AFTER three weeks of confusion and some heated backlash, the most striking thing to take from the federal Budget is its contradictions.

On the one hand we have a “Budget emergency’’ and spiralling Medicare care costs which necessitate a user-pays system for what was once universal free health care. On the other, none of the money raised is going back to either frontline medical services or to the task of general fiscal repair we have been told is so pressing.

We have a new medical research fund being established with these co-payments at the same time as we gut funding for the CSIRO and rip clean-energy programs to shreds – with no science minister to even oversee the shemozzle.

Pensioners are told they are becoming too much of a burden on the public purse so their payments will in future be indexed against inflation (the Consumer Price Index) rather than against wages (which tend to rise faster) as they are today.

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The flip side of that is university fee debt which currently attracts interest equivalent to CPI (giving it a zero cost in real terms) will now be indexed against the government 10-year bond rate or 6 per cent, whichever is lower.

Cuts are being made to education and training in areas such as TAFE funding, yet the Budget finds room to accommodate $240 million for its school chaplain program (no lay persons need apply).

There’s money for wealthy working mummies, but if you’re young and unemployed you may find yourself spending as much time at the soup kitchen line as the dole queue.

When you start picking the document apart there is more lifting and leaning than a Pilates class – making it rather hard for a government to frame a simple and consistent message.

Instead the public could be excused for thinking the Government is making it up as goes along, thought bubbles popping like corks in the Grange collection at Barry O’Farrell’s place.

Apparently we’re thinking about drug testing welfare beneficiaries ... until we’re not, until after the Prime Minister’s office reads the reaction to the headlines and fireman Abbott springs into full hose-down mode.

Apparently university fee changes won’t apply to those already enrolled – except they will (in the form of higher interest payments on HECS debt) according to the Government’s own website.

Apparently we’ll chase down those debts even when the former student is dead ... until that fire hose is uncoiled again and suddenly we won’t. You get the picture.

In all portfolio areas where confusion seems to reign supreme, there is one common theme – and no, the answer is not “Christopher Pyne’’. Rather, the policy changes generating the most heat, and ministerial stumbles, all look like early steps down the path to the Americanisation of health, welfare and education.

The bottom line is tertiary education costs for students will rise and their debt burden – especially for those from less affluent backgrounds – will become more onerous. Likewise healthcare costs, with an ever-shifting emphasis to private insurance and private providers (and widening “gap’’ fees), will also rise.

At the same time changes to welfare areas such as disability support and Newstart risk leaving some pretty threadbare patches in our social safety net.

The question is, do we really want to look to the United States, where gross national debt is more than 100 per cent of GDP and about 47 million Americans – or 15 per cent of the population – rely on food stamps to get by, for inspiration?

Outstanding student debt in the United States, where the “user pays’’ and “competitive fee’’ model dominates, now stands at about US$1.2 trillion (A$1.3 trillion), outstripping even that country’s total credit card debt.

In the healthcare sphere, unpaid medical bills are the largest single cause of personal bankruptcy, with an estimated 1.7 million cases in 2013.

Unemployment insurance, as it is known there (and there are varying federal and state programs), has a finite life after which time some very tough love applies, even in a straitened job market.

America is a society of immense wealth – and, like our federal Budget, some glaring contradictions – but it also rates very poorly by most measures of socio-economic mobility and inequality. With its ever-growing underclass of working poor, it is a case study in much that is wrong with neoliberal economic thinking.

Is it really a model we want to emulate?

paul.syvret@news.com.au