One of many depressing facets of the election campaign is the race to the bottom between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott on punishing and straightening the unemployed and low income people generally, and pushing the discourse that poverty, homelessness and disadvantage are mainly the result of personal inadequacy rather than poor public policy or structural inequalities.
It is therefore a welcome relief to read some calls for decency in the debate over welfare policy.
In today’s Age, Associate Professor Philip Mendes, Professor Margaret Alston and Dr Robyn Mason critically scrutinise the current policy proposals and long-standing opinions of Tony Abbott. Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald reports the concerns of Father Chris Riley, founder of Youth off the Streets, at the stances of both major parties. It also quotes Cassandra Goldie of ACOSS, Frank Quinlan of Catholic Social Services Australia and Maree O’Halloran from the Welfare Rights Centre.
straightening
It’s straiten, meaning to confine.
Paul, where has Gillard done that? Are you talking about her emphasis on the value of work? Surely it’s possible to value work without being accused of not caring about the disadvantaged, or do you see that as the inevitable corollary?
One example, PC: there’s no fundamental disagreement between the ALP and the Libs on welfare quarantining. Tony wants to introduce it straight away: the ALP prefers a more “evidence based” approach, starting with a trial in the NT to show that it works then a national roll-out.
I plan to vote “Anybody but Abbott” come Saturday.
Oh, poop. Did not know that.
Isn’t there all sorts of evidence that (quite apart from anything else) it doesn’t work?
PC #2, Father Riley cites a number of examples in the SMH article I linked to.
Picking on the unemployed is still greatly in fashion, sadly. But one thing Labor has done very well is putting money into social housing, which has made areal difference. I can see it where I live; an electorate with many homeless people, some of whom now have stable homes thanks to the local council getting funding from the Feds to build them.
Pavlov’s Cat @ 4 – the ALP is going to great lengths to ignore any evidence out of the NT experience that it doesn’t work. It’ll happen.
%# PC, few people understood the rationale behind the redneck Aboriginal Intervention of Howard’s last days.
It’s probably true that Labor kept only the dross but jettisoned any (unlikely)constructive policiesl; how otherwise could they continue their intellectually and morally deficient race to the populist bottom, with Abbott.
Hegemony and heterogeny; that’s the go!
Father Riley was on ABC radio this morning, and made some salient points, in the brief time that he was given. I think he is equally contemptous of the policies of both sides.
I suppose the internal polling both parties are getting tell them people don’t care much what happens to welfare recipients (unless they become one. Abbott has always been a bastard to the unemployed, disabled and single mothers – no surprises there. More crime, more homeless on our streets I suppose, because of these policies.
Fie #6, quite true on social housing, and Tanya Plibersek should be commended for her efforts in this area. However an article by Guy Johnson in a recent edition of Dissent magazine points out that there’s still a long way to go before the harm done during the Howard years is reversed.
Oh, and God will punish you, Tones. Something bad will happen to you financially, you won’t be able to pay off your mortgage and you’ll lose your house. (I hope.)
Fine @ 6 – some very good quality stuff popping up around where I am as well. And intermingled with other housing rather than creating future ghettos too.
Affordable housing & homelessness are still big issues depite them being big issues prior to the last election. You only need to walk around the CBD in Brizzie during the night to see human beings huddled in rags wrapped in cardboard and newspaper trying to fend off the 4.00am freeze. Then you need to try & rent a room or rent a unit on centrelink benefits if any landlord or real estate agent will let you !
It’s worth pointing out that we have done some campaigning on this, and one of the most risible things we’ve found out is that when local community advocates have called their ALP MPs asking for confirmation & the ALP’s plans etc, they are being told that ‘the legislation hasn’t even passed yet’ and it’s all Green grandstanding.
Says a lot about you when you’re happy to punish the most vulnerable in our society with a policy that has no strong evicdence to support its efficacy, and are too cowardly to even admit it to those who will be affected.
Tanya Plibersek is one of the genuine people in the current ministry, I think, who really wants to make a difference and is smart and sincere enough to achieve real benefits in her portfolio. It’s a pity there are aren’t more like her, although Nicola Roxon is probably another.
17, the trouble with the better ones is that they must yeild on policy when it conflicts with the darker needs of faction bosses and their “mates” outside parliament.
But to be fair, even labor has been an exponentially better unit for the people, than alternatives like Abbott.
Keep in mind the example of that weird creature they now have running what’s left of Britain; Cameron.
