'What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor?' — Isaiah chapter 3 verse 15
The Budget was one of most vicious attacks on ordinary people that we have seen in recent Australian history.
We are not in the throes of a fiscal crisis but if we embark on this treacherous path of US-style austerity we will be staring down the barrel of a social crisis.
We will be facing a social crisis if the people who bear the burden of inequality, especially the people who are forced into poverty and even homelessness, are made to pay so that the generous tax concessions enjoyed by the wealthy are preserved.
We will be facing a social crisis if the Government seeks to grind down people's lives, humiliating them and hurting them instead of helping them.
But make no mistake. In the face of the social crisis we have a secret weapon. It is called solidarity. And don't worry. It remains a secret weapon even though we name it openly and proudly. It remains a secret weapon because those who do not practise it can never understand it.
Solidarity is growing strong. It is being taught by the experts; by the people who suffer most from the toxic fruits of poverty and inequality, from the First Peoples of Australia to the most recent arrivals who seek asylum in this beautiful country and everyone in between, all who are attacked, all who are derided and despised.
These are the ordinary people, the great people, who have achieved on the ground the greatest and most progressive social change by analysing and agitating under the guiding stars of struggle and hope. Good social policy might be formulated and legislated from above but it is always created and fought for from below by ordinary people who will not allow the purveyors of injustice and inequality and greed to grind them down.
Our struggle is for a society in which no one is oppressed or humiliated by structures of inequality. It will be a long struggle, a hard struggle. But just as our struggle is enormous, so too is our hope.
As Brecht put it: 'The most beautiful of all doubts is when the downtrodden and despondent stop believing in the strength of their oppressors.'
This Budget will not discomfit the comfortable, but for those who struggle to make ends meet it will cause great suffering. This is not a Budget that repairs a nation. It is a Budget that has broken a nation's heart.
Our problem in Australia is not the 'idleness of the poor', as proposed by those who refuse to let the truth get in the way of ideology. Putting the boot into disadvantaged Australians might be therapeutic for welfare bashers but it will not help even one person into employment. Our problem is inequality.
This is a social question, not a question of behavior. We do irreparable harm when we turn it into a question of individual behavior, blaming people for their own poverty, as is so often the case with people who are homeless or in jail because of society's failure to provide them with opportunities and to nurture their talents.
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.
Our task is to have the humility to listen to the people who can teach us what it is that needs to change. It is about committing ourselves to join in the long-haul project of tearing down the walls that we have built around people, locking them out, or locking them up.
'What counts today,' wrote Franz Fanon back in 1961, 'the question which is looming on the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity must reply to this question, or be shaken to pieces by it.'
Fanon wrote eloquently of the 'systematic negation of the other person and the furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity.'
Sadly, the Federal Budget will result in a further redistribution of resources away from the already-poor towards the already-rich. This attempt at wealth redistribution can only occur on the basis of that 'systematic negation' of humanity typified by attacks on people who are pushed to the margins. Warren Buffett was right when he said: 'There's class warfare alright, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.'
Unemployment, homelessness, inequality and poverty will not be reduced by reducing social expenditure. As philosopher Slavoj Zizek explains:
We are told again and again that we live in a critical time of deficit and debts where we all have to share a burden and accept a lower standard of living — all with the exception of the (very) rich. The idea of taxing them more is an absolute taboo: if we do this, so we are told, the rich will lose the incentive to invest and create new jobs, and we will all suffer the consequences. The only way to escape the hard times is for the poor to get poorer and for the rich to get richer.
But we are not easily deterred from our struggle for a more equitable society. And it would appear that large sections of the community are feeling a growing sense of solidarity and love. Brecht put it so well:
The compassion of the oppressed for the
oppressed is indispensable. It is the world's one hope.
Dr John Falzon is Chief Executive of the St Vincent de Paul Society National Council and is author of The Language of the Unheard.
Footprint image from Shutterstock