From social security to social control

From social security to social control

Over the next few weeks and months you will hear a lot about the interim report of the government's committee on welfare “reform”, Participation Support for a More Equitable Society, issued on March 28. It is the government's latest declaration of its intent to wield social security as an even more far-reaching instrument of social control.

This may be why the report does not propose that the government cut social security payments further, since the payments are already well below recognised poverty measures, including the income-based Henderson poverty line and the Social Policy Research Centre's low-cost budgetary standard.

The committee's main proposal is that social security — at least for the unemployed, disabled and sole parents — should become a “participation support system” with a single, similarly named, payment. This system will mandate increased government intervention into social security recipients' lives (called “individualised service”), backed by sanctions against recipients who fail to act as required and by an increased stigmatisation of social security.

In an article in the March 30 Australian, Michael Raper, president of the Australian Council of Social Service, notes that negotiating participation requirements on an individual basis attacks “the security that people need from our welfare system. The main difference between the arbitrary paternalism of the 19th century charity model and a modern social security system is that social security is based on legislated entitlements.”

But it is precisely a “new paternalism” that the government wants. The secretary of the employment department, Peter Shergold, describes US academic Lawrence Mead's book The New Paternalism: Supervisory Approaches to Poverty as “relatively sophisticated” and “very influential”.

Mead proposes policies that are “an effort to control the lifestyles of the poor” and favour “order rather than justice”. He says poor people must “help themselves and avoid trouble”.

The government already controls aspects of the social relations and financial arrangements of social security recipients and, under “mutual obligation”, increasingly dictates the activity of unemployed people.

“Mutual obligation” will be extended to affect people with disabilities and sole parents through “a greater emphasis on prevention and early intervention to improve people's capacities”, committee head Patrick McClure says. This will further government attempts to present social security as a privilege gained only by meeting required norms of behaviour, rather than a right of the unemployed, disabled and sole parents.

The government also realises that more practical measures are required. Family and community service minister Jocelyn Newman said on March 29 that sanctions were required “to support people moving out of welfare dependency”.

But sanctions are punishments. Hundreds of thousands of social security recipients are already being financially penalised for “breaching” payment conditions. To describe sanctions as support is like saying that offering “six of the best” is support for behaving well; the concept, equally, is from the century before last.

Such Orwellian double-speak is already familiar enough from the mouths of government ministers. The committee, though, provides new lessons in the distortion of meaning.

Take “participation support”, for example. The poor are supposedly “socially excluded”; if then they refuse to take part in society — i.e., work, on terms dictated by others — this is their choice.

All people are part of our society, however. The rights accorded them are the starting point for how people choose to participate. The unemployed, disabled and sole parents are excluded from jobs and their relative financial benefits because not enough suitable jobs, child-care places and disability support services are available.

There are stark choices to be made in tackling poverty among social security recipients. One is to accept the government turning the screws a few more notches, penalising people or driving them out of the system altogether.

The other is to stop these “reforms”, to begin a counter-campaign for reduced working hours without loss in pay to share work around and for free and accessible child-care and other community services. We must throw our weight behind the latter.