By Jonathan Singer
Federal ALP "policy development" and "rethinking" on welfare shows that the party intends to defend and extend the policy it carried out before the Coalition government was elected in 1996.
In a speech to the Evatt Foundation on May 4, titled "Making families stronger", federal Labor family and community services spokesperson Wayne Swan proposed that "reciprocal obligation" be extended to parents. ALP parliamentarian Lindsay Tanner offers a similar perspective in his book Open Australia.
The aim of family policy, Swan said, is to "protect the family and reinforce its place as the building block of a caring community".
The family is "the single most important group in our society ... responsible for shaping the values of individuals", Swan claimed. He warned, "If governments do not change the way they provide support to families, more and more families will collapse under the strain of these modern pressures. When families collapse, society suffers."
Swan called for "an active family policy". He described the current system as "simply making payments, allocating budgets — no questions asked, no care given". This needs to be replaced with an emphasis on "helping families stand on their own two feet".
In Tanner's view, "Maintaining a comprehensive and effective welfare state is vital to ensuring that we can preserve some level of social unity". He admits, in contrast to Swan, that "the excessive complexity of the benefit system and the apparent rigidity of its rules undermine its credibility with those who use it". He concludes, "Maintaining the relatively inclusive nature of Australian society and preventing the development of a vast underclass of dispossessed citizens requires a lot more than just defending the status quo."
To achieve this, Tanner states, "The system should be redesigned around the concept of interactive welfare", with an acceleration of "the introduction of the concepts of case management and mutual obligation ... so that government assistance assumes a much more facilitating role".
Poverty trap
Swan and Tanner are especially concerned with "poverty traps" that result from higher income tax and reduced welfare payments (and loss of concessions) that follow when low-paid parents get work, and the high cost of child-care and raising children. According to Swan and Tanner, this creates "welfare dependency". Welfare recipients have no incentive to work.
To counter this, Swan proposed a system of tax credit payments, and "affordable child-care". Tanner suggests "an increased emphasis on the provision of quasi-universal services like community health centres and legal centres" delivered "with a strong locational emphasis".
Neither plan addresses the failings of capitalist economic and social structures that make Australia itself a poverty trap:
- There are not jobs for all who want to work. As things are, some people will always be on welfare. The system itself depends on welfare; for those who run it, the problem is how much of the costs can be shifted to welfare recipients.
- Neither work nor welfare payments are a guarantee against poverty. Lower levels of pay are not adequate to provide what a University of New South Wales Social Policy Research Centre study described as a "full opportunity to participate in contemporary Australian society and the basic options that it offers". Welfare payments, according to the same study, are not enough to "allow social and economic participation consistent with community standards, even with 'frugal and careful management of resources'".
A massive increase in welfare payments is necessary so that those who can't work are not condemned to poverty. At the same time, a major increase in wages is needed so that working will make a qualitative difference to living standards.
Compulsion
The use the ALP will make of its concept of welfare dependency is shown in Swan's remark, "If governments can be ambitious in their aspirations for families, so too must families strive to achieve a better life". The basic ALP policy is to be compulsion and self-provision.
Swan asked whether "first time parents applying for parenting payment should be required to participate in [early intervention programs] to be eligible for their first payment". While people should be able to use such programs if they need them, compulsion suggests that people who require the payment are responsible for their situation.
Swan noted that more of the burden of care for older people has been forced on to families. Rather than proposing to reduce the costs of institutional care, Swan said Labor wants "to help families care for" aging family members and "to look at how people can save for their future aged care needs".
The answer to Tanner's question, "How do we embrace concepts like mutual obligation without descending into the world of primitive welfare and the poor laws of 19th century Britain?", is: it cannot be done. Mutual or reciprocal obligation is about increasing the intervention of public and private welfare bodies into the personal lives of poor people.
Why the ALP should want to pursue this path was revealed by Swan. "When families teach children the value of education, society is more highly skilled. When families teach children the value of work, society is more productive. When families teach children the value of caring for others, society is more compassionate."
The ALP's welfare policy, then, is to produce a new generation of relatively docile but skilled and productive workers in a society compassionate about the evil of poverty but unwilling to change society to end that evil.
Universal services
Swan and Tanner raise an important idea for attacking household poverty — community provision of universal services — only to back away from it. Swan quoted University of NSW Professor Peter McDonald's observation, "children are a social good and are our future [and] therefore our community should be supporting children".
Tanner notes the popularity of universal social institutions (such as Medicare) "even amongst those who pay in more than they take out", only to say they are"inevitably very expensive".
Universally available services are popular because they are a right. Because they are available to all, users cannot be stigmatised. It also improves the capacity of the whole community to shape the provision of these services. Universal services provide choice, since the ability to pay is not a consideration.
Universal services, greatly increased welfare payments and a shorter working week without loss in pay are fundamental elements of tackling poverty and social alienation. Instead, the ALP proposes that the family fill the growing gaps in the welfare system.