Am I the only person who is thoroughly sick of the neoliberals and right-wingers carping on about the evils of the welfare state? It was, after all, they who invented it. As an unapologetic member of the “left”, I agree wholeheartedly with much of the standard populist critique of welfare. It is psychologically destructive to individuals, families and ultimately society as a whole. It’s effects are corrosive and often multi-generational. It is mostly counter-productive in terms of its stated goals. Far from eliminating need, it actually entrenches it. It represents a colossal waste of human potential. And it is increasingly becoming a form of institutionalised cruelty, as the “tough love” policies of both major political parties ramp up.

Which is why like any good socialist I advocate government wage subsidies and direct employment programs! People need blummin’ jobs, not welfare. Welfare as we currently know it is the direct result of neoliberal ideology. (Note: I am not talking about the old age pension and similar programs. Yes, those were created by left/liberal people. But those aren’t the kind of welfare the right is complaining about in any case. I’m talking about welfare that has its origins in trying to deal with entrenched unemployment.)

The neolibs mandated the deliberate creation and maintenance of a sizeable pool of unemployed in order to “control inflation” (by which they meant, control wage demands and increase their profit share). The success of this inhumane policy is reflected in the ever increasing percentage of the economy that is siphoned into profits. Since the neoliberal era began in the early 80′s, wages have all but stagnated in relative terms, while profits have sky-rocketed and the corrosive income gap has widened ever further.

The creation of this pool of unfortunates, whose role is to suffer and act as a warning to those who would challenge capital (and provide a scapegoat for those who need someone to feel superior to), was the deliberate and intended result of neoliberal policies. The modern welfare state proceeds directly and inevitably from this policy decision. “The left” had nothing to do with it; entombing people in entrenched welfare is a betrayal of everything the old left ever stood for.

The problem is that a generation of “lefties” have grown up defining themselves in the terms of the right. Few self-identified left wingers today have any knowledge of the economics that used to define their politics; in their minds, to be “left wing” is simply to have a humanitarian concern for the victims of neoliberal policies. Like the friend who tends the wounds of an abused spouse without ever intervening in the abuse, we have become enablers of those who stand against our beliefs. This will not change until we become aware of this dynamic, and take steps to end it.

Please bear this in mind the next time you are confronted with a right wing nutter spraying forth on the evils of the unemployed and benefit scroungers. Without neoliberalism, there wouldn’t’ be any. They own this mess.

Chris Dickinson is a member of the Greens (WA). The opinions expressed in these posts are entirely his own.

Responsibility for crime always lies with the criminal. But crime has a context. And we must not shy away from it.

I have said before that there is a major problem in our society with children growing up not knowing the difference between right and wrong.

This is not about poverty, it’s about culture. A culture that glorifies violence, shows disrespect to authority, and says everything about rights but nothing about responsibilities.

In too many cases, the parents of these children – if they are still around – don’t care where their children are or who they are with; let alone what they are doing.

The potential consequences of neglect and immorality on this scale have been clear for too long, without enough action being taken.

Let’s come back to social theory, Tory style, shortly. But first, let’s survey some of the ‘responses’ to the riots.

What we’ve seen is an orchestrated attempt at the centre of the state to have magistrates ignore sentencing guidelines, resulting in strangely disproportionate sentences like four years for a tasteless drunken Facebook joke, and six months for stealing a bottle of water.

We’ve seen plans to take a huge byte out of Blackberry data, all the better to criminalise texting. We’ve seen murmurings about banning some people from Twitter and Facebook (and on this, see Axel Bruns).

We’ve seen the philosophy of collective punishment come to the fore, with Councils being encouraged to evict the families of rioters from social housing, and cut off their benefits.

We’ve seen what is in effect a lot of dog whistling about “zero tolerance”.

We’ve seen David Cameron racialise crime, at the same time as the media highlights the arrest and sentencing of white kids and black kids with degrees, making all of it seem more like Cameron’s culture of contagion than any other or actual social cause.

