Last week Suzy Freeman-Greene wrote in The Age on the inadequacy of unemployment benefits:
A Senate committee investigating the matter received moving submissions on the dole's inadequacy but couldn't bring itself to recommend an increase. It's chairman, Liberal senator Chris Back, later told Age journalist Peter Martin there was a 'compelling' case for increasing Newstart. But it seems that since his party might be in government soon, he didn't want to make it.
It was disgraceful that the chair of this committee felt it wouldn't be right for the Opposition to support an increase to Newstart since they might have to pay for it if they got into government. It's also disgraceful that the current Government has so far refused to increase an unemployment benefit that has become so low that even the Business Council wants to see it increased as it has become a barrier to participation.
It is perverse to suggest that you can help someone get a job by forcing them into poverty.
The St Vincent de Paul Society is deeply worried about the new group of over 80,000 sole parents and their children who are going to be forced onto the clearly inadequate Newstart Allowance as of 1 January. Centrelink officers are already referring some of them to Vinnies and the Salvos because they know that a loss of around $100 a week could mean the difference between paying the rent and sleeping in a car.
The Government's response so far has been that they should just get jobs.
At Vinnies we are receiving letters and emails from many of these courageous women explaining how hard it is to find jobs that allow them to balance their caring responsibilities with employment.
It is time we turned our backs on the notion that social policy is best devised by those 'above' and imposed on those 'below'. It will take courage and leadership from both sides of politics to admit that this approach to disadvantage and inequality simply makes things worse.
It is time also to stop pathologising people and places, blaming them for their own exclusion and worrying more about the cost of providing adequate resources than about the long-term social and economic costs of keeping people in a state of exclusion.
In 2006 the then Prime Minister John Howard gave an address at the Westin Hotel in Sydney in which he referred to the 'zones of chaos' that wreck young people's lives. This continues to be the framework through which we seem to approach social problems in Australia.
The 'zones' discourse constructs individuals, homes and then communities as being either unwell or unlawful. Implicit in this is the affirmation of the place of these individuals, homes and communities within the normative economic, social, legal, moral and political framework that 'all of us' call Australia.
The individuals, homes and communities are thereby blamed for their own alleged pathology and/or criminality. Their condition is understood as a moral, as opposed to structural and historical, problem. And the problem is theirs to solve, albeit with a goodly dose of what Lawrence Mead described as 'the close supervision of the poor'.
The Northern Territory Intervention was the perfect example of this paradigm. It was especially characterised by a monumental lack of awareness or even interest in the analyses of those who would come under its control.
We must eschew the patronising notion that the local is somehow a world unto itself, a little pocket of chaos or excellence morally reflective of the degree of cleverness and hard work of its inhabitants.
As Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells has pointed out, the arena in which the so-called 'chaos' dominates is characterised by a network society, in which inclusion is an indicator of social security and exclusion is a ticket to the informal economy (crime), reliance on structures of public or private welfare, or poverty.
An exclusionary network is increasingly produced, outside of which the rights of the individual are denuded and the responsibility of society nullified. Indeed, the notion of a common good is deemed dangerous. Government might look hard at the spectacle of marginalisation, but only from the vantage point of prosperity. Which is how we end up with policies that are built on compliance and control instead of resources and self-empowerment.
The place to start is by asking which sections of society are regarded as garbage. The only explanation for the socio-political acceptance of the incarceration of asylum seeker children or the degrading housing conditions experienced in remote Aboriginal communities is that these sections of society are regarded as garbage.
Garbage is what you take out. You don't particularly care what happens to it later as long as you don't have to deal with it, or live with the stench or sight of it. The people who are treated like garbage are invited to recycle themselves into something socially useful; to go from being socially nothing to being socially something.
The existence of people who are treated like garbage in prosperous Australia and across the globe is the greatest reason we need revolutionary change as the most practical expression of solidarity and love.
Connections can be made between people who are pushed to the extreme margins and others who experience less extreme forms of marginalisation. The greatest power for progressive social change lies with this connection between the excluded.
It comes to fruition in the consciousness of an 'us' that firms up what is common between these experiences of alienation and exclusion, with a view not, in the words of Latin American author Isabel Allende, of 'changing our personal situation, but that of society as a whole'.
This Christmas I invite you to join me in saluting the people who experience exclusion and who are best placed to teach all of us how best to change society for the better.
Dr John Falzon is an advocate with a deep interest in philosophy, society, politics and poetry. He is the St Vincent de Paul Society National Council Chief Executive and a member of the Australian Social Inclusion Board. This article is an edited and expanded extract from his book, The Language of the Unheard, recently launched in Melbourne by Jeff McMullen and in Canberra by Paul Bongiorno.