Welfare 'reform': attack the poor
The final report of the government's Welfare Reform Reference Group gave the Coalition government what it wanted. It proposes the extension of "mutual obligation" requirements to all social security recipients of working age (16-64). The establishment media claim that the report "borrows policy ideas from both sides of politics" (Australian, August 17). This is because there is really only one side on social security issues in major party politics.
In its review of the social security system, the group did not concern itself with the human needs of recipients. Its report states: "While we have not attempted to assess what represents an adequate level of income support, we emphasise the importance of maintaining adequacy". This assumes, falsely, that social security payments are adequate. Objective measures such as the Henderson poverty line and the budgetary standards produced by the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales show these payments are at poverty level.
The group drew into its work many of the organisations active in welfare provision or advocacy. Their input aided the group in suggesting to the government the tone, the arguments and the measures to achieve the next stage in social security cutbacks while strengthening the system as a mechanism of control.
The report hints that the current limit to direct cuts to payments and the imposition of financial penalties for "breaches" of administrative rules may have been reached. The concept that welfare is a right, provided by society to those in need, is apparently more vulnerable: the report says that only "people who participate consistently with their circumstances and capacities" should be eligible for payments.
This is a call to determine who is most vulnerable, and then attack. Thus the only detailed proposal in the report is for annual compulsory interviews to discuss possible education or employment for parents with children six to 12 years of age and a requirement of job-seeking, education or employment for parents with children aged 13 or more. The aim is to convert pensions for sole parents and partners of the unemployed into a job-search allowance.
The broader extension of "mutual obligation" requirements to include disability pensioners, unemployed 35 years of age and older and low-income workers who may be eligible for some social security payment has the same basic result. Despite the report's rhetoric about "circumstances" and "voluntary compliance", the reality is compulsion. All social security recipients will be subjected to "individualised service delivery", which will assess their "needs" in order to resume "economic participation" — that is, looking for paid work. Their involvement in these "services" will be monitored, thus developing into a broad system of surveillance.
The driving of social security recipients into job-seeking is not matched by any requirement on government or business to provide more jobs, however. There are already six officially unemployed people chasing every job vacancy, so job competition will increase, pushing wages down, especially if government plans for wage deregulation also succeed. Yet the report acknowledges that social security recipients generally want to work, but have little financial incentive to take lower paid jobs. The government's need to compel "participation", by threatening to cut social security payments, will grow as wages fall.
Still, the ALP and the Democrats "welcomed" the report: "We also believe in the principle of mutual obligation", Labor's family and community services spokesperson, Wayne Swan, declared, making clear the insignificance of the ALP's claim to a policy difference. Australian Council of Social Services president Michael Raper has tried to pick out positive and negative features in the report.
Fortunately, welfare groups in Tasmania are offering a lead in opposing the extension of "mutual obligation"; they have called for a boycott of programs which include cuts in social security entitlements for those who don't participate. An attitude of opposition among welfare groups and all other people interested in defending the right to welfare could yet reverse the attempt to convert the social security system into a means of controlling and harassing the poor.