Illustration: Andrew Dyson via SMH
”when social disadvantage becomes entrenched within a limited number of localities, the restorative potential of standard services in spheres like education and health can diminish.
A disabling social climate can develop that is more than the sum of individual and household disadvantages…”
Transfer payments together with the provision of educational opportunities and health care may not be enough to break the social press.
So, can anything more effective be done to address “deep exclusion” and if so what?
He’s absolutely right – there’s not nearly enough emphasis on indices of deprivation and social exclusion, because the PTB prefer to focus on hard, bright monetary lines.
Would it be too little too late to merely return to the egalitarian policy traditions that preceded the economic “rationalism” that enabled the onset of deep exclusion?
Where do I start – control electricity prices so they don’t increase, rent control, government paying for costs of school excursions, free public transport, free education of a high standard for everyone, stop demonising the underpriviliged, more high quality public houses – I could go on and on.
Yeah. I know, I’m a socialist.
Paul Burns – do you mean the government should subsidise electricity so that it’s sold to you for less than it costs to get it to you?
The Daily Mash summarize it nicely with their article on food and heat in the UK:
Russell,
I mean erlectricity should be sold at prices the poorest can afford so they can have light, heating, hot water and energy for cooking. If that requires subsidisation, so be it. I have no time for the callous Thatcherite user pays ideology that leaves the underpreivileged worse off than the rest.
we pay taxes, let the goverment use them for basic human needs first and foremost. To use and old socialist slogan, butter before guns!
“I mean electricity should be sold at prices the poorest can afford”
Paul, do you mean sold to everybody at prices the poorest can afford, or a subsidy just to the poor?
If things are bad, they may not be getting worse – read pages 1, 4-6 of Peter Saunders latest article in the SPRC Newsletter
PB probably means just the poor should be subsidised, Russell, or at least I hope so. As someone who is fairly well-off, I don’t need (and wouldn’t welcome) a subsidy for my electricity use.
Wouldn’t it be better to have a pension that allows for a decent life, than special ‘hardship’ programs for the poor, as we have in W.A.?
“So, can anything more effective be done to address ‘deep exclusion’ and if so what?”
How about disaggregating payroll tax and making superannuation progressive, so that employers offering entry-level jobs aren’t slugged for payroll tax and super on top of wages?
The lower are electricity prices, the more electricity that gets generated, the more greenhouse gases get emitted.
It’s so difficult to be a socialist nowadayssigh.
Gavin @ 11, you’ve probably forgotten (as have far too many others who should know better) that the employer contribution to superannuation is actually in lieu of a wage rise back in the day. In other words, employers would be paying an equivalent amount anyway.
Can also help in other ways to make it easier for the poor to use less electricity – eg solar hot water systems on public housing. Running gas lines to public housing for cooking and heating. That’s far better than keeping electricity prices low so they can use electric hot water systems.
David: I’ll take your word for what happened “back in the day”. But that has nothing to do with what will happen tomorrow if entry-level labour suddenly becomes cheaper for employers without becoming less lucrative for employees.
I think one of the most important things is stable housing for everyone. RMIT has just done report about homelessness and mental health. They report that 31% of homeless people have a mental illness, but only 15% did before they became homeless. They’re conclusion is that being homeless causes mental illness, which makes sense especially in cases of depression and anxiety.
If you give someone a home, everything about their lives becomes better.
Russel @ 7,
Here we go Russel. It is OK to argue against making the life of some people easier, but not OK to argue that aluminium smelters should pay full retail.
Which is it to be?
Sorry BilB, I don’t understand the question, can you re-phrase?
It was such a good article that I (botched, apparently) putting up a Facebook comment exhorting folk to read it, late last night.
What a broadsheet contrast to the tabloid shreikings from Jones, Murdoch, etc!