And we’ve seen the interpretive battle over the meaning of the disorder won pretty comprehensively by the Tories, with the “sheer criminality” explanation prevailing. That despite the fact that it fails to account for “why here, why now?”.

Owen Hatherley:

Ponder, for a moment, the second-most unequal country in Europe. Its prime minister, who failed to win an outright majority, heads a government whose cabinet contains several millionaires, and embarks upon an ideologically driven economic policy against almost all international and professional advice. It has just faced its largest strikes for decades. Its lawmakers were recently found fiddling their mortgages en masse. Its press was caught phone tapping hundreds of private citizens and politicians, with little hindrance from the police.

Meanwhile, members of that police force had killed a bystander at one protest, and were criticised for violence and intimidation at another. Then, they shot a man, wrongly claimed he’d shot at them first, and young people across the country rioted, setting fire to police cars, attacking police stations, looting high streets and retail parks. After that, courts worked through the night; in Manchester, a mother-of-two got five months for accepting a looted pair of shorts from a friend and a young man got six months for pinching a bottle of water. Finally, these young people’s families started to be issued with eviction orders from their social accommodation; a form of housing which said government had already committed itself to dismantling. The prime minister claimed this would help break up criminal gangs.

Put like that, the UK sounds much like what the rest of the world must surely see us as, by now – akin to some post-Soviet Republic about to undergo a “colour revolution’” maybe, or a Mediterranean ex-dictatorship convulsed by civil unrest. Imagine the fundraisers and the Facebook declarations of solidarity were it so.

Indeed.

Now, Guy Rundle discusses social and economic theory, Tory style:

Homo oeconomicus becomes replaced by homo sociologicus — an understanding of social life and subjectivity that was once the hallmark of the left becomes a set of tools for the right. Industrial capitalism demanded the management of objects — steel from the mills, flowing to factories for cars. Post-industrial capitalism demands the management of subjects — it frankly accepts, whether it will admit it or not, that running Western economies in a neo-liberal fashion involves managing large numbers of people who are surplus to requirements — hence one talks not of “layabouts” but of “welfare dependency”, not of the “feckless” but of the excluded. Hence the sneaky, piecemeal way in which the Cameron government has introduced cuts — as a series of broken promises about what would not be cut, about tuition fees and the like. In adapting the language and techniques of sociology to their cause, they concede a basic and fundamental point to the left,and fight on our terrain.

However, the sociologisation of the Right occurs with one crucial and defining omission — it shears off any critical account of the effects of the market, of social inequality, of commodification, consumerism and advertising, and their effects on social life and subjectivity. Indeed, the whole purpose of adapting sociological thinking on the Right is to find tools to compensate for the corrosive effects of the market — while rendering those effects invisible. In many cases this is not done consciously — it is simply a product of the ideology that is pumped through PPE courses, right-wing think tanks, etc, etc. Thus, the smooth-cheeked Cameroonians emerge knowing that the market may have deleterious effects that must be compensated for in the interests of social management — but will not or cannot concede that the core of the system is doing the social, cultural and psychological damage.

Indeed.

Owen Hatherley’s piece, cited twice above, describes a logic to the evictions. They progress an agenda of clearing potentially desirable property of undesirable citizens. That’s something even Boris Johnson has been critical of.

Similarly, the collective punishment aspect of benefit cuts and evictions for the families of rioters is in a straight line from the philosophy that inspires “income management” in Australia, and Noel Pearson-esque community tribunals to decide which parents are worthy of welfare and which are not.

It masquerades as a philosophy of individual responsibility, but its truth is one of collective exclusion and social control.

NB: Comments should be responsive to this post, please. Earlier discussion of the English riots on LP can be found here.

There mustn’t be any Oakes/Latho self-referential “news” tonight, because wild weather and record rains meant that the weather became the top story (well, top three stories) tonight on Brisbane’s Channel Nine. Then, an elderly pensioner’s house burning down at Dutton Park featured, and then we finally got to election news.

