The “income management” system for welfare recipients inflicted upon Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory as part of the intervention no longer needs an exemption under the Racial Discrimination Act, because the government now plans to inflict it upon the entire Northern Territory welfare recipient population, as part of an eventual national rollout.
Oh, and we’re committing to buy a squadron of Joint Strike Fighters, for initial delivery in 2014 and the squadron operational by 2018. This armchair Biggles remains unconvinced by the JSF in the long term, but given that the US has committed to it being the only new fighter plane they will buy from now on, they must think it’s up to the job. Now let’s just hope the greenback stays in the doldrums to cover the inevitable further US-dollar cost blowouts.
Anything else sneak out under cover of conservaturmoil?
Yep, President Obama is expected to commit around 35,000 troops in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, it appears that Blackwater Security has been covertly operating in Pakistan, including kidnapping and assassinations.
Apparently in WA refusing to be searched, at random and without suspicion, could result in 3 years in jail.
There’s no excusing compulsory income management from a Labor Federal Government and Macklin should be ashamed. Voluntary community-run schemes are one thing but a universal system is a disgrace.
The only light is that it’s going to need the acquiescence of the State welfare and housing authorities anywhere outside the ACT and NT. Fingers crossed that it’ll be resisted if not rejected.
The Macklin scheme is a gift to the large supermarket chains and is pretty much the adoption of the nasty Tony Abbott plan.
It runs off the idea that if you cannot discriminate against aboriginal people you might as well hit all the disadvantaged, regardless of colour or race.
Yep, Liam, it is a disgrace and Macklin gets my award for the worst Labor minister.
Opposition Defence spokesperson Senator David Johnston has shown breathtaking gall with this:
Opposition defence spokesman David Johnston believes the Government underestimated the cost of its Joint Strike Fighter program and expects the project costs to be higher.
“I don’t think there’s any weapons with these aircraft and I think the costs are running away from us a bit,” he said.
“What the Minister is saying doesn’t bring us up to speed with the accounting and economic support that is necessary in terms of dollars for this project,” he said.
Unbelievable.
It’s funny that Joel Fitzgibbon was the one responsible for at least part of the “unprecedented level of analysis and evaluation by Australia” and that this is arguably part of the reason that he was himself allegedly subjected to a similarly unprecedented level of analysis by the Department of Defence.
Absolutely joe2 and Liam.
Macklin and the party and government of which she is a minister is not only enacting racist policy but now proposing classist and elitist as well.
This is probably the biggest area of failure of the ALP government, barely distinguishable from the previous mob and and an utter disgrace.
Arrogance and ignorance.
As someone who works in a school where there are many kids brought up in neglect and sent to school without food I support this welfare scheme. It is very easy for middle class lefties to criticise it but it is not their kids lining up at our free breakfast program because mum or dad did not feed them. I doubt many on this board have taught in schools where kids are sent with no books and pencils, where foster care is common, where some kids grow up in absolute neglect.
Some parents will only respond to losing money. And yes, it is true that many of these parents waste their money on alcohol and pokies. When you have been told by a grade 3 kid that the reason she has no books is because mum spends money on the pokies you become less sympathetic to these neglectful parents. Face the facts. Some parents can’t handle money and don’t care if their kids are neglected. If taxpayers money is going to these parents there is no reason why we can’t make sure it is spent on kids. But wait, for the left it is all about the right to neglect isn’t it. They would prefer some abstract ideolgy than to actually see kids looked after. And yes, I support food stamps too.
Bullshit.
Sorry to be blunt and even rude but thats a standard middle/upper class attitude from those who have no understanding of the factors that lead to such problems.
Face the facts, condescending ignorant attitudes that do not take factors that cause poverty and the like but instead adopt the easy patronising ethos that ‘they’ don’t know better so ‘we’ have to manage things for ‘them’ are part of the cause of the poverty in the first place.
I’ve worked in poor schools for most of 30 years and for much of that time been directly associated with close friends and colleagues in social welfare that have been at the forefront of dealing with those precise issues that you are so ignorantly talking about and trying to blame on the victims and some mob called ‘the left’.
You’re not John howard or Mal Brough are you?
Or maybe you are Jenny Macklin?
As a pensioner in line for the big scrubbing brush from Labor,where the local inflation rate,cannot be reduced that much by smaller businesses competing at price across a whole range of products,I might be lucky in one sense,I may not have to buy at a Woolies,and thus support the Lowy and Soccer.If I buy at the nearest local town when I am not buying at this local place name in N.S.W. And actually the personal service all round is better than the Woolies chooks and bantams!And yo would think the Aussie Rules Footballers in the Territory would provide an option to the Government intervention by assisting in group buying of fruit and vegies etc.where the more uncommitted to their health and limited prosperity of pension cheques etc.Did a bit of recruiting on the side and saved people by always having a feed possible for them,and,a bit of backup by Police and social type workers.And wherever encourage group buying as a membership encouragement or support where Government fails.An easy accounting system membership,easily checked to see if monies are being used appropriately and cost and quality consciousness,and transferable across a league or association.As outlet for money goods or more desperate means if short-term stuff ups happen.Not control by jock-strap,because the women in the club direct some of the traffic,and men playing up get to go through ritual perhaps within a ground where no camels are threatening existence!
Disgusting and disgraceful. I thought the PM’s name was Kevin Rudd, not Tony Abbott. wtf is Labor doing adopting one of the worst Liberal social welfare policies? Oh, i forgot. they’re putting up the Libs CPRS to the Senate later in the week.
Of course there’s a difference between Labor and the Coalition. Its when there’s not I get upset.
Hannah’s Dad,
No I am not Mal Brough. I am actually a teacher unionist who has seen the extreme dysfunction of some of these welfare families. I have had dads tell me of home invasions over their year 2 kids heads in morning line up. I have seen the horrific impact that single parent fatherless families have in low socio economic areas and how this leads young men into gang mentality and welfare. I have seen the mentality that justifies spending money on alcohol while kids go without lunch. Your solution will take a generation if it were to even be effective and I doubt it would. By saying to people, you can apply for welfare but if you get child support that is exactly what it will be means that taxpayers money goes to feeding kids. What is wrong with saying a certain percentage must go to food? The culture of sections of the underclass is so disfunctional they will do nothing to change unless forced to. I am not talking about working class families. I am talking about levels of dysfunction that are horrific and which are hidden to most people’s eyes. Family support payements are just that – to support your family. If you don’t use it properly you should lose it. I am not prepaed to take the softly softly approach. Neglect is criminal. I am not patronising enough to believe that the underclass don’t understand this. They do and so if they choose to neglect kids they suffer the consequences. I would argue that is in fact you Hannah’s Dad that has a condescending attitude because you believe that the underclass can’t make decisions. They can and they should also face the consequences for bad ones.
I posted this at Gutter Trash about the welfare quarantining proposed :
I happen to think it’s a pretty foul idea myself.
Why ? Because there is no evidence that it will achieve its stated aims – the only available comparable evidence is from the NT intervention, and from this post one would have to conclude a similar “result” for “whiteys”.
I also think that it is just another way of discriminating against, victimising, and disempowering the unfortunate in our society.
