BY JOHN TOMLINSON
Economic fundamentalism has created a sordid situation for poor people, here and overseas. There are ways in which each one of us can play a part in undermining the damaging impacts of such policies.
The cure lies in recognising that the pseudo-scientific appeal of "economic solutions" to social problems does not absolve ordinary citizens from making considered ethical judgements about the impact of such "solutions". It also requires that citizens rediscover their belief in themselves as moral beings and act in solidarity with those the economic fundamentalists would have us neglect.
We can no longer turn our backs and pretend that we do not see the dispossessed, those relegated to unemployment, precarious employment or sweatshop conditions; those incarcerated in immigration concentration camps; those forced into "work for the dole" programs; Indigenous Australians relegated to the margins of the society; and those in the Third World who are dying of preventable disease or starvation. Not only do we have a right to assist, we have an obligation to.
The economic fundamentalist agenda has been incorporated into both Labor and Liberal political parties since the mid-1970s. PM John Howard's industrial relations regime and his cutbacks in public education, health and social services are simply a more ruthless application of similar policies first implemented by Liberal PM Malcom Fraser and the Bob Hawke and Paul Keating Labor governments.
Howard's major contribution to the political debate has been to create an amalgam of conservative and neoliberal philosophical positions. What was not as clearly spelt out was his intention to ignore the conservative idea of the importance of the "common good" and to usurp it with an absolute belief in the supreme importance of the "self-providing" individual.
'Dole bludgers'
The unemployed of Newcastle and Wollongong are not unemployed because they are "work-shy job snobs"; they are unemployed because they spent years working in BHP's coal mines and blast furnaces. Many ex-wharfies are unemployed because they worked for years in ports that are now closed or where the loading facilities have been "Patrickised" and where the stench of dobermans and balaclavas still hangs in the air.
Unemployed people in every part of this country have been subjected to an economic fundamentalist nightmare. The best that many can hope for is precarious casualised part-time employment, interspersed with further bouts of unemployment. Australians are not lazy. A greater percentage of working-age citizens are members of the labour force now than at any previous time in Australia's history.
The language is massaged and sanitised. People aren't sacked any more — they are "made redundant", "downsized", provided with a seven-day weekend. But the effect of getting a pink slip in the pay envelope is still the same: demoralisation, feelings of failure and alienation. There was a time when, if this happened, unemployment benefits would be provided until a new job was found.
The present prime minister has the gall to boast that, if those for whom the government and industry can't or won't find paid work are to be given a below poverty line, income support payment, "it is only fair that the unemployed give something back in return". This is the equivalent of throwing a dollar into a blind person's cup and demanding that, if she/he does not regain sight immediately, you'll take back 80 cents.
Leading ethicists, such as Professor Robert Goodin and Pam Kinnear of the Australia Institute, have suggested that Centrelink's demand that the unemployed "comply or starve" is an equivalent immorality to that of the highwayman's "comply or die".
The road to immorality is paved with good intentions. Howard is always quick to claim virtuous intent. After the "Bringing them home" report exposed the crime of stealing generations of Aboriginal children from their parents, Howard was eager to suggest that, whatever happened, non-Indigenous people who took the children had done so with the "best of intentions".
When good intent is just not enough, Howard appeals to superior knowledge, as he did in the case of the yet-to-be-found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In the US and Britain, citizens are realising that their leaders might not have been entirely frank in the leadup to the war in Iraq.
Sledging and wedging
The Coalition government has taken to sledging the unemployed, lone parents, the young, those with disabilities, asylum seekers, Indigenous people, the frail, the aged and other relatively powerless citizens. Once the wedge is inserted, it is easier for the government to generate "downward envy".
Those lucky enough to have a full-time, permanent job bemoan the fact that the government pays the unemployed an income. Smart, low-paid employees should campaign for more generous unemployment payments with few attached conditions for two very personal reasons. Firstly, they are the most likely to encounter prolonged unemployment in the future and, secondly, if the rate of payment for unemployed people goes up, so too will minimum-wage rates.
The rich frequently engage in "downward envy", but in a different form. They usually proffer the simplistic economic fundamentalist solution of "cut taxes by abolishing welfare". Whether you are rich or low paid, "downward envy" is self-defeating because it deflects you from identifying the real source of your oppression.
The increasing wealth of this country has been accompanied by an accelerating decrease in the amount of peaceful foreign aid that Australia and other Western countries distribute to the underdeveloped world. The policies of the West have exacerbated the difficulties experienced in the underdeveloped world. There are now 500 billionaires in the world and, each year, 35 million people die of starvation. There are 23 million asylum seekers and displaced people in the world. One billion people constantly live on the brink of starvation whilst many in the West experience health difficulties from over-eating.
The underdeveloped world is forced into a Western controlled "free trade" system that is not free but designed to exploit the underdeveloped and developing world. "Fair trade" might go some way to solving many of the problems of the underdeveloped world, but such policies are fiercely resisted in the West. The ethical crisis facing the world is to see that we have a responsibility to lift all people above the poverty line.
The economic fundamentalists suggest that efficiency is the be-all and end-all, and that the market should be the final arbiter because it is (in some never specified way) able to come to an "objective" determination of "good". The economic fundamentalists suggest that there is no place for moral or ethical qualms.
Lessons from history
The 17th Century liberal philosopher Thomas Hobbes described the life that existed before society as "nasty, brutish and short". If we need to go back to the past to discover a moral future then let's start with John Donne's 1623 "For Whom The Bell Tolls": "No man is an island, entire of itself ... Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
To Donne we might append the 19th Century writer John Ruskin's assertion in Time and Tide that, "The first duty of a state is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed, and educated, till it attain years of discretion."
This of course would force us to look seriously at the possibility that the Coalition government's cutting people off from any form of social security is unconscionable.
The government's failure to live up to international agreements on the treatment of asylum seekers that previous Australian governments have signed and ratified would be seen as morally reprehensible. We might gain an understanding that the Coalition government's failure to honour the internationally agreed law of the sea in relation to the Tampa puts every Australian seafarer at risk as well as being ethically unjustifiable.
I am old enough to have lived through all of the stultifying 23 years of the conservative government prior to the election of Gough Whitlam's Labor government in 1972. But I am young enough to remember the inspiration of Whitlam's "It's time" campaign. Well — it's time again to embrace our humanity, our compassion, our decency, our justice and our sense of commonality. It's time for us to act in solidarity with all those less well-off than ourselves.
The last seven demoralising years of the Howard ascendancy is coming to an end. The most effective way we can hasten this is by communicating our disillusion about Howard's divisiveness to our families, work mates, and anyone else who will listen.
We need to get to know and communicate with asylum seekers, Indigenous Australians, people who are unemployed or in other ways presently down on their luck. We need to express our solidarity with them to incorporate them in our lives, communities and neighbourhoods.
We need to reject the failed economic fundamentalist prescriptions and the socially repressive "mutual obligation" regimes. We need to accept an egalitarian future based on ethically justifiable behaviour. We need to campaign for fair trade and greatly increased peaceful foreign aid. We need to forego pre-emptive aggression against anyone here or overseas. Above all, we need to accept that the bell tolls for us.
[John Tomlinson is a senior lecturer in social policy at Queensland University of Technology.]
From Green Left Weekly, October 29, 2003.
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