Across Australia - 1.3 million people are unemployed or under-employed by Paul Smyth Brotherhood of St Laurence 11:08am 24th Apr, 2004   April 26, 2004    It's far too early to farewell the Welfare State.    Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson has called for a resuscitation of the struggle to "end welfare dependency" not only for the indigenous people he represents but, it would seem, for all Australian welfare recipients ("When welfare is a curse"). At the Brotherhood of St Laurence we disagree.    Welfare dependency cannot plausibly be construed as the primary problem confronting Australians in poverty. The problem is caused by a lack of economic and social opportunity and it can only be solved by a new wave of investment.    Social policy may well become the key struggle of the 2004 federal election campaign. Look at the attention issues such as early childhood, the "crisis of masculinity" and work/family issues have been receiving. Clearly we are in a new phase of the social policy cycle and it is imperative the parties seize the moment and not become bogged in yesterday's muddy rhetoric of welfare dependency. We must begin to reinvent the relationship between social and economic policy.    Blaming welfare for our social problems has served to highlight one important fact: a system of income support, which was explicitly designed to match an economic policy based on full employment, was simply never designed to carry the 5 to 10 per cent unemployed populations that present economic policy produces.    When thinking about social goals, welfare must always be the junior partner to economic policy. When it was created, the policy of welfare support was never meant to be a substitute for a government commitment to jobs for all. Full employment was to provide the royal road to social security. As Labor prime minister Ben Chifley said at the time, the safety net was not meant as "an end in itself".    It is imperative the parties not become bogged in yesterday's muddy rhetoric of welfare dependency.    Our principal social policy problem now is not a welfare problem, it is an economic problem. Across Australia, about 1.3 million people are unemployed or under-employed, because the deregulated labour market has generated large numbers of casualised, precarious jobs that, even though they count as "employment", do not provide a living wage.    Whatever may be the case in Pearson's Cape York, at the Brotherhood of St Laurence, we can affirm that virtually none of our clients receive welfare because they prefer it to paid work. Most would dearly love a decent job if they could find it, but the present welfare system does little to help, being primarily concerned with hassle.    Pearson's claim that young people receive "unconditional payments" does not reflect the situation faced by most unemployed people. Indeed the Centrelink experience of welfare recipients has become so mired in punitive processing that the idea that people would be seduced by the money has become ridiculous.    To rebuild our social policy system we ought to begin with a reaffirmation of the right of all Australians to have access to income support at times when they cannot fend for themselves. Recent erosions of this right ought to be reversed and the trend to make receipt of benefits dependent on the paternalistic judgements of moralistic communitarians stopped.    It might seem strange to say the primary social problem today is an economic one. Haven't we had a period of sustained economic growth arising from two decades of restructuring? Yes, but the problem is, this abundance has not been delivered fairly across the community because of an excessively market-oriented economy. The economic toll of this social exclusion compounds with ill health, family breakdown and crime, and the longer it persists, the more costly it becomes.    Australia needs a new social direction. However, we do not need to reignite a failed campaign to cut off what Pearson refers to as the "money supply" to Australians left behind during the years of economic restructure. This is simplistic and dangerous.    Welfare must be a junior partner in any solution to the problem of the absence of opportunity. The solution is the provision of economic opportunity and this will only come from social investment.    We will happily farewell the welfare state if it means the inauguration of a social investment state.    (Paul Smyth is a professor of social policy at the University of Melbourne and general manager of the social action and research division at the Brotherhood of St Laurence. This article was published by the Age).
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