I thought we had made significant advances (at least they were touted as such) when the move was made away from the “food voucher” system which applied historically to those in similar situations.
It also seems to me that such a policy mitigates against those in dire circumstances from attempting self reliance in food (eg by home gardening), as a portion of their $$ will be withheld (for food)whether they require that amount for food or not.
What next ? Workhouses ?
Pterosaur,
Are you in denial? Do you simply not believe that many of these families abuse the welfare they are given and neglect their kids? Do you really believe that this does not happen and that all welfare recipients are honest and ethical? I would imagine you have never faced the real neglect experienced by kids in some of these households. This neglect often ensures that by upper primary school these children have been set on the path to replicating the patterns of their parents. Many are illiterate, many have little self respect and even less respect for others. Welfare ensures that these parents are left without having to anser for this. Some romantic idea of the noble underclass pushed by the middle class left will not save these kids in welfare dependent households.
“I have had dads tell me of home invasions over their year 2 kids heads in morning line up. I have seen the horrific impact that single parent fatherless families have in low socio economic areas and how this leads young men into gang mentality and welfare.”
Ah right Spana, the cloak is removed.
Its all, or mainly, ‘them’ single mums’ fault isn’t it?
More bullshit.
I do hope that all who are railling against the proposal to include all welfare recipients in the quarantining proposal objected as loud when the former Govt. imposed it upon the indigenous folk in NT. Cause if you did not object then I have to conclude that you are racially motivated.
I personally find the whole thing deeply offensive,and it seems to me that having broken a promise to re-instate the racial discrimination act but now having worked out that you can’t impose quarantining of welfare on one group we now have a LABOR govt. determined to never admit they were wrong and prepared to drag all and sundry into the net to cover their arses. Macklin is a disgrace and should resign. Not one bloody house has been built in two years and the beaurocracy becomes ever more bloated . I thought I voted the mongrels out, but apparently not.
just a reminder to stick to the issue, not the commenter.
Robbo,
I railed against welfare quarantining during the intervention and I rail against it being applied to whites as well.
btw, according to, I think, our human rights commissioner a few days ago, those thousands of cases of child abuse and neglect Howard and Brough used to justify said intervention came down, after several years investigation, to exactly 4.
I suspect the same would apply, proportionately, to white people who are ‘intervened’ with, too.
hannah’s dad:
What’s your solution to dealing with the significant number of children who turn up to school unfed because their parents spend the money on ‘more important’ things? Or should we just abandon such kids to their fate?
Spana
You are completely wrong about me and my motivations. Welfare recipients are no more prone to human failings than any other members of society, who are, it must be admitted more adept at disguising abuse and neglect than are those on welfare, as $$ can hide a multitude of sins. (This from personal experience)
You are also completely wrong to seek to punish the many for the sake of the few, as this policy seeks to do – especially as it seems (from the link I provided) that similar policy wrt to indigenous communities has not had the effects allegedly sought, and has indeed had a negative effect upon both the individuals and communities affected.
For Robbo – it disgusted me when this was brought in by the Rodent in the “intervention”, and still disgusts.
“Family support payements are just that – to support your family. If you don’t use it properly you should lose it.”
Spana, the point is, that with this scheme those who use their family support properly are to be bundled in with those who do not.
It is actually abusive to treat everyone, just because they are in disadvantaged circumstances, as child abusers, drunkards and pokey/porn addicts.
I guess the problem really is how do you deal with people who have a drinking or gambling problem, which, incidentally extends far beyond the lumpenproletariat being targetted by Macklin’s quarantining.
And the first problem is getting people who have a problem admitting they have it. Then they have to decide to do something about it. My extensive experience with people who have an alcohol problem has convinced me that removing the means to buy grog is NOT going to stop them getting it. So, as a means of achieving a solution to one cause of child neglect,it will be utterly pointless.I imagine the same would apply to problem gamblers.
The single mums I know don’t get enough money to cover the ‘more important’ things like rent, electricity, health costs etc,etc and the ‘less important’ things like food. To a person they are the ones who go hungry first, but I’m sure there are times when the children get less than enough. My solution is very simple: raise parenting benefit to a realistic level.
On the other hand maybe we could make people wear some sort of uniform so we can distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving poor.
I’m sorry, but Spana makes he laugh very bitterly. Spana is not strongly only anti-abortion, but wants to treat single Mums like shit once they’ve had a kid. Great combination.
“On the other hand maybe we could make people wear some sort of uniform so we can distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving poor.”
I think that is the plan with the cards to be issued. You would get to stand out at the supermarket checkout, as the poor scum, while Jenny Macklin watches benevolently from behind you with a basket full of caviar, camembert and champers.
The scheme gets more and more disgraceful the more I find out about it. And presumably the supermarkets will be ones like Black & Gold where the food is shit, or expensive Coles and Woolies where you can’t stretch your money.
Why don’t they just put a yellow star on them?
Robbo,
I agree absolutely.
Please see the Rudd 2 years on thread where I describe the ‘continued NT intervention’ as a ‘major failure’.
And my first comment here in this thread where I say Macklin and co. have added classism and elitism to their existing racism
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/11/24/kevin-rudd-two-years-on-open-thread/#comments
desipis
In essence you have asked the wrong question, more about that later.
Firstly I would question the unfounded presumptions of those who state without evidence that the only children who suffer from neglect defined, in narrow terms to suit themselves, come from poor parents and particularly question the again unfounded assertion that single mums are a major factor in criminality and neglect, so we can add misogynism to the charges as well as racism and classism.
Then I would take note of what Pterosaur has said above, that welfare recipients are no more prone prone to human failings than any other members of society and wonder why some find it so easy to presume otherwise.
I would look carefully at what Paul has written viz the hysteria generated by Howard/Brough and a compliant media where accusations of child sexual abuse, without foundation, were directed at the indigenous people and believed willingly by so many despite never being founded in fact.
The rate of CSA in indigenous communities has never been shown to be higher than in rich white communities yet the mere accusation was accepted as set in concrete fact. The only research done, albeit superficially, in the past few years of CSA in indigenous communities suggests that the rate is lower than in rich white communities.
Domestic violence and other problems are a different matter, but the stigma of child abuse that was forced onto the indigenous communities was a bloody disgrace to those who voiced it.
Are you really concerned about the neglect and abuse of children?
Really truly?
Then look no further than your average,or even above average whatever that means, suburb and you will, if you look under a few rocks, find stacks of abuse of all kinds that is almost completely ignored by our society.
Instead we like to do the “Look over there, its a child from an indigenous community/single mum being neglected”.
Scapegoatism.
In essence you have asked the wrong question.
Try this one.
“What should be done about child neglect/abuse?”
Full stop.
Don’t add the irrelevant riders “in indigenous society/single mums’ whatever.
Then you will be able to start to get to the answers.
I don’t have time now to give you thousands of pages of reports that have been written by hundreds of experts for yonks that have been assiduously ignored by the ostriches who would rather point at the powerlesss in our society and blame them.
If you want to find out start googling.
Words like child sexual abuse/neglect/ domestic violence, and the like.