The pick of the day was Julia eating a pie, and Mr Rabbit telling us “Australians need food to eat” – that was the water policy announcement, apparently. But the big story was a selected bit of Labor’s “welfare reform” – those bits to do with punitive stuff on attending interviews and having health checks. The $6000 labour mobility grant just barely slipped by, and then we got a fair dose of the PM slamming non-tech head Tony Abbott on Broadband, before Wayne Swan’s correct description of Andrew Robb’s call for a federal police inquiry into a Treasury leak on opposition costings.

So, tonight, we did get some actual political news, and what’s significant is the slant and the selection.

That’s highly questionable – or rather, it would be ‘better’ for those who are already relatively advantaged, and worse for many who are not.

Let’s put some facts on the table.

The Government’s scheme would pay eligible recipients the adult federal minimum wage ($543.78) for 18 weeks. Other benefits and transfers available would provide support equivalent to six months.

Abbott’s scheme would pay someone on $150 000 a year $75 000 for six months (the full replacement of the wage being the reason why his plan would cost around $3 billion dollars rather than the government’s $300 million a year). But someone on less than the current minimum wage would presumably only receive what they earn. So if someone works casually for a couple of days a week, they might get, say, $250 a week from a Coalition government compared to $542.78 from Labor – because “All those employed with a reasonable degree of attachment to the labour force” – including contractors, the self employed and casuals are eligible under Labor. Or perhaps such workers would get nothing from the Coalition, as the entire tenor of the proposal seems geared to full time work.

The point of the scheme proposed by the Productivity Commission was precisely to target public assistance to those most in need of it, and not to provide additional benefits to higher income workers, who were much more likely to have reasonable arrangements for parental leave in place, and much better economic resources to cope with a loss in income. The Productivity Commission rightly anticipated that those with employers who had a better capacity to pay, and employees with stronger market bargaining power, could access supplementary schemes from their workplaces. The Labor proposal seeks to level the playing field and enable those who are on lower incomes, whose attachment to the labour force is less secure, and whose resources for raising children are more straightened are the appropriate targets of publicly funded income support.

So, the claim that it lasts for longer is untrue, and fairness or its alleged ‘better’ status is very much in the eye of the beholder.

[Btw, the point of contrast between Ruddite dithering and 'Direct Action' Tony is also a falsehood. Abbott says his sheme would start in "his first two years in government" in response to a question on Lateline, while the government's intention is to begin its scheme in January 2011.]

In short, as Terry aptly put it on another thread:

The principle that payments are based on income rather than need simply entrenches existing inequalities, and will do little to benefit the vast majority of mothers and children.

It’s a regressive, not a progressive scheme.

As I said in my post last night, the welfare state isn’t the sole creation of social democratic regimes. There is also a conservative welfare state, as Gosta Esping-Andersen argued, which is dedicated not to the reduction of inequality but to support for favoured members of ‘traditional’ social categories. This is precisely what Abbott’s plan does, and its inspiration has bugger all to do with any putative conversion to the importance of working women’s issues in his mind, or even any disseminated influence of feminism as a social movement, but everything to do with a highly paternalistic and conservative social outlook. Oh, and base electoral politics, Howard style.

There is no good reason why any progressives should be tempted to support it for even a passing millisecond.

Update: I’ve set out my reasons for opposing Abbott’s plan at greater length in the ABC’s The Drum this morning.

Update: I’ve put up a links post to some of the reaction to Abbott’s plan.

Yet, such a scheme already exists, and almost nobody says anything about it.

The Centre for Policy Development brings you new research and analysis from Dr Benjamin Spies-Butcher and Adam Stebbing that explains the inequities buried in Australia’s complex web of tax expenditures. Their paper provides costed alternatives to one of the most expensive tax breaks – the flat 15% tax on compulsory superannuation.

Click through to read Reforming Australia’s Hidden Welfare State

By international standards Australia’s social spending is tightly targeted and, with the exception of family support, fairly modest. Tax expenditures, on the other hand, are growing like topsy. Because they’re exempt from some of the safeguards that keep ordinary public spending on the record and in the public eye, they’ve been allowed to undermine the progressive nature of our tax system by stealth.

