Coalition needs to abandon poverty politicking and fix its own 'welfare mentality'
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Version 0 of 1. Confronted with a report showing 2.99 million Australians live below the poverty line, more than half of them on social security payments, the assistant social security minister, Zed Seselja, blamed “a welfare mentality” that had been “pushed” by “the left”. The weirdest thing about that statement is not the fact that, for the vast majority of unemployed people, the problem is not their “mentality” but a simple absence of jobs (there are currently five unemployed people for each job vacancy by a conservative calculation). Nor is it that this basic problem is often exacerbated by the fact that the person has the wrong skills, or is considered to be of the wrong age, or has an episodic illness that no longer qualifies them for a disability support pension but makes finding a job more difficult, or also has to balance being a carer or a single parent. Neither is the most perplexing thing about the assistant minister’s victim-blaming statement the fact that, despite the alleged insidious left-propagated “welfare mentality”, unemployment among working-age Australians is actually lower than it was a decade ago, or that we spend less on social security than the OECD average. No, the strangest thing is that, at the same time as blaming the “mentality” of the unemployed, the government is introducing policies that supposedly seek to address some of the real underlying factors contributing to long-term unemployment. The social security minister Christian Porter’s “priority investment approach” is couched in actuarial figures but the aim is to target groups like young parents, single parents and carers at greatest risk of a life on the dole. There are legitimate implementation questions but it could be a productive approach. But if a government is prepared to address the actual underlying reasons for unemployment in the real world, where a taxpayer can suddenly find themselves as a welfare recipient before clawing their way back to being a taxpayer again, why would it simultaneously continue with the same old false and divisive binary that the world is actually populated by discrete groups of hardworking taxpayers and dole bludgers with a layabout “mentality”? And why would it persist with policies that make climbing out of unemployment more difficult? Porter’s early intervention ideas aim to help people escape unemployment but budget savings still before the parliament penalise the very same people – for example, the one-month wait for the dole for under 25s. And despite even the Business Council of Australia saying the very low level of unemployment payments acts as an impediment to people getting a job, the government remains determined to resist any increase in benefits. The study to which Seselja was responding, for the Australian Council of Social Service, found that 731,000 children are living below the poverty line, many of them children in single-parent families where that parent is unemployed. This raises some obvious questions. The most obvious is whether this is really the society we want to be. Are we comfortable that this is what our social security “safety net” now amounts to? And even if the plight of these people doesn’t sway the argument, there’s an economic question as well. Why leave benefits at a level that hinders their search for a job? By all means the government should crack down on the minority of people rorting the unemployment benefit system. But if it is really serious about addressing the causes of long-term unemployment – the real-life complicated ones that can’t be dismissed with an easy television soundbite – it needs to shelve the “welfare mentality” script designed to justify below-poverty line payments and budget cuts that push people in the opposite direction. Because it really makes no sense to claim to be devising policies to help people while blaming and punishing them at the same time. |