Here’s a clue with respect to the NT intervention, check out the report that started it all, I forget the name, maybe someone will tell us.
Look at their recommendations.
How many of those recommendations were acted upon?
Why, instead did ‘we’ jump in, boots and all, they way we did and still are despite expert voices decrying such.
Why were those voices ignored? {try the “Women of Wik” ..I think thats the site] to delve into that].
The first way to start to solve the problems of child abuse/neglect in this country?
Ignore those who want to blame the victims.
zoot:
How exactly would these single mums be disadvantaged by such a scheme?
From the article:
Sorry zoot didn’t see your comment.
Under Howard changes were made to supporting parent benefits, not only in the money paid but in the rules around how it was paid.
The net result was that about one third of single parents [mostly mums] had their incomes reduced by about one third.
The net result of that was that many single parent families [mainly single mums and their families] dropped below the poverty line.
Poverty in Australia is increasing, a parliamentary library report of 2006 had it rising from 10% to 12% in 2006 in the latter years of the Howard era.
Most are women and children.
Want to stop/decrease alleged child neglect in poor families?
Stop them from being poor.
We have thus addressed the tip of the iceberg of child neglect/abuse in this country despite those who like to pretend its only an issue perpetrated by the indigenous/welfare/single mums.
What to do about the bulk of the iceberg?
To give an idea of its size lets estimate, roughly, that about 1 in 10 children [a very conservative estimate] in Australia suufer severe abuse of some form and that most of them do not belong in the categories above, ie most child abuse in this country occurs in white, nonwelfare, two parent families.
Puts a different perspective on things doesn’t it?
hannah’s dad:
I don’t think I ever supported the targeting only women or only aboriginals with such measures. As for classism, I’d hope these regulations would apply to all the so called ‘middle class welfare’ too. I do support use of financial controls as a ’stick’ for poor parenting rather than using fines, imprisonment or taking their children away.
These measures are designed to combat child neglect resulting from financial mismanagement, not about tackling child abuse as a whole. If you have some magical way to stop all child maltreatment regardless of cause then go ahead and share.
These measures are designed to minimise the impact of poverty on the children. It doesn’t matter how much more money you throw at some families if none of the extra money goes towards the children or general household well-being.
http://www.homelessnessaustralia.org.au/site/mediacentre.php
http://www.homelessnessaustralia.org.au/UserFiles/File/Too%20many%20homeless%20women%20on%20IWD_Homelessness%20Australia.pdf
The first link is to the home page of Homelessness Australia the premier NGO in the area.
The second link is to a media release PDF which says:
“More than 46,000 Australian women are homeless this International Women’s Day.
While the common public image of a homeless person is of an older man, almost
half our homeless population is female.
Women make up 40 per cent of those sleeping rough or in improvised shelters, and
28 per cent of people living in boarding houses with no security of tenure.
48 per cent of Australia’s nearly 47,000 ‘couch surfers’ – homeless people
depending on the charity of family and friends – are women.
****The largest single cause of homelessness in Australia is domestic and family
violence, which overwhelmingly affects women and children.******
66 per cent of children who sought refuge in a homeless service last year were in
the care of a woman made homeless by domestic violence.
****The majority of people who are reluctantly turned away by homelessness services
each night are women and their children. An astonishing 50% of people seeking
assistance must be turned away due to high demand and under-resourcing.****
“International Women’s Day is a day to reflect on the achievements of women”,
Homelessness Australia spokesperson Pauline Woodbridge said.
“We must acknowledge the strength and resilience of women with experiences of
homelessness, among them many mothers who are committed to providing care
for their children in very difficult circumstances.”
[I added the ****s]
Well there we are a few more simple ways of of decreasing child neglect/abuse.
Spend more on homeless people.
Acknowledge that the single largest group therof [amongst several deserving groups] are women and children made homeless by domestic violence.
Stop domestic violence.
I would have been far cheaper to build lots of mock wooden dummy jets and inflatable tanks. When ‘teh evil’ takes satellite photos it’d look like we had thousands of planes and tanks.
They did it in ww2 and it worked a treat.
Is John Howard still in power? Income quarantining is a disgrace. It works in NT because poeple will live in the ‘long grass’. Is income quarantining restricted to families or does it include single people?
I don’t know how you could live in Melbourne if half your income of $224 per week is quarantined for food. I beleive rent is about $160 per week.
Lateline released the results of a report on unemployment tonight that says that unemployment has increased and the divide between the 3 types of workers is increasing. There are full time workers who when they are first laid off get casual work with no holiday pay then discouraged workers
Look, this is a minister who can’t build homes that have billions of dollars budgeted for them. She was easily the worst Rudd Labor Cabinet Minister before this week, and you should take heart from the prospect that she’ll stuff this up too. If only she had a diligent shadow minister, she’d be toast.
A couple of points. Many boys from single parent families without good male role models in poor areas with high crime rates get involved with bad stuff. Like it or not, the absence of a stable male figure pushes many boys out into the gang mentality early looking for male companionship. I see it every day where I work. This is not an attack on single mothers, just a reflection of the way the world works. Quite a few of the kids I teach are actually refugees from war zones whose fathers have been killed. These boys experience some of these same issues as boys from white single parent families but for very different reasons. Be it dysfunctional relationships or orphans from wars, the boys in my school face the issue of the thug mentality in order to be male. Why do you think teachers refer to ADD as Absent Dad Disorder?
So Fine and Hannah’s Dad, before attcking me for “attacking” single mums perhaps lok a bit deeper. I work with these people, kids of sinlge mums, refugees without dads, out of choice but that does not blind me to the reality of the nature of these areas.
Secondly, welfare is not a right. Welfare is like the village helping out someone who is having a hard time. If the village finds out that person is taking their money and buying alcohol while their kids starve they will withdraw support and help the kids directly. This initiative is no different. Welfare recipients have obligations. After all it is my money and your money and we have a right to see it used well.
Sorry Robert.
“A couple of points. Many boys from single parent families without good male role models in poor areas with high crime rates get involved with bad stuff ….”
Bullshit.
Hannah’s Dad, you prove once again you are so caught up in ideology you will simple live with your head in the sand. If you have never seen this in the schools where you worked than perhaps you were teaching in Ascot. I won’t name the suburbs but maybe a day trip to a few southern suburbs of Brisbane might open your eyes a bit to the gang mentality and the aggression that goes on there. But I guess you would argue that it is all just coincidence and that this has nothing to do with how these boys grew up. Just stick to that ideology and forget the world…
“Secondly, welfare is not a right. Welfare is like the village”…. preach, preach, preach, blah, blah, blah, obligations, blah, my money.
Sorry Robert, in advance.
Andrew E @ 32, it’s not just Macklin. I can’t think of a single minister who has a diligent shadow.
The fringe camp at Newman (where we lived for 10 years) was a complete disaster area. Violence, neglect of children, young men stealing blankets from the elderly on cold nights, drunkenness etc. Go through the UN charter of rights and there were a whole raft of rights that were simply not there. A lot of those rights had gone missing. The rights I am talking about were missing because most of the adults were drunk before lunch time and stayed that way well into the night. Numerous people of good intent tried to fix some of these problems from the outside with limited success.