Bringing together the latest research on tax expenditures, CPD’s latest paper explains how reforming these payments can make Australia’s welfare system fairer and more inclusive – at no additional cost to the budget. For example, if current superannuation assistance were redirected so that all taxpayers received benefits as a percentage of their contribution rather than a discount on their tax, a minimum wage earner would finish up $24,000 better off by retirement. By restricting the full benefit to low and middle-income earners (those earning up to $80,000 a year) we could make it easier for 85% of workers to save for their retirement.

Continue reading Ben Spies-Butcher & Adam Stebbing’s ideas on reforming Australia’s hidden welfare state: download their paper from the CPD website.

Among the bills which will be considered is one embodying the loosening of penalties on jobseekers who “breach” agreements with employment services providers. This legislation is having its second run around the parliamentary paddock, having been rejected last year in the Senate by the Coalition and Nick Xenophon.

It’s been interesting to watch the shift in political rhetoric regarding the unemployed, now that it’s not just about the underclass in long term unemployment and those who are low skilled. With middle class types and “aspirationals” either losing their jobs or fearing that they will, all of a sudden it’s politically respectable to make a case against things like having to exhaust all your savings and redundancy pay before your qualify for benefits.

It’s intriguing to speculate on what this tells us about the real reasons for the carrot and stick stuff during the boom, though of course the developments are welcome. Part of the proof of the pudding, though, will be whether there’s any increase in benefits in the stimulus package which is widely expected to be announced later in the week.

Lapham, playing himself, leads his empty vessels through the streets of Manhattan, counterposing up-scale parties with wait staff slaving for tips. It’s a savvy piece of emotional manipulation designed to guilt the young rich into acknowledging the class structure that, above all else, got them to where they are. In one party scene, the hubris is intoxicating as a tipsy Ivy League cohort prepares, like their parents, to ascend to the heights of commerce, industry and influence.

Of course, this constructed ‘choice’ transcends the personal, reading as an obvious allegory for the nation as a whole. If the American working class has nothing to lose but their chains, Lapham clearly hopes a new generation will hand them the bolt cutters — a naive appeal to altruism perhaps, but one that continues to resonate as the economy tanks. Lapham’s choice is now more pressing, in that conditions have got much worse, and much easier in that elite opinion is again extolling the virtues of public service, always a potent (if submerged) strain of America’s DNA.

Two recent events have confused Lapham’s dichotomy — namely, the collapse of the Wall St investment banks that once promised grads an inside track to power and influence (in the doco, Jack must choose between the now-flailing Goldman Sachs and life as a writer) and the election of the Obama Administration. But perhaps the more important wildcard is the ‘West Wing effect’ where Jeb Bartlett’s passion for public policy collides with the burgeoning mythology around President Obama’s inner circle.

Consider the media frenzy over the past week surrounding the inauguration speech allegedly penned by 27-year old staffer John Favreau, the pain felt by Facebook-addicted staffers held hostage by outdated email-free PCs and the plight of press secretaries confronted by electronic doors — the touchy-feely anecdotes could fill a whole Blackberry. Which of Lapham’s formerly Goldman-bound Yalies could now resist taking the social policy reigns under a svelte 47-year old with a penchant for pickup games of two-on-two?

Add this to calls for a ‘new Keynesianism‘, big government and demands for massive tax hikes and a seachange seems unavoidable. Four years after Lapham’s intervention, the US is witnessing a wholesale rejection of the Patrick Bateman era, demanding personal commitments more in tune with the darkening reality of everyday life. For a nation on its knees, self sacrifice has again become sexy.

But perhaps a more difficult question is whether this new public-spiritedness is pointed in the right direction. The levers of government may be so corroded, and the policy making options of earlier eras so passé as to render the renewed enthusiasm null and void.

