Larvatus Prodeo

By now it’s no news to anybody that Family Service Minister, Mal Brough flew a particularly ugly little kite over the weekend:

Family Services Minister Mal Brough is proposing that some welfare-dependent families could be forced to direct debit part of their income to pay for rent, electricity and food in a bid to help children.

The Minister says there are examples, especially in remote Indigenous communities, of parents wasting their welfare payments on drugs, cigarettes and alcohol while their children are in need.

He says up to 30 per cent of welfare payments could be compulsorily set aside.

With the Federal Budget coming up, I suppose we can expect to hear a lot more ministers proposing ways to make Australia a better country by spending less money. Or, in the case of Brough’s proposal, giving Centrelink bureaucrats more power to interfere in the lives of welfare recipients. In their own interests, or the interests of their children of course.

Here in the dacha we’ve been having heaps of fun working out budgets – one for me and one for Zeppo – allocating money for essentials like rent, gas, electricity, the phone (without which we’d have no contact number for prospective employers) and the internet (without which there’s be no e-mail addresses for prospective employers or daily e-mail alerts of new vacancies). Then we get to the luxuries – as we both enjoy eating we’ve decided to pool our resources and splash out on food from time to time. Which leaves me with discretionary spending of $80 a week for the next few weeks.

Why so little? Well, long term – around March next year – I’ll have enough put aside that I’ll be able to move to an area of high unemployment if we don’t get another extension on the lease or the rent goes above the 46% of my hard-bludged income I’m paying at the moment. Makes Brough’s proposal to set a compulsory 30% of welfare payments aside for rent, electricity and food look pretty bloody inadequate to me. And let’s not have any bullshit about how I could find cheaper accomodation if I lowered my standards – what am I supposed to do, live in a barrel? Half the rent of this house is still a damn sight cheaper than I’d be paying for a 1 bedroom flat. Sorry, I forgot – I’m no longer entitled to make lifestyle choices – forget the last two sentences.

Cutting to the chase, my $80 of present disposable income has to cover the following costs:

• Half the rebate for a fortnightly appointment with the brain-care guy (that’s $11.00 gone);
• Cut-rate pharmaceuticals (say another $2.35 – not too bad actually);
• Them Nicotine patch thingies (biggie – $30);

Leaving the grand sum of $37.65 to cover daily transport to the nearest beach for a day’s surfing. Which would be a lot more enjoyable if bus drivers didn’t get so stroppy when you’re trying to get the board through the door. Plus the Moonee Ponds Creek isn’t exactly noted for challenging waves.

If the arse drops out of another pair of trousers, then I can forget the week’s surfing – instead it’s off on another tour of the seconds outlets and other discount places where you can buy cheap kit that doesn’t scream “poor bastard” at everybody you pass on the street. Bloody good thing I don’t have any kids to support. Bloody good thing too, that I wangled my way onto a disability pension – if I were on the dole, I’d be $60 a week worse off and on the streets once a fortnight begging complete strangers for a couple of dollars to cover my next appointment with the shrink.

Stupid as Brough’s proposal seems to me, that hasn’t stopped it winning plaudits elsewhere – here, for instance. I haven’t checked too many other sites for “Hooray Mal, it’s about bloody time! Oh and while you’re at it…” posts, so that could be an isolated example. But I don’t propose either to kid myself that there aren’t any more posts like that out there or depress myself by looking for them. The politics of welfare are in a pretty bad state and that’s all down to the conventional conservative wisdom on poverty (tug-o-the-forelock to Don Arthur at ):

In the past we have suffered from the supposition that the only remedy for poverty lies in remedies that allow people to look after themselves — to participate in the economy. Nothing has better served the conscience of people who wished to avoid inconvenient or expensive action than an appeal, on this issue, to Calvinist precept — ‘The only sound way to solve the problem of poverty is to help people help themselves’
(John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, p 259)

In Australia, this piece of conventional wisdom is supported by the popular belief that it is trade unions who are ultimately accountable for unemployment. Hence the recent WorkFarce legislation which, under the outright lie of labour market deregulation, actually imposes more regulation on employers, most of it aimed at ensuring that they don’t make agreements covering matters such as unfair dismissal and occupational health and safety which are henceforth no longer to be considered workplace relations issues.

One result – as I noted a couple of weeks ago – was the docking of building workers’ pay because they took a half hour off to pass the hat around to collect money for the family of a dead colleague. The employer in the case said that of course they didn’t want to dock the workers’ pay but the legislation gave them no choice. An interesting contrast to the Eight Hour Day campaign when a number of employers were writing letters to the newspapers saying look, we’d love to give our blokes a shorter working day, but unless it’s enforced by law we’ll have our prices undercut by the bastards who don’t.

You might take the cynical view in both cases, but this time let’s not. Let’s assume that the employers were basically decent people who wanted to do the right thing by their workers to the extent that they could. So in the nineteeenth century you had decent employers agitating, alongside their unionised workers, for a law that would rein in the bastardry of their competitors and in the present day we have employers who are constrained, by the law, to act like complete bastards. This, apparently, is social progress.

The conventional wisdom has it that the poor are either shiftless, idle and profligate – that poverty is largely self-inflicted – or that too much welfare will make them so. Hence, the bipartisan praise for our brilliant system of targetted welfare which cares for the genuinely needy without draining public funds into the pockets of shirkers and malingerers. We pride ourselves on having the bestest cheapest safety net in the world. What we’ve really got is a lot of people walking an economic highwire with nothing between them and terra firma but a thin layer of sawdust and a few random piles of elephant shit.

The conventional wisdom also holds that you can, and must, do two things at once – provide welfare support for the genuinely, and worthy, poor while at the same time keeping the welfare lifestyle unattractive enough that workers prefer to stay in low paid employment. Well you can’t do both. The best you can manage is the cynical pretence of the former and the punitive reality of the latter. All the same, there are still plenty of technocratic economists about who will play around with footling attempts to square this economic circle.

At the same time as this government has been gradually tightening the screws on welfare – under the disgraceful rubric of Mutual Obligation – it has been setting aside ever more in Budget surpluses – if memory serves, $12 billion is the current record. This is unquestionedly a good thing. But a $12 billion budget surplus is $12 billion taken out of the economy in taxes – $12 billion which could have been invested or paid out in wages (if it comes from firms) spent on stuff (if it comes from households) or, in a more sane political climate, invested in infrastructure – you know, building roads and stuff – or disbursed in transfer payments – like welfare payments.

Instead, it will most likely be used to fund tax cuts – which makes about as much sense as feeding your kids on gruel and pease porridge all year so that you can give them a new XBox for Christmas. And Brough’s uninformed and ill-considered proposal may well be implemented in some form, because it is so elegantly and beautifully completely wrong. Instead of looking at whether welfare mums and dads actually get enough money to pay the rent and the bills and then feed and clothe their children we just assume that they do and impound their income if we’re not satisfied with the way they do so.

Ultimately, the conventional wisdom holds that the poor, like convicted felons, have placed themselves outside the civic community through their own failures and sins. Unlike convicted felons, the poor have rarely been granted the courtesy of a trial before a jury of their peers.