A few people tried to fix things from the inside with even less success. Part of the problem here was that the people came from different groups and were unlikely to accept leadership from “those people”
The issue is complex one about the relative importance of human rights most of us take for granted. So what I would like to know is which human rights should take priority under these circumstances? The right to control your own welfare money? The right of a husband to use the families money as he pleases? The right of a child to be properly fed and educated?
I didn’t like the way the intervention was set up in a racist framework. But I had seen so many good people try to fix problems like the Newman fringe camp over the years that I thought that what Mal Brough was doing was at least worth a try. I also think that what Noel Pearson is doing is also worth a try – and more likely to succeed since Noel is not some stranger who has come with a quick fix without having a clue how different Aboriginal culture really is.
hannahs_dad : “Bullshit.
Sorry to be blunt and even rude but thats a standard middle/upper class attitude from those who have no understanding of the factors that lead to such problems.”.
-spana “As someone who works in a school where there are many kids brought up in neglect and sent to school without food I support this welfare scheme.”.
- spana surely sounds like he is from a middle and upper class background to me, hannahs dad. There must be dozens nay hundreds of middle and upper class working with disadvantaged adoriginals in the NT, surely?..lol.
hannahs_dad -”Then you will be able to start to get to the answers.
I don’t have time now to give you thousands of pages of reports that have been written by hundreds of experts for yonks that have been assiduously ignored by the ostriches who would rather point at the powerlesss in our society and blame them”
- perhaps the neglected children can use the reports to make a fire beside the car while they wait for their mum to come out frm the pokies. Are there really hundreds of experts?. Sounds like hyperbole to me. Yonks?..lol.
hannahs_dad : “I’ve worked in poor schools for most of 30 years”
-examples?…which state?.
I have this vision of hannahs dad sitting in front of his new imac in mosman while spana struggles by with a refurbished PC from a local govt aid agency. Spana has much more legitimacy.
John D
many people thought this aspect of the intervention was “worth a try” (I wasn’t one).
Check out the link I gave @11 to see what the actual effects were from the review into these measures that was recently completed – from the point of view of those appointed to review the processes of the government review into the intervention.
http://webdiary.com.au/cms/?q=node/2165
Here’s a recent take by Mick Dodson on the intervention.
Read the whole thing please, and also the Women for Wik site which has a go at destroying myths.
From Prof Dodson.
“Mal Brough (Longman) had admitted he hadn’t read the Sacred Children report which supposedly triggered the intervention …..
Because of media laziness, most Australians didn’t know what ‘the intervention” was really all about. They didn’t know that:
[A list of things not done, please read.]
And he concludes:
“”This is racist action not for the purpose of helping children, but to wedge political opponents. What troubles me most is the racial discrimination and the incapacity of the media to be outraged by this. Why are we ready to allow this to happen?”
“Australians think it’s about protecting kids. The lazy media let that happen. And if you put your head up you get called a child abuser yourself. You get abused for saying, ‘Hang on a minute, can we talk about this?’”
Welfare is more like civil insurance
It’s highly likely in a majority of cases that some of the money was also the recipients, from when they were contributing to the pool (or perhaps derived from mining operations on their ancestral lands that they never ever got any compensation or recognition for).
You think the 1 in 5 with mental illness, the 100,000 homeless, the 300,000? problem gamblers, untold alcoholics, the permanently injured or disabled, are never going to be you, or someone you know? Who previously was a contributor?
If you don’t share a bit of the wealth around, which is primarily based on the exploitation of the worlds collective natural resources anyway, it will get redistributed for you, one way or another. Nature seems to abhor significant imbalance.
Even more so in a society that cultivates a mercenary disregard for the rights and agency of fellow citizens generally.
Another of those “just a reflection of the way the world works” perhaps?
No matter how much money you’ve got, no matter how self-important you feel about it.
You can’t take it with you.
It’s a slippery slope when it comes to believing you can manipulate other human beings I think, without unintended reactions and consequences.
Even when stupid, people are often more cunning than others can often imagine, at all levels of society.
The end point is?
Download of fit and proper operating instructions at birth for everyone?
Cancellation of your breathing rights if don’t come up to scratch?
I railed against the intervention welfare restrictions, and listened to visiting women from the NT give a public talk about how stupid and demeaning it made them feel. Not to mention how it limited what and where they could buy and their basic dignity, needing to go and ask for access to money (actually having to organise an appointment to ask), to buy kids presents at non-approved stores and other rubbish. Oh, and those who don’t care still don’t care much, and cards have become a source of trade themselves, for whatever.
The less people have to live for, the less they probably care about anything or anyone.
A recent paper in science concerns the psychology and behavioural responses to rewards versus punitive approaches…
Rewards are better than punitive and manipulative measures for building social trust and co-operation.
Like a bit of contemporary ’science’, this really seems like an elaborate way of trying to measure/quantify the bleeding obvious.
David G. Rand, Anna Dreber, Tore Ellingsen, Drew Fudenberg, and Martin A. Nowak. Positive Interactions Promote Public Cooperation. Science, 2009; DOI: 10.1126/science.1177418
…
“But despite this anger at free riders, rewarding good behavior is as effective as punishing bad behavior for maintaining public cooperation and leads to better outcomes for the group,” Rand says. “When both options are available, reward leads to increased contributions and payoff for the group, while punishment has no effect on contributions and leads to lower payoff for the group.”
Previous research has suggested that punishment can compel cooperation in anonymous two-time interactions where individuals need not worry about reputation or retaliation — a scenario Rand, Nowak, and colleagues find unrealistic, since most of our real-life interactions are recurring, with our reputations always at stake.
“Sometimes it is argued that it is easier to punish people than to reward them,” the researchers write. “We think this is not the case. Life is full of … situations where we can help others. These sorts of productive interactions are the building blocks of our society and should not be disregarded.”
Dragonman64
No I’m living out in the donga miles from anyone else [as I suspect some commenters here know] having spent most of 30 years working in 3 of the 4 most socially disadvantaged schools in the state, having worked at a juvenile detention centre, worked as school liason with wards of the state institutions [does that ring a bell chiming abuse of children?] and lots of related experience and a bloody frustrating time it was too.
If you care to read Prof Dodson’s message in the link you will see that what I am complaining about is the problem he is addressing in a specific area [media images versus reality].
Sorry I don’t fit into your neat little image from your neat little world view but hey, thats reality.
See you have totally ignored that abuse of children is widespread and endemic within the broader white affluent non welfare section of our society, that, for example, domestic violence is the single largest cause of homelessness in Australia [and if you can't see that is relevant to child abuse/neglect then we can't begin to communicate].
That the issues of poverty, divorce, child neglect/abuse have been consistently presented to us, for a decade or more in particular, through a distorted lens.
Off you go and actually research the issues, don’t be like Mal Brough and not read the reports and operate from political cynicism, but get informed.
You can find the reports, there are dozens.
Look at the final words of Prof Dodson above.
Those words apply equally to the welfare issue.
“What’s your solution to dealing with the significant number of children who turn up to school unfed because their parents spend the money on ‘more important’ things? Or should we just abandon such kids to their fate?”
