BY JONATHAN STRAUSS
The Coalition government is preparing to extend social security "mutual obligation" requirements even further, this time to disability pensioners and to those sole parents and non-working partners of the unemployed who receive the Parenting Payment.
Statements by government ministers, as well as a highly publicised July 24 speech by Lawrence Mead, a "US specialist on welfare reform" (i.e., unreconstructed reactionary) to a conference of the government-funded Australian Institute of Family Studies, are smoothing the way for this increase in social and economic control.
The August 8 cabinet meeting planned to discuss the final report of the government's welfare reform review group established last year. The report recommends that measures already in force of many unemployed people, such as "work for the dole" and compulsory participation in Job Network programs, be applied as broadly as possible to social security recipients.
As the children of parents get older, the jobs focus for the parents will increase. A requirement that parents re-enter the work force when their children reach school age is one proposal being considered.
The report calls for such "early intervention" to overcome supposed welfare dependency and ensure "more fulfilling occupation" of pensioners' time.
'Participation payments'
Symbolising this, the existing payments for the unemployed, non-employed parents and the disabled will become one "participation payment". The report doesn't recommend whether this payment should be at the higher pensioner rate or the lower allowance rate paid to the unemployed. The government has promised not to reduce payment rates, but an increase in payments to the unemployed seems unlikely.
The extra amount paid to the disabled and sole parents could be made up by "incentives" to "participate", similar to the token additional payments made to unemployed people required to undertake training or work for the dole.
On July 27 family and community services minister Jocelyn Newman told ABC radio: "This whole exercise [is] about giving people opportunities to not stay on welfare for an undue length of time". But, referring to a pilot program that compelled sole parents to attend interviews, she said parents who refused to attend "could have a problem".
The government has been touting this pilot program as a success, since 81% accepted an invitation to see a Centrelink jobs and training adviser, compared with 17% under the previous voluntary attendance procedure. Moreover it claims 85% of those who attended agreed that some or all sole parent pensioners should be compelled to attend such interviews and two-thirds agreed sole parents should engage in some extra activity.
The attendance figures are not strictly comparable, however, since the sole parents were actually required to come to an "entitlement review" and were then invited to stay on to talk to the adviser. The attitudes of the sole parents interviewed may also have been influenced by the fact that they had been compelled to attend an interview, while others were not.
Work
In his conference speech, Mead argued for enforcing work as a condition for social security, not only to reduce the number of people on welfare but also to reduce the number of people living in poverty.
"There's a need to raise work levels and limit dependency just as in [the US]", he said before concluding, "I think you will find that, to get results, you will need to be more demanding than even the McClure reference group is considering. You'll have to demand definite participation, and you'll have to demand actual work, not just education and training."
In his The New Paternalism: Supervisory Approaches to Poverty, Mead admits his policies are "an effort to control the lifestyle of the poor" and favour "order rather than justice" because "government cannot ameliorate poverty unless those it helps do more to help themselves and avoid trouble".
Mead's argument rests on blaming unemployment and poverty on those who suffer it. But, while its results on single parents' supposed attitudes to "mutual obligation" won the most publicity, the Centrelink survey found some very real barriers to employment, including health problems and taking care of young children.
The survey also found that many sole parents were already doing, or had recently done, paid or voluntary work (including caring for a relative with a disability) and 50% expected to return to work within one to two years.
Lack of suitable jobs for single parents and those on the disability pension is the real problem. Ray Nichols, from the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University in Melbourne, in a letter to the July 27 Australian, noted "only 60% of those forced off welfare in the US have jobs, [and] only 13% work full-time".
In Australia, similarly, there are not enough jobs available now for any more than a small proportion of the officially unemployed. The mass of pensioners forced to look for work under the proposed government scheme would become unemployed.
This, according to Sydney Morning Herald economics commentator Toni O'Loughlin, writing on April 22, is "something the Government would clearly want to avoid". But increased competition among employed and unemployed workers for jobs and even the performance of otherwise paid work as voluntary work are ways for the government to try to force wages down — which is one of its aims.
Trade union silence
Federal employment services minister Tony Abbott, infamous for his labelling of the unemployed as "job snobs", is now trying to present the government's Job Network and other "mutual obligation" programs as creating social linkages. On July 20 he even claimed that this is, in practice, the "Third way" proclaimed by some Labor and other social-democratic writers as an ideology for the political "left".
There is nothing "left" about increasing social control over people and reducing workers' living standards, however. Unfortunately, the labour movement, as represented by the ALP and most unions, has not resisted "mutual obligation". The ALP's "reciprocal obligation" takes the same direction of restricting the right to social security.
Nor have unions counterposed a equitable jobs policy for workers (such as a shorter working week without loss in pay) to social security cutbacks.
Prime Minister John Howard on July 25 claimed that there is "no longer an argument in Australia about the need to provide support for the needy and the underprivileged in our society". In a backhanded way he is right: social security is increasingly not considered to be a right.
The most powerful possible advocate for this view, organised working people, is silent. What reigns is the idea that welfare is a privilege, a crumb cast to the poorest section of society, but with a string attached: the demand that people know their place.