There is a huge stink about new public housing being built at Narooma, with the locals screaming that the site is unsuitable,the building is unsuitable,the residents will not be “normal people” etc. The conversation that involved a local politician and a number of residents who will be “adversly affected” by this block of units was one of the most unedifying things i have heard in a long time, but what it shows is that there are many in the community who would cheerfully throw the disadvantaged onto the nearest garbage heap.
I will be voting for the Greens because I cannot abide Labors position on these matters.
Chris Riley is quoted as saying that “He now has ”no idea” who he will vote for”.
Perhaps someone should tell him that there is a third party he can vote for that doesn’t resort to blaming the victim.
From the first link:
“In February 2010, Abbott told a Catholic social services conference that he refused to set targets for reducing rates of homelessness because he believes that many people make “a choice” to be homeless, and there is little government can do to help this group of people.”
What a bloody disgraceful response from Abbott that should render him ineligible for public office in this country.
Seriously.
[See Gummo's comment.]
For starters it ignores the fact that the single largest cause of homelessness in this country is women and children attempting to escape domestic violence.
Generally I deplore the attitude of the ALP government, welfare quarantining for example, and agree that they are falling well short of a desirable ethic and set of policies.
But I would support Fine and Adrian above re Tanya Plibersek.
She is heading up a ministry that is, thanks to her, doing some really positive stuff.
It would be a crying shame if she lost the job next week.
I have said here before, she is the only ALP politician I would put #1 on by ballott paper.
robbo @ 18 – having lived next to a large public housing block in an otherwise pretty affluent Canberra suburb, I probably would be a bit concerned if the government decided to build a big one next to my house. I wouldn’t have a problem if they decided to do a number of small scale ones that fit in with the rest of the housing (eg houses if it was mostly houses, townhouses where townhouses) scattered around the suburb though.
It is indeed a race to the bottom …. by politicians and their policy-wonkers and all their assorted fake experts …. on BOTH sides of the political fence. (Sorry, Pavlov’s Cat, on 2).
Take the “Rustication” proposals from both sides of politics; Labor is as bad as LNP. After decades of ruthlessly punishing any urban poor who dared try to escape poverty by moving to little towns out in The Bush, our glorious lords-&-masters have done a spectacular 180 degree flip-flop. Now, (looking at just on side of the political fence as an example) in a flash of absolute brilliance, the puppeteers tugging Abbot’s strings and other things, have deigned that urban unemployed who “Go Down To The Countryside” will be given a hefty cash reward if they stick at the same job for twelve months – and four thousand dollars if they last two years. Of course, anyone who does not follow exactly the very narrow definitions of their employment arrangements will be denied welfare assistance, such as the “dole” for Six Months. Farewell to individual choice and goodbye to market forces. Welcome to Rort Central! And exactly how many guardian angels do they intend appointing to make sure that each and every one of the ex-urban workers will actually receive – and use as they see fit – the full value of the “wages” they are paid? Oh, and by the way, has anyone thought about how to prevent the sexual harassment of ex-urban workers in vulnerable situations?
Me? I’m as happy as Larry. I want rush out and buy myself a couple of failed farms and dud rural businesses so that I can make a squillion out of the new serfs and the tied labourers. It’s jackpot time! You little beauty! I’m going to make a mint, too, selling razor-wire and welded mesh screens to every isolated farm house I can find (installed by my own newly-acquired half-paid workers, of course); all these farming and grazing families will have to be protected from gangs of marauding ex-urban unemployed who have been cut off the “dole” and left to starve …. I’m going to get filthy rich! – just so long as the policy makers don’t stop and think about the real social, internal security and economic costs of what they are proposing.
Having lived IN a large public housing block in an otherwise pretty affluent Canberra suburb I say build more of them. It’s this hand-wringing middle class patronising approach to people like me (long term unemployed, angry, will never have a secure place in society, otherwise intelligent) that makes me want to puke. We are human beings, not socio-political chess pieces. And as for Plibercek – she lives in the finger wharf at Wooloomooloo with her husband, the Director General of NSW Education (yes, the mob that “ran” the BER in NSW and fought to keep heaters thatw are poisoning kids). Plibercek is far from a hero, but totally symptomatic of the middle class takeover of politics in the last thirty years. Useless drones that keep repeating mantras learnt on campus, and supporting brain dead personality cults like Mar’n Ferguson and Albo. the Social Housing spend was all about ensuring that blokes with ladders on their utes could keep working to pay their mortgages. That is, the ultimate beneficiary of this largesse was the big four banks who hold the mortagages. Ever tried Cui Bono you dolts? It was rolled out as part of the stimulus program. As someopne currently living in my car I am looking forward to an increase in squatting and personal theft – maybe then you useless drones will realise that forcing me to live on $33 a day is going to hurt you more than it hurts me in the long run.
when ACOSS launched its election campaign platform on the monring of Aug 5, it put housing affordability at the top of its agenda. That story was not picked up on any ABC website or news bulletin.