Desipis @ 17 has gone to the heart of this, and Spana too, I think. I was amazed reading this thread to find all this extreme fervour to the extent of abuse of those who disagreed with their p.o.v. from several usually rational contributors.
In 2007 I too was very critical of the NT intervention. It was so suspect, taken up so zealously by Howard just pre election, and Brough whom I think has all the makings of a fascist. Mainly though I hated it because the people who prepared “The Little Children are Sacred” report were so appalled at how their findings were used. This was not what they asked for. They should have been heard. Suspension of the Racial Disrimination Act and involvement of the army particularly worried me.
Since then I have tried to weigh up the responses of those directly involved and been impressed by the genuine efforts to consult families affected particularly by the quarantining of welfare payments. I listened to Macklin recently admitting that there was plenty of criticism of this, but at the same time overhwhelming numbers of women, particularly grandmothers I think, who wanted it to continue. I imagine if you asked the kids up there they’d agree.
Like Spana I’ve worked with children sent to school with no breakfast and worked hard to overcome the disadvantage of those without books or who just couldn’t participate in routine activities because they hadn’t the right gear. I guess that sort of disadvantage has always been with us and always will be, but surely family welfare payments were intended to even things out a bit. It’s appalling that children are hungry and without basic school gear when hundreds of dollars intended for their support are drunk or gambled away.
As a child who suffered extreme deprivation at a time when there was no welfare support I can tell you that I would have jumped for joy if someone had somehow made sure my mum fed us kids before buying her next packet of fags. I was “helped” as a rather sensitive teenage scholarship child by well meaning adults trying to make sure I had a uniform and school satchel, even shoes.
I would have much preferred not to depend on that sort of “help” which was known to all and sundry. There were plenty of families on our street as poor as ours, but somehow they ate quite well and the kids were neat and clean, so more money was not necessarily the answer.
Then as now the problem is about parents’ order of priority when spending family income. If that income is provided by the state for “family support” it seems to me that the state has not only the right, but the responsibility, to see that it does just that.
Does this make me an elitist patronising racist?
I must admit this has flown under my radar, but I can’t agree that further marginalising, infantalising and patronising people because they’re poor and/or black and/or women is a decent or satisfactory way of dealing with the problems poverty causes.
No doubt there are people who are incapable of budgeting their money, but the pittance solo parents have to provide even the most basic needs for their families is a disgrace. It certainly isn’t enough to cover unexpected expenses.
I watched the wonderful Samson and Delilah on Sunday and what really struck me was how invisible disadvantaged people are in our society. Every so often, they are visible for the wrong reasons and our response is to pay a bit of lip service to them, devise some solution which makes us feel comfortable so we can continue to look through them.
This lazy “intervention” is totally wrong and it won’t work because it doesn’t attempt to address the root causes of poverty, abuse and neglect.
The nature of scheme proposed by Macklin will mean that Centrelink staff will be completely inundated with requests for exemptions:
Macklin’s press release:
http://www.jennymacklin.fahcsia.gov.au/internet/jennymacklin.nsf/content/welfare_reforms_protect_children_25nov2009.htm
Considering our very high school attendance rates nationwide 96% (UNICEF) and remembering this only relates to children under 16 anyway, and our likewise very high vaccination rates, you’d expect that the percentage of parenting payment recipients who fulfill the requirement for exemption would be > 85-90%.
This would apply to: Approx. 400,000 single parent families receive the parenting parent (ABS stats 2006)
I suspect on the ground for parenting payment recipients who can easily satisfy the requirements, this will mean an annual or bi-annual trek to the Centrelink office with your child’s immunisation book and some sort of new ‘attendance report’ from the school. (School office staff are going to be rapt, not.) Having to trek to Centrelink to attend interviews, and sign annual job contracts etc is very much a feature of Centrelink operations since the changes around parenting payment recipients needing to work up 30 per f/n when their youngest reaches 8 years old. And school attendance isn’t a feature overall in non-indigenous disadvantaged communities in the same way as it is in indigenous communities FWIW.
For young people and older people on Newstart however it’s going to be much harder to satisfy the requirements (although they aren’t very specific in relation to people over 25…”who has a history”).
And this is where the scheme’s stated purpose cant be sustained. And of course, as per the NT heads into areas of individual rights and collective punishment
The intention is ‘reasonable’ when it’s applied to families with children ..but applying the scheme to adults who have no responsibilities to children, and further who are not living in communities where a large minority or even majority of adults w/out children/young adults are chronically addicted therefore their behaviour can’t even be shown to be effecting children or the wider community…hhm.
I’m not unsympathetic to the arguments around how to deal with now inter-generational issues of addiction, neglect, disadvantage that are seriously effecting not only indigenous communities but many regional towns, outer fringe suburbs, public housing estates etc. and I always thought that welfare management should be an option for DOCs type agencies to nominate (with recourse to appeal) for those families with children that have demonstrable problems and who are already clients of the agency etc and as part of an overall mgt plan ……but looking at the proposed exemption assessment criteria, it seems that this scheme when rolled out nationwide, will more so effect unemployed people without children…like huh?
Eat up your veggies or Jenny will be around to make sure you do.
Income quarantining will make it a little more difficult for welfare recipients to buy addictive substances, alcohol, tobacco, and gaming. The alcohol, tobacco and gaming, particularly pokies, industries may suffer, a little. But I see this as a slight balance to the devious ways for these industries.
It is also good to see the lump sums, like baby bonuses, will be all income managed.
Quoll’s comment is worth re-reading.
I do support income management in some cases and I’ve read enough about it that I know it’s a powerful tool where a) it’s done with the active participation of the clients, ie. for recent parolees or people dealing with gambling/alcohol/substance addiction, and/or b) there’s strong community support for it, ie. in remote communities with strong Land Councils.
It’s already used and is available to some State child protection, housing & disability welfare agencies.
What’s totally stupid and counterproductive, as jo says, is applying it to people across the board as if the problems of Yuendumu kids were the same as Ambervale/Rosemeadow teenagers were the same as middle-aged Kings Cross rough sleepers. It’s ignorant and punitive.
Spana,
How exactly do you disentangle the “low socio economic area” from the “single parent fatherless families”? Strangely enough, being a single parent tends to mean both being poor in absolute terms, and relatively poorer than your impoverished neighbours who are co-parenting, because they have two pay-checks coming in (whether from paid employment or the welfare programs).
When you are poorer than your neighbours, you don’t have as much to spare for those toys and gadgets that keep their kids happily entertained at home, or for those music lessons/sporting clubs after school which keep their kids busy either. You can’t keep the kids quiet by feeding them food you don’t have, so you tell them to go out and amuse themselves. The kids from two-parent families where their parents piss the money away on booze/gambling etc get told the same. This means that kids from single parent families and from dysfunctional two-parent families are the ones who are more likely to be out and about with other bored kids with no money making their own “entertainment”, which in poor socioeconomic areas means crap public infrastructure for engaging in leisure pursuits, making it more likely for bored kids with no money to turn to petty vandalism and eventually worse to pass the time (especially once they realise that thuggery can be a source of money).
