After reading reports commissioned by Government, my response is often like that of a small boy watching a magician. Everything is presented so reasonably, so logically. You know that an unwanted rabbit will be produced out of the hat, but you can’t quite work out how it will be done.
The McClure Review of Australia’s Welfare System reads reasonably and pleasantly, commends a variety of initiatives, good and bad, states solid principles, and proceeds logically from a diagnosis to suggested cures. Yet you sense that things may turn out badly for the objects of the report: people who rely on income support. As is usual in magic the secret will lie in the false bottom of the magician’s hat. It will have a financial bottom line, but no human bottom line.
The report criticises the present welfare system for being expensive, too complex, not well fitted to a modern economy, and for discouraging people from seeking work. Its suggested remedies are designed to make the provision of welfare sustainable, to encourage people to move from welfare to work, to encourage employers to enable people to work, and to enable the community sector to smooth the path to work.
The dominant concern and strategy of the Report are to move people from dependence to be self-supporting through work. That will both benefit those relying on welfare and reduce the welfare budget. So the Report proposes limiting disability payments to those with a permanent disability, demanding that young people either study or apply for work, ensuring that it will be more advantageous to work than to live off welfare, enlarging the scope of mutual obligation and income management and encouraging social enterprises to facilitate employment.
The Report recognises the need for programs to help disadvantaged people find work. It considers early childhood intervention to ensure that children have access to education, the improvement of service delivery to those with many needs and the adaptation of requirements for participation in study and work to individual need.
This report has many attractive features and others that raise concern. That people should be encouraged to learn and work, that welfare payments should regularly be simplified and targeted to the most needy, that the services provided to people should be delivered in a way from which they can benefit, that business and the community should be involved in enhancing the lives and opportunities of people: these are all worthy ideals.
Some of these proposals may save government expenditure. Others will demand further expenditure if they are to be effective. If young people are to find work, for example, work must be available. If participation is to be adapted to individuals, people must be employed to monitor their condition. If community groups are to be involved they must be resourced and preferred as tenderers to large corporations that promise economy of scale.
At the same time, large savings may not be easy to find. The Report fails to
mention that the percentage of people receiving income support from the Government has dropped by about a third since 1997. This reflects tighter targeting of support to the most needy. It is likely that a high proportion of those receiving support will need intensive support if they are to find work.
So the Government may be forced to name what matters most deeply in the revision of welfare: the flourishing of the people involved – of which education and employment are a part but not the only part - or the cutting of the welfare budget. Its response will show whether it defines people by the economic contribution they can make through working, or by the broader claim they make on society by their naked humanity.
The shape of the Report may encourage a narrow focus on economic considerations. It certainly presupposes a thin account of human flourishing when it urges measures like income management and mutual obligation. Looked at from a broader human perspective they make vulnerable people, whom a poor sense of their own worth already makes dependent and apathetic, even less self-reliant and capable of taking initiative. The savings that increased demands for compliance produce will come from vulnerable people’s despair at meeting them.
The Report also encourages a narrow economic focus by attending in some detail to measures that will cut costs, but leaving vague the ways in which disadvantaged people may be helped to connect with society through education and work. The examples given of programs that might be expanded, too, are often deal with relatively advantaged people, not with the most disadvantaged.
For a Government set on cutting costs this Report will be easy to cherry pick by further depriving the already deprived. The risk is that it will not pull a white rabbit out of the hat, but a ferret.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.
Rabbit out of hat image by Shutterstock.