For a period in the late 90s and early 00s, progressive forces were searching for new modes of public engagement in the tacit recognition that national governments were no longer able to provide the kind of policy guidance beloved by post-WWII welfare states. In the best examples, domestic social movements crafted global networks that went beyond defensive postures towards what Alain Touraine calls “conflictive participation in the global economy”. Those networks have now become clogged as domestic ‘solutions’ again become fashionable.

What remains of welfarism after its trashing under Bush is still tilted away from the genuinely excluded (think The Wire) towards an illusory middle class receding irretrievably from view. US labor unions are mostly a defensive bulwark against the vagaries of global competition and not an assertive force for social change. Obama’s multi-billion dollar car industry bailout will benefit, first and foremost, Hillary’s white workers and not the forgotten of Detroit’s slums. The multitude of stimulus and bailout packages are an attempt to revive a failed settlement between capital and labour that passed its used-by-date decades ago.

The alternative for the legions of Obama fans is to take a good look at the fluidity that has re-made American society and fashion a conflictive social movement that engages directly with issues of cultural diversity and economic fragmentation. For their part, policy wonks should be looking less at off-the-shelf responses and instead at regulations that protect and extend cultural and economic autonomy — the contours of which will inevitably emerge, with or without the input of a new band of Ivy League do-gooders.

In any event, it’s been interesting to see some more clarity emerging about the issues surrounding various types of investment funds freezing withdrawals – including the fact that there are 190 000 Australians with such investments. Turnbull has certainly been carrying on as if the problem is of much greater dimensions than that. Bernard Keane raises one salient issue in Crikey:

The demand by cash management funds and mortgage trusts that they also get a government guarantee is one of the more shameless try-ons in an era of particularly refined rent-seeking. Why don’t we guarantee all listed companies while we’re at it? It would be heartlessness of titanic proportions to dismiss the concerns of shareholders about their investments.

It’s also becoming clearer that some of these investment vehicles have been in some trouble for quite some time, though it’s worth noting that in most instances, investors still have access to distributions and dividends even if their capital is temporarily not liquid. But it does look as if the “all the fault of the government and that bank guarantee” narrative is – at best – vastly overstated. Meanwhile, as Keane also observes, the News Limited papers are full of heart-tugging stories about hardship which conveniently support the opposition’s “narrative”.

He raises the question of whether unwise investment decisions made by individuals ought automatically to attract government bailouts.

Christopher Cole sold his New Zealand home last year and invested the entire $600,000 proceeds in failed mortgage fund MFS PIF at the suggestion of a financial planner.

“I was going to buy a house with it but now I’m living in a caravan,” he said.

I’d have thought that it was always well known that you’ve got hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest, on which you’re relying, that you should diversify your investments to reduce your risk.

Without wishing to diminish the plight that this gentleman and others find themselves in, why is it that we’re so ready in this country to thunder about the “responsibilities” those on welfare have to account for, and manage their meagre finances responsibly while relatively cashed up citizens are automatically presumed to have some recourse from the state for questionable investment decisions, taken to chase high returns?

Perhaps Turnbull would care to explain.

Elsewhere: More from Ken L at Surfdom.

What we’re seeing here, I think, is a combination of Kevin Rudd’s very conservative personal values and political calculation.

Ps: Incidentally, Julie Bishop’s point on Lateline about the contrast in the degree of information given in Keating’s economic statements compared to Rudd’s announcement might have some validity in terms of transparency, but it ignores the fact that the Keating government’s interventions occurred after recession was well and truly entrenched (and arguably thus too late) and were prepared over a time scale of months rather than a weekend in response to an emergency. The opposition appears to be playing a complicated game – trying to weave together a message of holding the government to account, blaming the government partially for what’s occurred, and suggesting that Malcolm Turnbull is a bright spark who thought of it all first. I’d have thought all this – combined with the whining about briefings – puts them at the centre of their message rather than the economic situation itself, and risks looking petulant. I think they’d have done better to stick to their initial reaction – nobly supporting the government’s endeavours in the public interest at a time of crisis, blah blah.

NB: Previous post and thread discussion on the stimulus package here.