By Anthony Barich
THE experiences of disadvantaged people are the key to building a truly inclusive Australian society, not forcing people to rely on charity, St Vincent de Paul Society national council chief executive Dr John Falzon said.
In days gone by many now so-called “potential workers” were seen as “expendable and surplus to the needs of capital,” he said, but in the Federal Budget released last month the push to “get potential workers into the labour market is intoned as a matter of national emergency”.
The greatest power for progressive social change lies precisely with the excluded, Dr Falzon said, because people who can best define and interpret the reality of exclusion and socio-economic insecurity are also potentially ideal to determine the means towards social inclusion.
Addressing the SVDP Society’s 25 May Winter Appeal Launch at the Perth Town Hall, he condemned the Gillard Government and the Federal Opposition as “cheerleaders for paternalism”, because entire locations that were previously described as “surplus populations” are now described as “the unwilling workers that the nation is crying out for”.
He said these people are being penalised and humiliated by “tiresome moralising” that tells them to “take responsibility for a chance”.
“The government and business community are doing all they can, so the narrative goes, to help you. ‘Now you’ve got an obligation to help yourself and stop being dependent on the State,’” he said.
“This discourse is as inaccurate as it is offensive”, and ignores the reality while wallowing in the “shameful rhetoric of welfare bashing”, Dr Falzon said in his talk, titled The Forgotten People. This mentality also defies the Australian Bishops’ conference’s 1996 Social Justice Statement that stated: “In the main, people are poor not because they are lazy or lacking in ability or because they are unlucky. They are poor because of the way society, including its economic system, is organised.” Reflecting on this, Dr Falzon called on a strong, flexible social security system that “actually delivers social security rather than insecurity and vilification,” which although essential to building a fairer Australia, is not the ultimate answer.
The social security system should merely be a means to social, economic and political inclusion rather than an end in itself, he said.
“The government can threaten with all the sticks under the sun but this will not lead people to learning,” Dr Falzon said.
Suspending a young mother’s entire income, for example, only causes hardship for mother and child, forcing her to get help from family, friends, neighbours or a charity, he said.
“It will teach her that she is of little value (to society) and that she is able to be controlled and disciplined and made to ask for charity,” Dr Falzon said.
He cited the 1993 research paper Much Obliged – by the St Vincent de Paul Society’s Gavin Dufty, Stephen Ziguras from the Brotherhood of St Laurence and the University of Melbourne’s Mark Considine – which revealed that increasing compliance measures under the banner of mutual obligation did little to facilitate employment participation. “Contrary to the aims of active labour market policy, the emphasis on compulsory activities appears to generate avoidance and resentment. While people may comply, these requirements are in practice not a means to finding work, but rather a necessity for remaining eligible for benefits. In effect, then, the system operates for many disadvantaged job seekers not as ‘welfare to work’ but ‘welfare as work’,” the report said.
Dr Falzon added that since 1996 the unemployment benefit has fallen from 54 per cent to 45 per cent of the after-tax minimum wage.
“We build massive walls around people on the basis of their race, class, gender or disability. The same people are then condemned for lacking the ‘aspiration to scale these walls,” he said. He praised the Federal Budget’s investment in mental health as “ground breaking”, but expressed hope that the punitive treatment of people on social security benefits do not cause greater problems with mental health.