So what exactly makes you so sure that it’s all about absent male role models instead of more about absent discretionary income dollars, i.e. bored kids with no money?
Yep! This should be about children’s rights.
Funny, I thought access to welfare if needed had in fact been a constitutional right since 1944. At least that’s what the Depression/WW2 generation implied in the 1944 referendum.
Australia voted “No” in 1944.
Some excellent comments have been made about what’s wrong with Macklin’s scheme to micromanage the finances of the poor on a nominally but not really non-discriminatory basis. I can only add two things:
1. My mother’s family were unemployed during the Great Depression, and were “assisted” through the “Susso” system whereby the assistance rendered – from grocery coupons to school books – was invariably clearly and conspicuously marked as Susso issue, and it was utterly miserable to be a primary school child in the early 1930s writing in a conspicuously marked Susso exercise book and being put down constantly by the spawn of more fortunate parents who could buy them ordinary exercise books. It is a disgrace, as others have already said, that a Labor government – and a Left Minister – should be dragging us back down that path.
2. George Orwell, as one might expect, made devastatingly good sense about the plight of the British unemployed in the 1930s in The Road to Wigan Pier. See especially chapters 5 and 6. Whilst some of it is showing its age, a lot of what Orwell wrote remains relevant to the issue we’re debating on this thread.
Paul Norton:
If you think you felt bad for turning up to school with marked exercise books, how do you think the kids that turn up to school with no exercise books feel?
My beef with income quarantining is not so much the principle but the practice. If I thought it would work then I’d wear the costs in gross loss of freedom and self-reinforcing stigmatisation for the many who don’t need it. But Spana is right in that some kids suffer appalling neglect and we should be willing to incur all sorts of costs to remedy that if we can.
But it’s being done in defiance of the empiric evidence; there are lots of overseas places that have tried this. What happens is that it further limits the already limited ability of welfare families to meet lumpy expenses (school books, etc are a good example). And a market often quickly develops among the hard core addicts and drunks for trade in vouchers, smartcards, food, etc – all you end up doing is reducing their effective rate of payment. US Food Stamps is the canonical case here.
That they’re going ahead with this in defiance of this overseas experience, and without a proper evaluation of what they’ve already done, puts the lie to their claims of preferring “evidence based policy”. But of course it will play well with the shock jocks.
Desipis (and others), a note about child welfare.
At the moment, should a child turn up to school without exercise books or showing other signs of neglect (inappropriate clothing for the season, hunger, lack of washing) then a report can be made to State child protection authorities who are able at the moment to initiate early intervention which can include voluntary income management.
If a caseworker is able to work with a family with mutual trust it’s much more likely that they’ll be able to change parenting habits. Where income management is a negotiated part of a broader plan it’s a sensible, really helpful initiative.
But this is very different to the casual compulsory income management being proposed by Macklin’s office, which as jo notes, will apply to people who might not have any children at all. It would potentially apply, for instance, to old age pensioners and recipients of Veterans Affairs benefits.
Most importantly, these kinds of punitive measures taken without broader casework and trust have very counterproductive outcomes. If a mother is considering reporting or leaving a situation of domestic violence, but knows that income management would be a likely consequence (as it would be under Macklin’s proposals) then that would weigh on her decisions.
“a conspicuously marked Susso exercise book?
Looxury!
…And to respond to the argument that tax dollars shouldn’t be squandered on booze and pokies and cigarettes, I also wonder whether the drinking punting smoking Family Tax Benefit Part B recipients (aka The Working/Middle Class) shouldn’t also have their payments quarantined.
Can I get some reaction from the back section?
Desipis, it was my mother, aunts and uncles who were primary school children with Susso exercise books in the early 1930s.
My world changed when the 1944 Education Act was passed in the UK. However the eleven plus scholarship opportunity for me a few years later didn’t come with vouchers of any kind as I recall.
Changing the subject, I imagine there will be a wonderful and witty new thread on the Godwin Grech story. What a fascinating store of emails have surfaced from Treasury no less in the Senate Priveleges Report.
Malcolm Turnbull “looking good”! He sure needs friends and support these days, but I wonder how welcome it is from that quarter!
Ambigulous is surely sharpening his pencils, and others their claws! Let’s get into it!
Hannah’s dad makes a convincing case.
I don’t think income quarantining is the answer because what happens when they leave welfare schemes? What “lesson” have the disadvantaged learned?
It would be fairer to look at extending these restrictions to all – tax alcohol based on volume of spirit, for instance, so that a 24*375mL slab of beer at 5% strength is taxed the same as a 1L bottle of 45% strength spirit, as I believe that will do far more to discourage alcoholism than any other action the government can do.
Regulate gambling further – time restrictions on machines so that they are unable to be used 5 minutes in every hour, for instance.
As mentioned elsewhere, welfare payments are woefully low and need to be bumped up to give the disadvantaged any chance of getting on with their lives. It is ultimately defeating to social progress to stratify society.
Surely the issue is about long-term vs short-term. In the long term, of course welfare quarantining isn’t a solution. And I’d like to know (because I’m quite behind the play on this debate) whether Macklin’s plans include strategies aimed at addressing the structural causes of poverty, abuse and neglect. If not, that’s shameful.
But in the short term, how does that approach help kids RIGHT NOW? The fact is that welfare quarantining may have a positive impact on families straight away, and as such is worth the loss of ‘freedoms’, as some would see it.
Silver bullets don’t exist, and certainly not in the areas being discussed. I’d be willing to try anything, everything, throw the kitchen sink at it and see what works.
Liam @ 58 – yes if they are regularly sending their kids to school without having fed them or food for lunch.
btw is there currently any scope for the welfare authorities to impose compulsory income management where children have been reported for neglect? What are the tools that they can use that sit between counselling and education, and the fairly extreme step of removing the children from their parent’s custody?
If income management is used in specific cases rather than applied blindly to everyone then I think it could be a useful tool. Its not that different in concept to child support – parents should be spending money towards supporting their children – but if they don’t then its reasonable for the government to intervene.
Chris, it’s being trialled in WA.
Liam – right, I’d heard about that, but thats only really happening because the federal government wants it happen and is part of the general roll out of income management. And if I remember correctly it only applies in certain WA suburbs.
And the Kimberley IIRC, Chris.
But here’s the thing I was referring to at my #3 comment: it’s a bilateral arrangement with the State Goverment, and the Department of Child Protection is a stakeholder.
These kinds of schemes simply don’t work—for the reasons derrida derider has mentioned—without broader intensive social work. The people who are likely to be helped by income management schemes are people who are clients not just of Centrelink but a whole lot of other State human services agencies as well, and it’s not their budgeting problems that need fixing, but more likely their alcoholism, drug, violence and mental health problems first.
I’ve said this before. I really really wish that this wouold stop being an issue. I was raised by a single mother in the 70’s. And the worst thing was constantly being made aware of your ‘place’ by everyone else. There were the assumptions about single mothers and their kids that isolated us. Other kids were told by their parents not to mix with us. Adults would talk quite openly about how it was disgusting that they had to pay out of their taxes for ‘the slut and her bastards.’ We were followed around in shopping centres to make sure we didn’t steal anything. We were made to feel bad if we did buy things that weren’t food and basic clothes. (One of my few pleasures as a child was buying the odd computer magazine, an interest that would in time help pull me out of poverty but was definately seen as a waste by others back in the day.)
