The Federal Government demonstrated its harsh attitude towards job seekers with the announcement on Monday of a new regime that will see unemployed people forced to look for 40 jobs a month and to take part in work for the dole or training for up to 25 hours a week. The Coalition's rhetoric around the issue amounted to victim-blaming, with assurances that the new rules would 'improve the prospects of job seekers' and Employment Minister Eric Abetz reviving the term 'job snobs'.
Yet evidence shows that work for the dole doesn't get unemployed people into jobs, while voters have expressed concern that the Government's budget measures will create a more unequal society.
This latest crackdown on unemployed people reveals disdain for the findings of poverty and unemployment research — an attitude that the Treasurer, Joe Hockey, displayed many times while selling the Federal Budget. Hockey and his colleagues are far from alone in implying that unemployed people are work-shy dissolutes who require hard-nosed moral reform. What's astounding is that their role as public figures doesn't stop them getting away with the kinds of views that produced the horrors of the workhouse.
Imagine how the quality of the debate would improve if those who blamed the victims of poverty and illness for their plight were publicly labelled welfare sceptics or denialists, and forced to back up their claims.
Social research academics would be thrust into the spotlight, arguments would fly furiously back and forth at dinner parties, frontbenchers who vilified the unemployed would be ridiculed, and Facebook pages would spring up to shame welfare sceptics. Most importantly, poor people in this rich country might be allowed to live with some measure of dignity and security.
The media is continually criticised for the way it reports on the science of climate change. Yet even when it pits a climate denialist like Andrew Bolt against a CSIRO researcher like Dr Steve Rintoul, the discussion encompasses the quality of the science. While the big polluters flood the public sphere with misinformation, respected news sources such as Fairfax accept that climate scientists are the authorities in this area.
The ABC has a policy of following 'the weight of evidence' on the issue, and says it has 'well and truly moved on from the debate as to whether or not AGW is real'.
Yet public figures get plenty of leeway when it comes to ignorance about welfare issues — even when that ignorance impacts on hundreds of thousands of people. You'd never guess from the Coalition's pronouncements that a solid body of poverty research, developed over decades at postgraduate university level and in the research units of welfare groups, is at odds with their views. Sure, callous statements attract controversy, but the arguments against them are often emotive rather than evidence based.
Labor is not much better than the Coalition. With hardly a whisper from the media, Julia Gillard announced as ALP policy during the 2010 election campaign that unemployed people who did not attend their Centrelink appointments would be stripped of their benefits. Few challenged the implication that this group were lazy and unmotivated rather than battling problems like homelessness, illiteracy and mental illness.
You wouldn't know, from the major parties or most of the media, that welfare advocates and researchers don't claim that payments alone are enough to fix poverty and unemployment. They've been saying for decades that prevention is better than cure, and creating programs that have had astounding success in keeping at-risk families together and giving long-term unemployed people the resources to find and keep real jobs.
Yet income support remains an important basic right, and needs to be increased as a matter of urgency — do we really want a return to the horrors of Victorian England, where death from starvation was not uncommon?
Rarely do we hear in the broadcast media from academics in this field. This means the general public remain ignorant of the basic concepts around poverty, welfare, and disability. Worse, it is socially acceptable to make sweeping remarks about poor and unemployed people in a way you wouldn't dream of doing for any other group (we have laws against racism and sexism, but none against classism).
Welfare saves lives. The idea that it is toxic is itself toxic. It's time for the media to avail itself of the expert evidence about the causes of poverty and unemployment and how to solve them, and to dispute wild generalisations about users of the social welfare system.
They should also report on how each party's actions in this area stack up against poverty research. The Greens, for example, have renewed their demand that the dole needs to increase by $50 a week — an increase in line with what the Australian Council of Social Service recommends.
If this issue received the scrutiny it deserves in the media there would be a sea change in attitudes to poverty, unemployment and income support over time.
Perhaps eventually we'd even become the fair society we like to imagine ourselves to be, and the public money we already spend on social research would bear fruit in a healthy, confident generation of young Australians of all classes and backgrounds who would be eager and ready to take on the world.
Catherine Magree is a freelance writer and editor who in a former incarnation worked at the Brotherhood of St Laurence as information officer. She blogs at feministculturemuncher.blogspot.com