Unfortunately, you begin to suspect that, like Davidson and Steketee, Gittins is a museum exhibit, verging on stuffed and mounted, to depict the evolution or descent of journalism from informative, substantial broadsheet, to shreiking “Volkischer” propaganda.
This Labor government’s response:
http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/05/11/welfare-government-fails-its-social-democracy-obligations/
Now extending welfare quarantining across the country.
Prediction: watch crime escalate in these areas.
What a great article.
We need to see an 2-3 articles like this in the national papers every week.
Ross Gittens was not arguing against more money for the poor. However, the thrust of this article was about:
Later on Gittens goes on to say:
I would add that “lack of choice” is part of the problem. For example, Noel Pearson is not socially disadvantaged because he can choose to live the life of a city lawyer or something much closer to the life of a traditional Aborigine. All the Aborigines I have known from outback communities haven’t got that choice for a variety of reasons.
What contributes to social disadvantage is both a personal and cultural thing. The Aborigines referred to above would probably think I was socially disadvantaged because I aren’t part of an “obligation network” that they see as an essential part of their life.
So perhaps we could get away from talking about electricity subsidies and talk about both the nature of social disadvantage and some of the strategies required to do something about it?
There seems to be a growing awareness among the community of families in danger. The agency responsible in SA, sorry I can’t remember the name, received 24,000 calls last year from the public and professionals reporting examples of children at risk. Families SA I think.
Some professionals had to wait on the line up to an hour and we have just had the sad case of a young child dying after being given methadone, from a family which had been reported several times by a neighboor.
Poor social policy means that agencies are stretched beyond their limits of being able to cope. So it seems that identifying families in need of help is not such a problem but getting agencies to do something is. What they then do is probably far from adequate but it would be a start.
I think once a family has been identified as at risk, there needs to be a raft of options to ensure the children do not become another generation with poor parenting skills, poor understanding of nutrition, poor health and sanitation knowledge, poor work ethic etc etc.
There should be bonus welfare payments for the parents, and perhaps even the older children to attend and finish various short courses, which may even be conducted in the home in the case of cleaning or cooking.
This is going to cost heaps but governmnents have been shirking their reponsibility for years.
I’m sceptical of too hasty a move away from income (or, as Tigtog says, “hard and bright monetary lines”) as an indicator of disadvantage. Surely money remains a key factor. British commentator John Veit Wilson says income is the ‘clean water’ in the struggle against poverty. Just as any public health professional will tell you that good health outcomes depend vitally on clean water, so adequate and reliable income over time is the necessary foundation for social inclusion – even if it is not always sufficient.
Most poverty lines use income to stand in for living standards more generally, and by ‘living standards’ we tend to mean ‘more stuff’. Yet even those classic studies of poverty that, unlike Henderson or NATSEM, start from an examination of multiple deprivation or exclusions tend to conclude that such exclusions are the consequence of a primary deprivation whose origin is economic. This is perhaps unsurprising as time and space are rearranged in contemporary capitalism to favour the production and consumption of commodities while degrading subsistence-oriented activities which satisfy needs directly.
In the safety business it has been found that the ratio of serious:minor accidents in a particular industry stays relatively constant oven time even though accident frequency rates have dropped dramatically. Because of this it has been found that the most effective way of reducing serious accidents is to put most of effort into the reduction of minor accidents rather than simply concentrate on the serious ones.
The same principle may also apply to reducing the number of families in serious danger. Put effort into fixing problems that tend to push families into minor danger and you may well reduce the number of serious incidents. Social disadvantage would have to be one of the contributing factors.
It may be useful to divide the socially disadvantaged into a number of groups including:
1. Those that have the aptitudes and attitudes/culture that will get out of social disadvantage with a bit of help.
2. Those who have the aptitudes but not the attitudes/culture to get out of social disadvantage.
3. Those that lack the aptitudes.
Different goals and strategies may be appropriate. In the case of the first group the focus should probably be on getting out of disadvantage. In the case of the other groups it may be more appropriate to put more emphasis on successful living in a situation of social disadvantage.
