the role of capital/wealth in driving income inequality.

A recent study by Lisa Adkins and others builds on Piketty’s argument to argue that asset price inflation means that capital gains, capital income and inter-generational transfers are the preeminent drivers of inequality. This is important because those gains are mostly within the sphere of capital ownership. They may not show up as income at all.

It is well-known that inequality of wealth is generally greater than inequality of income, but the above suggests that a focus on income inequality may underestimate the true extent of economic inequality and miss key drivers of it.

Beyond mapping inequality, a focus on wealth is important because ABS data shows that there are significant differences in where particular households sit on wealth and income stratifications:

  • Only 35% of households in the lowest income quintile are also in the lowest wealth quintile, 23% have average wealth (home-owning pensioners?) and 7.3% have high wealth;
  • 42% of households in the highest income quintile are also high-wealth households – meaning that nearly 60% do not have high wealth.

Some recent SACOSS work has also shown significant differences between the expenditure patterns of households on essentials like water and public transport depending on whether their position is measured by income or wealth.

Insurance is another example of where expenditure is regressive in relation to income, that is, a proportionately bigger imposition on low-income households, but different when looking at households based on wealth. When considering income, making insurance cheaper (for instance by removing stamp duty on policies) looks like a good policy – and one that has been contemplated by SACOSS. However, such a policy will primarily result in a windfall for higher wealth households who have more to insure and proportionately higher insurance expenditures. For this reason, SACOSS has opted to call for an insurance concession for low-income households.

Similarly, policies that provide grants or subsidies to landlords for energy efficiency investments (as advocated in ACOSS’ NLEPP) are good in the income frame as they can lower energy bills for low-income tenants. However, such policies may also increase wealth inequality by increasing the value of the property and the wealth of the landowner.

In short, with an exclusive focus on income, we may be advocating and getting benefits for those who are financially well off, or we may not be targeting supports to where they are most needed.

DATA ISSUES

Even where the focus is on income, Piketty’s work raises questions about the data we use to categorise and measure income inequality. He argues that the household survey-data used in official measures of inequality is flawed both in collection method and categorisation. For instance, he suggests results vary if weekly, monthly or yearly income is used, while ratios between percentiles are volatile and surveys tend to significantly underestimate the income and wealth of the highest percentiles.

For this reason, Piketty prefers tax data and expresses inequality as a share of total income/wealth, rather than as the percentile ratios or Gini coefficients (found in ABS data). As per my previous post here, I also think the income share methodology is more versatile in that it can be applied to other areas such as gender. Indeed, the World Inequality database now includes this as part of its Australian data.

Piketty also suggests that the classification of households into quintiles is flawed. It suggests an even stratification of households and significantly fails to account for the massive increases in income and wealth in the top 10%, 1% or even 0.1% – and the power they exercise as a class. Instead he proposes a classification of classes defined as:

  • Lower = bottom 50% of income or wealth
  • Middle = from the 50th to 90th percentile of income of wealth
  • Upper = top 10%, which includes the “dominant class” which are the top 1%.

He admits this is somewhat arbitrary, but the lower bracket accounts for very little of society’s income or wealth, and the definition of middle is close to common usage of people who are doing better than most, but not the elite.

ACOSS’ flagship inequality report uses similar categorisations for wealth, but not for income. Other work around the network of Councils of Social Service (e.g. SACOSS cost of living reports) also uses income quintiles which may hide the real distributional dynamics. This is often because of the limitations of the data published by the ABS, but where there is the opportunity to use microdata to produce our own statistics, we should not be bound by ABS categories.

POLICY

The final chapter of Piketty’s second great tome, Capital and Ideology, outlines policy proposals which arise from his analysis. All reflect a base understanding that inequality should be limited and that to do this, we need to think about wealth as temporary and social, not a permanent and inalienable individual right. He proposes a number of large-scale policies or directions to limit inequality, including:

  • Co-management and power-sharing within corporations
  • Progressive income taxes and a basic income provision
  • Progressive annual wealth tax
  • Progressive inheritance taxes
  • Universal capital endowments of $100k or more paid to 25-ish year olds (and taxed back over time)
  • A public register of assets to facilitate greater transparency of wealth
  • A constitutional principle of fiscal justice based on non-regressivity and the publication of information on how tax is apportioned among the population
  • A progressive carbon tax
  • A just distribution of educational investment
  • Replacing tax deductions for political and charitable giving with funding vouchers for people to allocate to their preferred charities.
  • Transnational democracy and new global institutions.

The tax policies are obviously difficult to achieve politically, but go well beyond the timid tax changes the Councils of Social Service often champion. Apart from some mischievous SACOSS mentions of inheritance taxes, changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax are about as bold as we get (see for instance, ACOSS Budget Priorities, Section 10). These proposals are certainly steps in the right direction – but they are a long way short of annual wealth taxes. However, the power of Piketty’s historical and comparative analysis is that none of the big tax policies are utopian dreams. They all have existed at different times and/or currently exist in different places.

The universal capital endowment is more speculative. While I can see how it flows from the analysis, I worry about the implications for those who through fate/sickness/whatever don’t make the most of that endowment. Having had their perceived chance, will they simply be left behind with no support/sympathy?

