By Jonathan Singer
The federal government has withdrawn the outstanding parts of its "second wave" of anti-union legislation after the Democrats decided to join with the ALP and the Greens to defeat these measures in the Senate. The ALP, however, helped the government pass a law allowing discriminatory wage rates for younger workers earlier this year.
The Coalition government proposed to reduce the ability of workers to claim unfair dismissal and to amend its Workplace Relation Act (WRA) to include more stripping of conditions from awards, more emphasis on individual and non-union "bargaining", compulsory secret ballots for industrial action, suspension of the right to legal industrial action, prevention of "pattern bargaining", more hurdles to the entry of union officials to workplaces, and provisions that would make attempts to maintain high union membership and profile potentially illegal. The Democrats consider changes in some of these areas necessary, but didn't accept what the government proposed.
The WRA primarily attacked unions in the more weakly organised sectors of the work force. The government's reinforcement, at the same time, of the Trades Practices Act provisions against "secondary boycotts" made picketing and solidarity action more difficult.
These laws put pressure on unions and their leaders, but were not able to break strong organisations — as was spectacularly demonstrated in the Patrick dispute in 1998. Moreover, there has been some revitalisation of union activism on the job.
The WRA amendments try to tackle strong union organisations, too. Even though the ACTU directed its campaign in opposition towards lobbying the Democrats and was less active than three years before, the series of demonstrations called as part of this campaign in August suggested that serious industrial action against the implementation of these provisions was possible, a situation the Democrats want to avoid.
Industrial relations minister Peter Reith said he may seek to reintroduce some of the amendments as separate bills next year. The government is also developing a "third wave", which would change the constitutional basis of industrial relations law from conciliation and arbitration powers to powers to make laws relating to corporations. This would create a unified national system and make the legal status of labour basically the same as that for any other commodity. The Democrats have said they will consider this change favourably.
Cutting to the core
The Coalition's first-term attacks on welfare recipients were also directed mainly against the more vulnerable. Young people copped the common youth allowance and compulsory work for the dole. Additional waiting periods and administrative penalties were applied to all of the unemployed. Funding for child-care and public housing was cut, and bonds and means-tested fees for nursing home places were introduced.
Underlying the government's moves has been the perspective of making family — that is, private — provision the mainstay of welfare. As early as John Howard's campaign launch speech in 1996, he declared, "The stable family is the greatest welfare system devised by any nation".
After the Coalition's re-election in 1998 a new government department, Family and Community Services (FaCS), was created to cover all income support and welfare services other than aged care. The government set out to apply "mutual obligation" — compulsory activities in order to be able to receive welfare payments — to older unemployed people (already extended to cover 25-34-year-olds in the 1999 budget), sole parents and people with disabilities getting income support.
Howard addressed the national congress of the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS), the peak body of welfare organisations, in November 1998. "In arguing for taxation reform", writes Ching Choi in the introduction to Australia's Welfare 1999, a biennial report from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, "he emphasised that a broad revenue base [that is, the goods and services tax] was necessary for the continuation of the existing level of community services provision".
Family and community services minister Jocelyn Newman's discussion paper, "The challenge of welfare dependency in the 21st century", adds "maintaining the government's disciplined approach to fiscal policy" on income support payments, even though these payments haven't increased, as a proportion of government expenditure or gross domestic product, since the early 1990s.
This paper is the basis for a government review that will report by June. But the government's policy is decided; the review's purpose is only to determine how to implement it.
A submission to the review by academic John Tomlinson comments: "If the intention of the 'discussion' paper was to encourage informed debate about the income support system in this country then the paper might have reflected on the historical underpinning of the existing system, pointed to alternative philosophical bases of income support systems in a range of other countries and perhaps canvassed untried alternatives ... Instead the prevailing issue in the paper is how to decrease the fiscal drain on the economy."
Welfare services expenditure increased to 1.9% of GDP in 1997-98, probably reflecting the failure of employment and income support policies. Moreover, the government gets welfare services on the cheap: according to Maneerat Pinyopusarerk and Richard Webb, in Australia's Welfare 1999, expenditure by all Australian governments on welfare was $7 billion, and non-government community service organisations raised $3.9 billion, but unpaid welfare work in households and as volunteers was worth an estimated $24.5 billion.
Two ways
Since the paper doesn't allow for cuts in the already poverty-level rates of particular payments, the government can achieve welfare cuts in only two ways. One is to shift people onto lower payments: for example, the suggestion of placing many people who get the disability support pension onto a shorter term payment may be an excuse to pay them at unemployment rather than pension rates — $18 less per week.
The government is also seeking to drive people off income support, even though there are not enough jobs for everyone. These people will presumably become dependent on family or friends. At the same time, this destroys any concept of a person having a right to welfare if not able to work.
The government's talk of a "social coalition" is a smokescreen. It has offered tax incentives to business to encourage philanthropy, but donations remain insignificant; a Committee for Economic Development of Australia report recommended direct government subsidies of private (including for-profit) services. Instead, responsibility is being thrown back onto working and poor people.
The government has found a willing partner for its policies in the ALP. Its family and community services spokesperson, Wayne Swan, and participants in Labor's policy "debate" like Lindsay Tanner and Mark Latham, can match the government in phrases like "reciprocal obligation", "helping families stand on their own two feet", "interactive welfare", "mutual obligation", "too much like charity", "self-help" and, of course, "welfare dependency".
After the government managed to get ACOSS support for a GST, the peak body is again a target for cooption. Although it has consistently criticised income support payment inequities and the lack of jobs for those who want them, it has welcomed the government's review as if it would address its concerns.
The unions could mobilise a movement in opposition to the attacks on welfare rights and to fight for universal services, increased wages and welfare payments and a shorter working week to share the work around. Unfortunately, there will be very little, if any, discussion of this at the 1999 ACTU congress this week.