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AUSTRALIA

Stigmatising those in need is a grubby game

  • 23 May 2018

 

Every society has ways of marking out, and sometimes marking, people who are considered a lesser breed.

The Greek word stigma originally referred to the branding of slaves and traitors. In other societies adultery, desertion, Jewish descent, imprisonment, ignorance and other crimes also earned branding or wearing distinctive clothing. The scold's bridle, the scarlet letter, the yellow star, the white feather and the striped uniform are just a few of the ways to exclude people from the benefits of society by marking them as outsiders. 

In Australia such external forms of stigmatising are generally seen as a bit crude — though the recent withdrawal of medical benefits from people brought back from Manus Island for treatment shows that crudity and cruelty are alive and well. But the expectation that the state will ensure that the weakest and most disadvantaged in society can live with self-respect has caused problems for governments. They balk at making the wealthy fund their share of that care through higher taxes, but fear the electoral consequences of being seen as heartless.

The solution has been to allow the real value of Newstart and its equivalents to decline. Those whose life is diminished by this deprivation are then stigmatised. That has traditionally been done by straightforward blackguarding. People who are unemployed were called dole-bludgers and refugees called illegals, and accused of ripping off the community. People would then regard as justifiable the hardship imposed on the targeted groups.

The brutality and cynicism inherent in this frontal attack is now increasingly recognised as such. As a result, stigmatisation has had to become a little more subtle. Government measures to reduce the welfare budget are no longer presented as just punishment but as a way of addressing social evils. But they imply that the people in need of benefits compose the social groups infected by the evil.

For example, some tens of millions of dollars are being committed to programs addressing alcohol and drug dependence among unemployed Australians. Who could argue with the need for programs that address drug dependence? But the association of drug dependence with unemployment encourages the public to see addiction as the problem of the unemployed and a problem affecting all unemployed. They will then be seen to need therapy more than income support.

A more blatant example is the proposal that unemployed people receiving benefits should be tested for drugs. There is no evidence that this would be helpful in

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