I’ve got a crazy idea maybe increase public housing rather than selling off the land to developers (hello SA Labor govt) thus reducing public housing despite the continued increase on the waiting list- in SA the category 1 waiting list is more than 1,000 that’s for immediate and emergency housing, the total waiting list is more than 20,000- and instead of beating up on the poor on welfare in some sort of race to the bottom with the Libs how about increasing their benefits. The dole (Newstart) is as low as $430 a fortnight for those in a relationship.
Having read Gittins piece Mohammad Yunus comes to mind. The other night I heard a discussion about a controversy over a micro finance operator. This other “bank” went to some detail to indicate that their overall interest rate was only a little more than the Grumene Bank rate, but he said nothing about any programme of social inclusion. It was this issue that drove Yunus. He would not lend to people who did not participate in his education development programme as he knew that to lend to people who did not have the knowledge to best utilise their opportunity to bring their family out of poverty, would be doing those people more harm than good.
J de M, I agree with your arguement for more public housing. The commercial model has failed as developers build houses for maximum capital gain, houses which are not suitable for people with minimal incomes. Houses built to suit small cash flows have a small buyer market of people with very little money, ie the young, and are therefore a poor commercial proposition. This is a glaringly subtle distinction that would have been lost on those wrote public housing out of the future government business plan.
Gavin R. Putland@15: cutting super contributions means that instead of low-wage jobs paying X, they will pay X less the 9% super. Yes, the employer will pay less, but only because the employee gets less. It would be better to cut the minimum wage or increase GST, in that it would make the pay cut explicit and people would get upset about it.
A progressive super scheme would be great if it was a combined pool, like the existing old age pension. The current regressive semi-private super system where benefits overwhelmingly flow to the richest is designed to do exactly the same thing as your “no super for poor people” scam is – further advantage the well-off at the expense of the poor. We should be making the system more progressive, not less. Ideally by increasing the pension at the expense of the super scam, but increasing the co-contribution system and requiring low-fee funds as the default would be valid alternatives.
But on topic, working to ameleorate entrenched disadvantage and low social equity is not very hard – it was done very successfully in Australia in the 1950′s, for example (with the caveat that the results were the ones desired, not the broader goals we would have for such a system today).
One interesting idea that I had last night was that we could escape the housing boom trap by redirecting the industry towards creating livable cities. Rather than turning productive land into houses on the edges of cities, we could reclaim the inner areas of cities and turn them into modern, well-serviced high density ones. Brownfield development, in other words.
This doesn’t have to be multi-storey blocks, the infill housing work done in Christchurch is one example of how you can turn low density into medium density over time at a reasonable cost – and the work is similar scale to the rural encroachment projects, so can be done by the same people.
Moz, re ‘your “no super for poor people” scam’:
Whoa! I never said the poor wouldn’t get any super. I merely said that super contributions would be “funded by a disaggregated federal payroll tax”. I even added: “Of course there is no reason why the federally-funded contribution should be proportional to the worker’s wage or salary…”
You add: ‘A progressive super scheme would be great if it was a combined pool…’
That’s precisely what I’m suggesting.
Another suggestion: low cost to free and universally available child care because early childhood trained workers (0-5 yrs) are the ones best located to see the evidence of intellectual and physical impairment as well as the bruises, the hunger and the fear manifested by abused kids. Nio child care means no safety net and no pathway to early intervention.
John D mentions lack of choices and I agree; it’s not just money. Sure money is needed just like clean water but it’s not sufficient. I’d say the biggest contributor to giving people life options is education (ie it opens doors and creates networks).
House. Job. Health. Education.
Got the last two. Summed it up pretty succinctly Tyro Rex. It ain’t rocket science. I’d also emphasise, education and viable avenues of escape for young people needing to simply flee.