Of course my mother became tired of defending herself against verbal attacks from strangers. She got tired of snapping how she wasn’t a woman of low virtue, that her husband had died and how in their grief her husbands parents found it easier to ignore her plight rather than help. Cut off from familial assistance she was alone with kids in tow. Welfare was hard, sometimes working was worse as she would be worse off (though we all still did it being told by her that working even if it cost us benefits was better than costing the community money.)
We learned to try and keep hidden, having had drilled into us that the slightest misbehaviour in public would cost us more than it would other kids. Being reliant on the community for welfare we were beholden to them. Oddly enough looking in retrospect I could see many occasions where we were mistreated but at the time we just rolled with the punches and moved on.
I don’t dispute that for some on welfare the parent uses all their money on smokes and grog and the kids go out and steal. But I’d be willing to bet that for every visible ‘criminal’ welfare family raising hell there’s at least twenty others leading lives of quiet desperation, trying to deal with lack of resources and the shame the community makes them feel.
On the upside I managed to raise above it and become a lot more resiliant without I hope losing my compassion. Yay for me. On the other hand among my siblings I have seen it crush them, one to the point where he feels so imobilised he is unable to fix his life. Having been told by the community over and over that he will ammount to nothing he has relented, believing he deserves nothing he has lowered his expectations.
The sort of one solution fits all approach says a lot about community attitudes. At best it says we can’t be bothered hiring case workers to look at individual solutions. At worst it says ‘we don’t trust you.’ And they might be right. I did go hungry sometimes as a kid. To pay for repairs, to pay for books, to stop us sliding backwards. And it was worth it. And now even that will be taken away from some. It was a bad idea when used blanket across all aboriginals. It’s a bad idea now.
That is terrible tssk. What a society it is that we live in when this sort of thing can happen.
Do you think that community attitudes have changed at all since you were growing up?
I things are better but reading some of the comments here I wonder. Too many people look at single mothers as leaches or a drain when they should be looking at them and thinking “how can I help?” We were lucky sometimes with assistance from churches and schools and some good solid male role models. Had some very near misses with some predatory males as well. (One job I was offered as a young teen my mother stopped me from taking because something felt ‘off’ about the kindly employer in question. We found out he was jailed recently for a string of offences against young men.)
My mother did go hungry and I remember during the lean times when we had two meals a day my mother would eat maybe once every two or three days. We always paid our bills though. And sometimes going hungry was worth the little luxeries now and again.
But I do despair looking at my siblings. I find it amazing that a lot of hardliners on the right are so pro the rights of the child before birth (trying to outlaw abortion) when as soon as they are out they are quite fine to have them treated with contempt. As a full time worker I can see where some of the jealousy comes from, but they don’t understand how much time is taken up when you are poor. Not having a washing machine for instance means you spend at least a whole day doing landry by hand. If you don’t live near a shopping centre you have to do the shopping in two or three trips on foot.
You don’t see these people because they become very good at being invisible. If you live on a housing estate the first thing you want to avoid is ‘the family’ (there’s one in most estates, the one that gives the rest of those on welfare a bad name. And if you think it’s bad being mugged by one as a taxpater…try living near them. Living on an estate means ‘dobbing’ isn’t an option so police assistance is out the window.)
My advice is be compassionate and if you feel the need to tssk tssk about the kid’s parents do so out of earshot. Kids hear and take on board more than you think. As for one commenters talk about single parent kids hanging out doing nothing. Yep. That happens. Just as many though are struggling with balancing study, part time work and depending on their family situations taking care of ill relatives or younger siblings.
But because they aren’t on the corner hanging about you don’t see them. They’re hiding in the library, serving you at the checkout or cooking dinner for their brothers and sisters.
Right on, Hannah’s Dad. Typically compassionate and thoughtful posting from you.
This policy
a) is a disgusting retraction of basic rights (and yes, god damn it, welfare should b ea right in a ‘civilised’, developed country like Australia.)
b) Doesn’t work – here, overseas, anywhere where it’s be trialled.
c) Is going to further marginalise, stigmatise and judge the members of society that least need approbation and most need help.
patrickg
Thank you, I needed that.
tssk
I was gonna write somethong for you but I’ve got visitors so gotta go.
No prob Hannah’s dad. Just as an aside, I find it interesting that a lot of the people I know that whine about welfare payments had no problem accepting the middle class welfare payments from both Rudd and Howard.
Tssk – because they don’t need it, they deserve it.
Or something.
What’s the point in spending trillions of dollars on new fighter planes? Honestly, I really have no idea.
Katz @ 54.
They voted no to some propositions like wage and price fixing and yes to others.The referendum proposed a considerable number of ammendments to the constitution and the voters had to vote on each one. I don’t have my Hasluck by me to give you the details but if you look up his volume on the home front during WW2 in the Official History of WW2, you’ll see the details.
FWIW, I don’t get my history wrong.
Katz @ 54,
Correction and sincere apology. Social Services Referendum was carried in 1946 not 1944.(Shouildn’t rely on on my memory.) So, the provision of social services is a constitutional right all Australians have.
Further correction, which I meant to add to comment 76. The 1944 Powers Referendum was rejected by the electorate. Katz, I grovel.
Re 1946 referendum result. Presumably it gives the Commonwealth Government the right to interpret just how social services might be provided. But, as I implied in a much earlier comment, I don’t believe the Great Depression generation envisaged it would be interpreted by Government in a way that was tantamount to restoring the inequities that plagued the provision of social services prior to 1946; having to queue with food vouchers at your local supermarket is pretty close to having to go to the local cop shop to get your rations. One might not have to go on the track from town to town to get your next weekly ration, but otherwise its equally humiliating – worse in some respects, because under Macklin’s legislation, as I understand it, you are publicly humiliated. Everybody in the community gets to know you’re on welfare. At least, in the Depression Era only the cops knew for certain you were on the dole.
The constitution reads:
They have the constitutional power to makes laws about welfare (but not to legally force people to directly provide welfare), if they chose to. It is neither a right nor mandated responsibility based on that section of the constitution.
Desipis, isn’t the thing about our Constitution that it basically does nothing but divvy up which powers go where? That is, nothing very proscriptive at all is contained there?
*Ahem*
Paul Norton @53, both my grandfathers managed to keep their jobs during the depression. My paternal grandfather was the only person in their street who had a job for the duration of the depression. Several neighbours suicided out of despair and shame, apparently.
I don’t remember my parents talking about Susso books (it may not have been available in SA), but my father and his siblings and a small handful of others would have been the only ones in his school who weren’t relying on assistance.
Having said that, having Susso emblazoned over all one’s schoolbooks would have been an unnecessary daily humiliation.
That’s another thing about this business that bothers me, virtually having a scarlet letter on your forehead branding you as an incompetent dole bludger. Certainly, if people are having trouble managing their money, they should be assisted quietly and respectfully. The way this is being approached makes me very uneasy.