Similarly, while in a previous post I have recommended removing tax deductions for charitable donations, I fear the alternative Piketty proposes. He proposes a voucher scheme where everyone can vote an allocation of money. But based on some local examples of where South Australians were asked to vote funding for neighbourhood projects, it is easy to see that such a scheme may simply lead to a populist contest where money does not go to where it is most needed.

THE ULTIMATE QUESTION

However, the quibbles above are relatively trivial issues for what are big proposals for broad policy directions. And beyond the individual proposals, Piketty’s work prompts one big final question: in the face of the macro-processes that are driving inequality, is the scale of change we often work at really going to make a dent on rising inequality?

I suspect not, but that is the ultimate challenge of Piketty’s work. It is a theme I will return to in future posts.

Proposal to Remove Tax Deductibility for Donations to Charities

This is a slightly longer and more generalised version of a presentation I made to the Reset arts conference (with a caveat that these are personal views, not a policy of my employer). My presentation was part of a series of seven-minute pitches of provocative ideas.

Reset: A New Public Agenda for the Arts

The Pitch

My provocative proposal today is to remove tax deductibility for donations to the arts, and to charities generally – because it will increase public accountability and fairness in funding.

Piketty

The idea is raised by French economic rockstar, Thomas Piketty, whose work has been pivotal in highlighting growing inequality around the world. Famously, in his best-selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, he warned that processes of capital accumulation were leading western countries on a path to a level of inequality not seen since before the First World War. Yet while the argument, and the focus of the wealth of the top 1% has been celebrated, there has been less attention to or support for the policies he and his collaborators propose to promote greater equality. These proposals, contained in his later book, Capital and Ideology, are principally around controls on capital, taxation of wealth and progressive income taxation.

Most relevantly for the charitable sector, Piketty argues for the removal of tax deductibility for charitable donations because such donations empower and reward the preferences of the rich. He was focused on the large endowments to French and American elite educational institutions that promote inequality in education and opportunity, rather than on my $20 a month donation to whoever – but the argument is basically the same.

Tax deductions for charitable donations represent public money which is theoretically paid in taxes to the government, but handed back to be directed and expended by private individuals and corporations on programs which fit their personal priorities.

To be clear, in supporting this proposal, I am not suggesting that private donations to charities should be banned, just that those donations should not be tax deductible and that the extra tax revenue gained from this should be used to fund the same areas of activity through transparent public funding processes.

How Much Money?

Federal Budget papers suggest that the amount of tax forgone due to deductions for philanthropy in 2020-21 was around $1.6bn across all charities. That is about 32% of all Federal government grants to not-for-profit organisations.[1] In the arts, my back of envelope calculation is that it would be about $50m (based on the $132m donated to ROCO arts/cultural organisations in 2018-19). That is equivalent to around 20% of the funding of the Australia Council, or five times the Creative Partnerships program.

So, we are talking about a fair bit of money that could go into peer assessed, publicly funded programs.

Of course this assumes that the total amount of tax deductions simply switches from private philanthropists to public funding. Economists will tell us that this won’t happen, but the key question is, what is the net impact on funding for the not-for-profit sector as a whole?

It is possible that total funding could increase if donations do not drop by as much as the tax revenue gained. If donations drop by the same amount of the tax deduction, then there is net zero impact on overall sector funding.

But the bigger question is: if we oppose removing tax deductions because we think philanthropists will stop donating, what does that say about our view of philanthropists and about how we value art or the work of charities? Are we really just a tax avoidance plan? Are our donors really that self-serving – or is there a different value proposition at play? How confident are we in the public value of our work?

A side benefit

Removing tax deductibility for charitable donations also has an important side benefit. For the last 20 years, conservative governments and think-tanks have used the tax-deductible status of charities to threaten or curtail advocacy. This has been most prevalent in the environment movement where tree-planting is seen as charitable, but protesting is not.

However, the threat is broader, but it disappears if no donations were tax deductible. Organisations would then be freer to decide how best to pursue their charitable purpose without concern over government attacking their tax status or the need to fit into often arbitrary DGR categories. And advocacy/peak bodies would be able to fundraise on the same footing as the rest of the sector.

Caveats and Questions

Obviously, there’s devil in the detail of such a proposal.

  1. tax deductible donations would need to be removed for all charities (so nobody was choosing between charities with tax deductibility and others without [which is the current situation]);
  2. any extra tax revenue must actually go to the arts/charitable programs, not be “lost” to general revenue; and crucially
  3. government funding processes must be transparent and peer-reviewed (not a Catalyst for more sports rorts, dodgy car parks, or what seems like systemic corruption and pork-barrelling).

But these are implementation issues, not reasons to continue privileging the preferences of corporations and individuals over democratic public processes.

This proposal is radical, and for those who currently receive substantial philanthropic donations – don’t panic! It is not going to happen in the foreseeable future. But it should provoke big picture questions:

  • about the role of arts and charity,
  • about who we serve and are accountable to, and
  • it should challenge those neoliberal views that government funding is a social cost/dependency while private funding is somehow more worthy.

And mostly, we should be asking: are we happy that our sectors are funded in a way that reflects and increases inequality?

[1]              The 2020 Tax Benchmarks and Variations Statement shows deductions for gifts to deductible gift recipients (including private ancillary funds) at $1,655m. Budget Paper 1, Statement 10 shows total grants to NFPs at $5,198m.