Our society implicitly recognises what I saw Margaret Thatcher say the other day (on recording)
The Davidson power bill is about $2.40/day which is less than it costs one of us to take a return journey on public transport to the city. (About 15 km.) What this means is that anyone who is stressed about their power bill will be stressed about the cost of transport.
The outcome is that these people will be inclined to stay at home because of the price of transport instead of packing their lunch to take advantage of the many free things that can be enjoyed in cities like Brisbane. In many senses this transport cost driven isolation is a greater social disadvantage than having to skimp on power consumption.
We could deal with transport cost driven isolation by simply increasing income but I suspect this money would simply go into general expense and the people involved would still skimp on transport.
The more effective way of dealing with the social disadvantage of transport cost related isolation would be to provide free offpeak travel on public transport.
Strategies based on understanding the specifics of social disadvantage are more likely to be effective than simply increasing income.
When I was a teenager we suffered from mild social disadvantage because my widowed mother could only earn less than the male basic wage. During my third year of high school she told me that I would have to leave school at the end of the year unless I was able to win a state bursary for the final two years. (She ended up changing her mind before she found out that I had won a bursary but this is not the point.)
The interesting thing here is to speculate whether comment about the bursary would have been different if she had earning a bit more. My guess is that she would have still made the comment because the bursary was seen to be about “reducing the burden of keeping me at school” while a slightly higher wage would simply have added to our normal expenses leaving keeping me at school as an added burden. The message here is that targeted money would have had a much higher impact on this social disadvantage than untargeted money.
I also spent most of my primary school living with my family in a two room dwelling. So it would not have been a good place to do homework. I also had no help with homework (or education in general from my mother ) during high school. Neither of these things really mattered in those days because schools were run on the assumption that parents were poorly educated and homework didn’t contribute to class marks.
Things would have been more difficult for someone like me these days. Schools often seem to behave as though everyone has teachers for parents who will do things like ensure that kids get their grammar right. Worse still homework now has a direct impact on class marks so student who has good facilities for doing homework and a team at home that helps turn assignments into something that will get a high mark would have a real advantage over someone like me. It is important to recognize the barriers we unwittingly erect that make it harder for people to escape from social disadvantage.
“Strategies based on understanding the specifics of social disadvantage are more likely to be effective than simply increasing income.”
I can see that could be true, but despair of governments being capable of making much of a difference. I think pensioners do have free off-peak travel in Perth, but that doesn’t solve the problem. You have to be physically able to use it and not frightened to use it. The very last time my mother used public transport was when she and several other old ladies were the only passengers in a train carriage that was invaded by a group of young delinquents with spray cans who sprayed up the carriage and threatened to spray them.
In fact, fear of crime is possibly a big reason some people won’t go out. And very hard to change. Housing is another problem – with old people living isolated and lonely lives in detached houses because there aren’t any other suitable options in the neighborhood they want to remain in. Maybe local government is better placed to intervene – ferrying people to free book clubs at the library, free daytime classes in yoga etc.
Russel @38: Perth has a free system for pensioners. Most of the rest of the country hasn’t. I wasn’t just talking about seniors. Isolation due to cost of transport effects a much wider range of people.
Free public transport would be a useful start even allowing for its risks and limitations.
There are good emission and congestion related reasons for making public transport free fro everyone.
The money spent on Brisbane tunnels might have been better spent on free public transport.
@ Paul, post 6:
The quote you reference is likely the following:
“Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.”
Herman Göring, 1936.
Unless I overlooked another, socialist version, perhaps in response to this?
Good article, thanks Brian.
Gavin Putland want’s 9% of employees wages slashed to increase company profits. Why stop there, why not reintroduce slavery?
Gavin I have a proposition for you, I’ll forgo my 9% of wages if you give me 9% of your business earnings.
“Gavin Putland want’s 9% of employees wages slashed…”
No I don’t! See comment 32. Then see http://is.gd/bc4super .