FDB, well yeah. That’s kinda my point. Contrary to what Paul Burns was saying:
I wasn’t disagreeing with you.
Although if I might get a bit squibertarian, the tendency has been to assume that “have the power to make laws” means “is obliged to make laws” (though no particular ones).
As I wrote that post in the wee hours – some clarifications from Macklin’s press release – the scheme is a trial roll-out in the NT, and at some stage may cover “vulnerable regions and disadvantaged regions”(?) nationwide.
It will apply automatically to:
People who receive benefits like Age Pension, Disability Support Pension, Youth Allowance, Sickness Allowance, Austudy Payment are not automatically covered but may be referred to the scheme by Social Welfare referral.
My main point in my first post, was that the scheme is targeting the unemployed under 25 without children, even more so than people who are receiving a parenting payment.
That is, the criteria for exemptions for those who are automatically covered,(in contrast to those referred by agencies)….it’s those whose receive parenting payment who will be able to meet the proposed requirements for exemption by merely having their kids in schools and vaccinated. The older unemployed need to show a ‘work history’ of some sort, but the under 25 unemployed need to be in full time study/training or working to be exempt at all.
So aside from all the important issues raised by other participants in this thread – it seems that the two groups most affected will be communities where school attendance is an issue, and that is indigenous communities and secondly the young unemployed.
There may be valid reasons to intervene in respect of children attending school, but I just can’t see any valid reasons why young unemployed people in disadvantaged areas should have their incomes managed if they are not responsible for raising children, nor are they clients of any welfare agency.
Souvlaki and falafel roll shop owners will be marching on Parliament House when they hear about this!
Yeah in some other news, maybe a few Queenslanders may want to know that the QLD government right now in parliament is currently stripping away fundamental rights not seen since…well in fact ever. They have gone well pass Joh. Ironic thing is it won’t arise in the news until its far too late (for both the Labor party here and Queensland)
Tig tog,
I don’t disagree that all the factors that you mention are relevent to the causes of gang culture among young men. However, I strongly believe that it goes far deeper than just economics. From what I see with kids, boys want men in their lives as role models. They will look up to and emulate the men they do have, good or bad. When there are none present and poverty forces these kids onto the street they fall in with macho yobs and gangs.
There is a reluctance on the left to deal with this issue because it means admitting that just perhaps a stable mum and dad are the best setting for a kid to grow up in. The left has become so politically correct that any mention of this makes you a sexist bigot who hates single mums. I just feel we need a little more honesty and a little less ideology. Boys do need good role models and fathers in their lives.
The stigma is a real issue which only gets worse the more targeted income management is. Unemployed may be embarrassing but unemployed lousy parent is a lot worse.
The best answer would be to put part of the child allowance or some other form of middle class welfare on the same basics card as the lousy parent .
“There is a reluctance on the left to deal with this issue because it means admitting that just perhaps a stable mum and dad are the best setting for a kid to grow up in. ”
Yeah right, better tell that to K. Rudd and B. Obama. Those two underachievers could have done so much better for themselves if it weren’t for their family circumstances.
“Boys do need good role models and fathers in their lives.”
Those Sydney uni students with the rape facebook group sound like they need a little male guidance, I hope you’ve been railing against priveleged parents who pack their kids off to boarding schools as well. I hope their parents had their parenting payments suspended.
I’m one of 5 kids from a single parent welfare family, I’m sure my mother didn’t expect to be left on her own with 5 kids, but there you have it. I actually didn’t experience any particularly bad attitudes from my school, in fact my teachers were mostly pretty good [makes me wonder if I encountered Hannah's Dad at some time], but my mum was very heavily involved with the school and did a lot of volunteering for committees and what not. I was in also in a regional area and people can do it tough seasonally in the country and so I think there is maybe a more compassionate attitude generally about the welfare, less so about the single parent family thing. Personally, I’d say the biggest issue to child welfare is predatory adults and no amount of income quarantining will stop the attitude of some – it’s a form of entitlement, I think and it’s a damn shame that so many from safe middle class backgrounds aren’t given better guidance in these matters – I blame the parents. oh yes.
BTW: 4 of the 5 kids in my family all run successful businesses, two of us employ other people. Personally, I’m glad and proud to have grown up on welfare, it taught me extraordinary independence, resilience and a lot about setting priorities, as well as understanding that prejudice usually comes from one of two mindsets – smugness/entitlement or insecurity – neither are useful or admirable, imo. I’m happy to have been from a single parent home, although not having witnessed abuse or arguments, made it extremely strange to visit the family homes of my friends, where parental snark, misogyny and outright threats of abuse, was common and incredibly confronting to me at the time.
Furious,
Rudd and Obama are not typical. We can all find examples of the dysfunctional married couple with kids and the successful single parent kids. Of course the divide is not black and white. However, there is no doubt that for the many kids I teach who deal with dysfunction and the lack of fathers in their lives, this is a real issue. At crucial points in their lives had a stable male figure been present in there could have been very different outcomes. Not all kids from single parent families turn out to be thugs. My dad was raised in a single parent family from a young age and he is a decent well adjusted man. But combine lack of a father with a viscious street culture, sexist attitudes to women, bad relationships and gangs and that is a recipe for disaster. Two good parents remain the ideal and is what many kids from single parent families yearn for.
Spana, if two parents are better than one, then is three even better again?
Since Spana is probably out role modeling I venture to say that it might make it a bit more exciting for the two parents, Fine.
Qualifications and experience, (for those who feel insecure about their critical skills).
I grew up reasonably poor myself, although we didn’t notice at the time as most everyone else in the commission estate was too.
And…, I’ve spent a lot of time working with disadvantaged people.
Sure, some of them are no-hopers, but so are many others at various levels of the income scale. Same goes for unrealistic sense of entitlement etc., it is not just concentrated among welfare recipients.
This micro control is just a ruse which panders to the significant proportion of voters who, if they had their way would have all the rugged and buggered in secure facilities, or even better, disposed of.
It won’t do any good, most people on welfare who really need help with income management already have it via some sector of the poverty services industry.
And money management is but one of a raft of issues that the “target group” have to grapple with in an increasingly (and unnecessarily, in my opinion) complex world. A lot of people just aren’t that smart, and our society seems to revel in making it even more difficult for this unfortunate group.
I could go on but, that’s probably enough to give you some idea of where I stand on the issue.
In my experience, if you really want to help the disadvantaged, you need to live with them in their community. It doesn’t guarantee results, but the chances of helping people to lead a reasonably dignified existence are better.
P.S. what is Kev and his gang of fixers going to do about the legendary single mum who earns her (inadequate) wage fair and square in a job and then puts puts it through the pokies. It happens, you know.
This just in …
Fielding wants a commission chaired by Plimer and Garnaut to check out what’s causing global warming …
You have to laugh …
“You have to laugh”
Do I really?
And now the latest …
Hockey to stand and the party members to have a conscience vote on the CPRS. If so Turnbull rolled and CPRS through …
I said:
Well you don’t have to … but it helps.
Eva Cox at The Stump on the plan to roll out income management nation wide
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/thestump/2009/11/30/the-changes-we-shouldn%e2%80%99t-be-having/