Around 5:30 that day however, ABC (among others) did run a story of ACOSS supporting (and wanting to see extended) the Coalition proposal to provide a bonus to employers taking on older workers.
I recognise that was interesting news. However, in the context of a campaign which media commentators and others were already decrying as lacking substance, being a “meta election” and so on, I would have thought that the ABC – if no one else – would have seen an even greater importance in reporting the considered position of a peak advocacy organisation whose members make up the vast bulk of all welfare, social service and community development organisations in Australia (that in one way or another, themselves, work with the majority of the most disenfranchised and vulnerable members of our society).
Now ACOSS and others are out there again on housing afforablity – http://bit.ly/abu5hy – we’ll see if the media is prepared to make it an issue when the political parties are not.
I suspect not.
From Bernard Keane in this afternoon’s Crikey:
The smug callousness of the neocons and their “Liberal” acolytes is vomit-making.
Gee whizz, that’s as devastating a summary as I’ve read yet.
As sure as night follows day, the Morlochs will eat them.
And as sure as night follows day, they will become the unwilling but desperate recruits for the sort of people you would never invite home to dine with your family.
I do take issue with the use of the word “skills” to describe the advantages yer commentators, academics &c have in the labour market but I’m not sure what should replace it – front, chutzpah or maybe self-serving amoral mendacity. That last option is a bit wordy.
From the article:
“He said suspending welfare payments – as Labor has proposed for job seekers who miss a Centrelink appointment, or relocate interstate and then lose a job – ”will help the crime rate go up”.”
Some penalty for those who chose not to attend Centrelink appointments is reasonable but punishing people who move interstate and can’t find a new job sounds unduly harsh.
And of course, whenever the wailing and gnashing of teeth over “stamping out inflation” is on display, one can easily forget that <ideflation is at least equally serious a problem and hard for business to get out of.
While inflation much above 3% can pose serious problems, falling prices aren’t any better for investment and jobs.
Yes, it’s the ALP that deserves to be called out on welfare quarantining. Abbott can say whatever he likes he’s in opposition. Labor went down this route to avoid being called racist as originally it was set up for Aboriginal people in the NT. They’re rolling it out for everyone up there and then mid-next year intend to roll out welfare quarantining nation wide for everyone on unemployment & single parenting benefits, regardless of what the research says.
You had that Labor Senator banging on about “personal responsibility” on Sky the other day in respect to the NT intervention yet are bringing in welfare quarantining nation wide.
What disappoints me is right-wingers used to always go on about Labor and it’s arrogance re: moral supremacy/nanny state stuff and they were right. Welfare quarantining (not even Howard stooped that low), mandatory internet filter, jacking up cigarettes by 25% per pack etc.
Nothing but jacked up yuppies thinking they know what’s best for the rest of us plebs. With how completely disappointing this Labor government has been on these and other issues not only have they lost my vote but I might never vote for them again.
So disheartening.
@25 Perhaps you’ve never read Henry Morgenthau’s report to the US congress in 1939. Bear in mind that he was the first Fiscal Stimulus Guru, FDR’s Treasurer for 12 years…
‘We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work…I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. … And an enormous debt to boot.”
Today, in Australia, we have more unemployment than in Nov 2007 and a huge debt..to boot. sound familiar?
Ok. $150 Billion to protect/save 200,000 jobs is $750,000 per job. The claim that letting these 200,000 become jobless would’ve been cruel can be assessed in the following way…
In 2008/09 there “should’ve” been a $20 Billion surplus. Imagine the 200,000 unemployed were paid a “super-dole” of $1000 per week ($52,000 a year)instead of having their jobs “saved” for $150 billion. OK $10 billion “super-dole” per year and STILL $10 billion surplus left, with the unemployed living like Kings and Queens on a grand aweek TAX FREE!!
Keep in mind that $150 billion debt carries about $10 billion in interest….to be paid to overseas financiers!! Yeah..$10 billion to Banksters OS instead of $10 billion to unemployed Aussie workers, AND $150 billion in hock to those same banksters! That’s Labor for ya!
