Another quick ramble around the topics of welfare and liberty …

… with a few gratuitous cheap shots at various targets along the way.

Trawl through the archives here and at Tug Boat Potemkin and you’ll find plenty of evidence that, unlike Mirko “A person’s moral worth cannot be assessed by reference to one or two acts and no punishment is too severe for people who betray their mates” Bagaric*, I’m a bit of a rights buff. I think that an Australian Bill of Rights, which set a few limits to the extent to which governments – and government functionaries – at all levels can intrude on the liberties of individual citizens is long overdue.

Nothing Melanie Phillips said in a recent rant on the opinion page of The Age shifted my position any – I found Philip Lynch’s subsequent rebuttal of Phillips more convincing – and still do. Phillips’ arguments against Bills of Right struck me as an exercise in unwitting self-contradiction, particularly this gem of a paragraph:

The emergence of a culture of hyper-individualism has given rise to a radical egalitarianism of lifestyles and values. Morality has been privatised, and all constraints of religion, tradition or cultural taboos have come to be seen as an attack on personal autonomy.

Wasn’t the whole point of her book Londonistan that England was threatened by the cultural taboos and traditions of Islam? There’s a double standard there and at the very least, Phillips needs to make one of those schoolmen’s distinctions if it’s going to stand up. Subsequent reading revealed that Phillips’ knew little whereof she spoke, particularly in relation to the common law, so that was that for me. Ignorance and irrationality are no substitute for a sound argument.

Sorry, I forgot for a moment that these days I’m working in a “free market of ideas” – what I should say, of course, is that I have a strong preference for sound arguments over ignorant and irrational ones – I regard the latter as an inferior good. But in the free market of ideas, that’s just one consumer preference – there are other market segments, with very different preferences and if the market is functioning properly, those preferences will be met – to the best extent possible – by willing suppliers and society as a whole benefits because, generally, there are high levels of consumer satisfaction.

So what are our civil liberties in Australian society? Our civil liberties are residual. They’re whatever liberties we have left after the Federal Parliament has legislated away its cut, the government of whichever state you live in has legislated away its cut and your local council has legislated away its cut.

But that’s only the start of the story. There’s also the vexing problem of (legal) persons outside the government who might hop in for their chop as well – either because the law leaves things mostly to custom (as in the case of minors) or a Government, for whatever reason, mandates such curtailments of personal liberty.

This is what the Federal Government has done with Job Network – much of the harassment of the unemployed that used to fall under Centrelink’s remit has been contracted out to private agencies, as Robert Bollard records in this excellent post. The Howard government does not see welfare recipients as individuals with rights and, in its implementation of the policy of “Mutual Obligation” has pursued its own political agenda at the expense of first, the unemployed and more recently, disability pensioners and single parents.

The government hasn’t enjoyed complete success in re-shaping the bureaucratic culture of Centrelink. The further down the Centrelink hierarchy you go – the closer you get to the local Centrelink offices where staff actually have to do the harassment and deal with the consequences, the less likely it is that the brute agenda of cost-cutting will be pursued with the rigor the Government wants. My last visit to Centrelink started with the staff member who was doing my review interview reassuring me that I had nothing to worry about – the peremptory, threatening letter I’d received from Centrelink was a stock letter, written in Canberra where they didn’t actually have to deal with any of the clients. Twenty minute later, my circumstances had been reviewed, with no changes to my DSP entitlement, much to my relief.

But – entirely in keeping with the common law tradition – I’m privileged as DSP recipients go. I got onto the DSP before they brought in the new 15 hour rule. Not so the bloke I got talking to between rounds at a recent pub trivia night.

After several years of various Job Network “assistance” – resume writing workshops, interview technique workshops and so on, he was referred to a Job Network provider for a Job Capacity Assessment, to ascertain his eligibility for DSP. He provided medical evidence that he couldn’t work more than 12 hours a week. Eight weeks later, he got a letter from Centrelink advising him that he didn’t qualify for DSP and inviting him to drop in, so he could discuss the reasons. He responded with a letter requesting a copy of the decision and the reasons for the decision.

The last I heard, four requests and nearly thirteen weeks later – that is, nearly at the end of the allowed appeal period – he still hasn’t received the documents he requested: the written decision and reasons. This gives the general impression that he in fact does qualify for a Disability Support Pension, even under the new rules, and that the stuffing around is a convenient way for Centrelink to deny his claim without formally rejecting it; an application of creative incompetence to a situation where fair treatment of an individual conflicts with a diktat from senior management.

Would this change if Australia had a bill of rights? Here’s an apposite section of Philip Lynch’s rebuttal of Melanie Phillips:

…what do the first three months of [Victoria's Charter of Human Rights] – and the first six years of the UK Human Rights Act, on which it is based – tell us about its likely impact and implications?

First, the charter is likely to improve public services. An evaluation of the British act by the Lord Chancellor found that legal recognition of human rights had exerted a “powerful, positive and beneficial” impact on the development and delivery of public policy and services… The review concluded that “the act has led to a shift away from inflexible or blanket policies towards those which recognise the circumstances and characteristics of individuals”. In other words, the act has made services more responsive to human than bureaucratic needs.

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* Given Bagaric’s position on mateship and his previous pronouncements on the common good trumping individual rights, his most recent piece – on the Cousins suspension – came completely out of left field. If Bagaric were serious about mateship, you’d expect him to be calling for nothing less than the mass execution of the entire West Coast Eagles administration – after all, Cousins was supposed to be a mate, wasn’t he. If he’d gone with the common good line, he’d have argued that Cousins would just have to cop it, for the benefit of the team and society as a whole.Instead, Bagaric came up with an almost – but not quite – nuanced, almost – but not quite – cogent piece examining, among other things, whether footballers should be required to act as role models for our kiddies. Drug abuse, it seems, is not like a bad smell – it doesn’t contaminate everything it touches. Although, for once, Bagaric didn’t put it that way.