Labor has stuffed up..BIG TIME. They’ve gotta go.
Bravo boganboy (23), (winding up RantoMatic2000):
Running the Cui Bono ruler over these flavor-of-the-month brand-named imported-from-new-york social-housing-model ( cherry picked and adapted for oz conditions ie needing to feed the big players and party donors in the construction industry, whereas the original model had disused buildings being repurposed and the refurbishment itself being used as a job training opportunity) that tanya et al love to spruik would be interesting, I reckon.
Only half of these 1 million$ish cost/ per shoebox-sized glorified bedsits actually are reserved for “homeless”, (and they have to go through winning degrading “the city’s n most homeless” competitions, so good for putting out feelgood press releases, with photos of the lucky winners, to get a bed), the rest are earmarked for (get this) “creative industry” types, people who are supposed to “model” to the homeless and unemployed how to get out of the shit, thereby preventing the edifices from becoming ghetto focii.
So the theory goes, but it looks like the studio bedsits are actually just being flogged off in open real estate ad company to any yuppie who reckons the idea of an ultra-inner city micro-pad, with added social colour for free, is way cool, and can come up with the $200/wk. There’s nothing in the “for rent” ads to suggest part of the deal is to give someone “less fortunate” a bit of pro bono script writing, or whatever these hypothetical creative industry types do between macchiatos, lessoning.
I see there’s a thriving little side industry flogging nearby parking spaces to said yuppies, and by the looks of some ads, lucky winners of the 2 bedroom apartment leases are subletting on a 2 bed rents per room basis, …hey if its good enough for overseas students …
Australia, on the lurk since the 1790′s.
Did someone say “figleaf”?
@32 it makes as much sense quoting from morgenthau as it would me quoting keynes saying we would be better off having one group of workers digging holes and the next coming in to fill them up.
in actual fact it makes keane’s point that it is ideology which is behind a persons view of the stimulus package.
ultimately we may never know the counter factual but i for one am looking at similar countries and am proud of the govts response on the whole – and perhaps that is ideology mixed in with old fashioned keynesianism but it’ll do me
Hehehe that’s got to be on a very short list of most ridiculous comments of 2010. I just love it.
There are several obvious problems with your claim BC
1. The stimulus package wasn’t $150bn — it was about $42bn
2. The number of jobs saved is and inadequate metric. One must consider the number of working hours retained (i.e. the number of jobs multiplied by the number of hours) We will probably never know that figure exactly, but it is clearly going to be a lot larger than $200,000 FT jobs permanently held
3. The metric doesn’t consider the counterfactual costs. People on welfare benefits are a charge on revenue. People and businesses who pay taxes are a revenue input. You need to consider both sides of the balance sheet
4. Some of the stimulus (about $10bn) was the equivalent of a temporary tax cut. For conservatives, it is an odd claim that handing people back some of their taxes is a bad way to use money.
In the longer run, what is salient about public debt is not that it exists, but whether it is capable of being persistently raised and serviced without significant disruption to the economy as a whole, and whether the objects for which it is being raised are of a value to the community which is commensurate with the debt service. These are practical and political questions that are not reducible to simplistic shibboleths about the virtue of non-indebtedness and balanced bookkeeping.
The whole point of public policy is to ensure that people live as well as they can in a way that can be maintained over meaningful timeframes. Regimes need to be judged by this standard rather than by arbitrary claims about figures on balance sheets.
The PM’s trope of “I know the value of work” buys directly into a couple of long standing discourses about morality, virtue and work. The PM is not referring to the dollar value of work. She is referring to work as a source of moral virtue. In so doing she buys directly into 19C. discourses that surrounded the poor houses, the poor laws and associated concepts deriving from charity such as “the deserving poor” who were those prepared to submit themselves to the brutal regime of the poor houses as well as wash and attend Church on Sunday. By mobilising this sort of language the PM has hopelessly mired herself in the social values that accompanied the massive disruption of the UK economy as the UK industrialised. Those who fell foul of the process, and there were many, were treated with supreme harshness until they learnt “the value of work”.
To hell with structural economic disadvantage or even with geographic maldistribution of employment opportunities; to hell with sociology, economics and modern governance. Let us again describe those who experience misfortune as undeserving, lazy, not too bright, the bottom of the pile, the unfit. Why not go the whole social Darwinist hog and simply eradicate those who refuse to display that they have internalised all of the moral virtues of this vicious little atheist by learning “the value of work”.
It is no surprise therefore that the model beings on whom this re-emergence of savage pre-modern attitudes is being tested is the indigenous population of the NT. They are, of course, the most disempowered, the least adequately represented politically and the most out of sight. Oh yeah, they also all look different to “us”. That helps to identify them. Even the term “welfare quaranting” has about it some of the scent of 19C. public health policies that equated poverty with dirt, dirt with race and the latter as a sign of a disease within the body politic. Who then could forget the famous Nazi slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei”?
If work is a sign of moral virtue there’s a few of the PM’s parliamentary colleagues who’ve yet to display the right attitude to it. Let’s not mistake having a job for doing any work. She could have a go herself and reading some history would be a good start.
Hannah’s Dad@20: the single largest cause of homelessness in this country is women and children attempting to escape domestic violence.
That doesn’t match my recollection and I’m struggling to find ABS numbers. I vaguely recall that a great majority of women with children who are homeless have experienced domestic violence, and I agree that that group makes the best headlines and are hardest to attack, but IIRC the largest single cause is actually mental illness. Much less photogenic, but a much bigger issue. Especially since we’ve done so much to make them homeless. Sorry, I mean “cared for in the community”.
The ABS says: “In 2006, more than two-thirds (67%) of the homeless population were adults over 18 years of age, with 12% under 12 years of age, and 21% from 12 to 18 years old. Less than half (44%) of homeless people were female. … There was also a 10% increase in the number of homeless adults outside of families. This was the largest group with about 60,000 people on Census night.”
Abbott … refused to set targets for reducing rates of homelessness because he believes that many people make “a choice” to be homeless
In a civilised society he’d be diagnosed as insane since his worldview is so emphatically divorced from reality on so many fronts and he’s not able to accept facts that conflict with it. Or is that just bigotry? Sometimes I find the subtle shades of definitions a little hard to make out.
moz @38, I go with bigotry.
Homelessness Australia ia the peak body in the field.
Here is one of their media releases.
Excerpt:
“As we mark International Women’s Day 2010, it is important to remember that women make up almost half of those experiencing homelessness in Australia.
About 46,000 women are homeless in Australia. Domestic and family violence is the largest issue contributing to their homelessness…….
We still see half of the women who approach services for women escaping domestic violence turned away”
The statement that women and children escaping domestic violence is the single largest cause of homelessness is in this linked media release which is entitled “Homelessness-its not who you think?”:
http://www.homelessnessaustralia.org.au/UserFiles/File/Homelessness%20Its%20Not%20Who%20You%20Think_Homelessness%20Australia%20Release.pdf
Here is some of the nitty gritty from the Homelessness Australia media release of 2008.
“FACT: One in every 42 children under the age of five accessed a homelessness
service with a parent or guardian in 2006-2007.
FACT: On any given night, 450 people across the country are turned away from refuges because every bed is full.
FACT: The single largest group of people who experience homelessness are women escaping domestic violence.
There is no “typical” homeless person. Children, women, families, young people
and the elderly were among the 189,000 Australians – 69,000 of them under 18 -
who used homelessness support services in 2006-2007.”
There are a whole stack of releases and articles at that sight.
They make depressing and uncomfortable reading.
Unfortunately most people are unaware of what really goes on concerning this issue and myths and stereotypes abound.
hannah’s dad, thanks for the links. I’m struggling to make sense of them, but it’s interesting to read up. My reading says 44% female, 67% over 18, so I’d expect about 30% of the total to be women who might have children.
But yes, even volunteering on the fringe of that particular problem is very difficult. I’ve withdrawn and gone for the easy option of just giving money.
I fear that we’ll start seeing stories like this one from NZ if the mad monk gets in (alternate link).
hannah’s dad – I think the stereotypes come about because the public face of homelessness is those you see in the streets. Those that have no real shelter at night at all – commonly men. Whereas there’s a lot more people out there staying in friends/families houses, emergency accomodation, cars etc who aren’t easily recognisable as homeless.
Though while I understand that solving the latter may take time – to provide long term accommodation – there’s really no excuse for government not being able to fix the former – just a matter of willingness to spend a bit of extra money on emergency accommodation.
btw the following I think is a worthwhile read:
http://the-riotact.com/?p=25394
Abbott isn’t even Australian born!
He gets all of his second-hand ideas off the Tory Party in his home country, the UK. Bazza McKenzie would be on the mark with his ’70′s T-shirt “Pommy Bastards” with Tony Abbott & Billy Hughes among them!