Inequality is growing in Australia by Dr Cassandra Goldie, John Falzon 2:18pm 20th Jan, 2011   The peak body for the community and social welfare sector, ACOSS, says it will use its 2011 National Conference in Melbourne to illustrate the worsening plight of disadvantaged groups and people struggling on low incomes, which it says is leading to growing inequality in Australia.    "The indications are that more people are hitting hard times and falling into poverty," said Dr Cassandra Goldie, CEO, Australian Council of Social Service.    "At last count it was estimated that over 2.2 million people in Australia were living in poverty and 105,000 were homeless, but we believe these numbers are likely to be higher.    "Preliminary figures from our 2011 Community Sector Survey show the number of people accessing and being turned away from services is increasing, especially in the areas of disability, housing and homelessness, and youth welfare services. But the largest increase is in area of financial support and/or emergency relief, which has seen a 47% increase in the numbers of people turned away.    "The data is still being analysed and we expect to release a comprehensive report sometime in April, but the picture is already clear, and we are seeing enormous strain on community welfare groups. More than half the 745 organisations surveyed reported that they are struggling to meet the growing demand (54.8%). And the recent flood disasters are likely to have made this situation more acute, which occurred after survey period (July 2009-June 2010).    "Across our network, which comprises thousands of community and social services groups around the country, including the big charities, there have been reports of a surge in demand for emergency help during the Christmas holiday period, attributed to the accelerating cost of living pressures.    "St Vincent de Paul Society and Anglicare for instance, both reported a jump of about 30 per cent when most charities usually expect an 8-10 per cent increase for help around this peak period.    "We know the cost of essential items and services like food, rent, energy, health, education, clothing and transport costs continue to go up. In fact since 2000, the cost of living in Australia, as evidenced by the CPI has risen by 34% with energy expenses in particular doubling in the past decade and expected to double again in the next 5 years. And ACOSS believes this is understating it as the CPI isn"t necessarily the best measure to reflect the disproportionate impact of the rise of essential goods and services for people on the lowest incomes.    "We know that nationally over a million low-income households are in housing stress with housing costs exceeding more than 30% of household income. 65% of people on low incomes in private rentals currently experience housing stress, with many of these households spending over half their income on rent.    "And whilst the cost of staying afloat has gone up, those people who some of the most reliant on our social safety net - people who are unable to get paid work - have not had commensurate increases in their social security payment - the Newstart Allowance.    "Although there have been some efforts by the Australian Government to alleviate these pressures, especially in response to the recent global financial crisis, with lump-sum payments to families, pensioners and carers, and increases to pensioners, other disadvantaged groups, such as those on Newstart and sole parents have missed out. Even when there are slight increases to meet increases in cost of living, these groups always receive less because of the way payments are indexed.    "Right now, a person living on Newstart receives just $34 dollars a day, and their last increase to cover the cost of living was less than 40c per day ($5.20 per fortnight). Newstart is now a massive $127 less than the amount received by people on pensions.    "We are particularly concerned about people facing long term unemployment, as they fall deeper into poverty and risk of homelessness. The number of people becoming unemployed long term continues to rise, despite the fact that Australia"s unemployment rate is down to 5.0%.    "All of this paints a worrying picture that challenges our long held notion of a fair and egalitarian society and requires the attention of our key policy and decision makers. We have urged action on a number of fronts, including reforms to social security payments, employment services, and our taxation system. ACOSS will use this week"s National Conference to highlight these issues and allow community service groups working at the coalface to point the way forward.    "The Conference provides an opportunity for all of these issues to be put on the table and dissected by community workers, researchers, and government representatives, so we find ways to deal with these growing problems and reverse the current trend of growing inequality which threatens to make us poorer as a nation," Dr Goldie said.    May 2011    Blaming people for their own poverty, by Dr John Falzon.    According to a recent OECD report Australia has one of the lowest unemployment benefits in the developed world.    Since the mid-1990s, people experiencing unemployment have been increasingly disadvantaged compared with average weekly earners and the aged pension recipients.    Social, economic and political exclusion is a systematic action that is done to people. It is not something that people happen into by means of bad luck, bad choices or bad karma. It is manifested in individual lives as a unique intersection between personal narrative and the axes of history and structure.    Recently we have seen the Australian Prime Minister appearing to compete with the Leader of the Opposition on who can engage in the toughest welfare-bashing. Our problem in Australia is not the “idleness of the poor”, as perniciously proposed by welfare-bashers of all political stripes. Our problem is inequality. This is a social question, not a question of behaviour. We do irreparable harm when we turn it into a question of individual behaviour, blaming people for their own poverty.    The offensive aspect of these comments is that they blame people for being left out or pushed out. Nothing could be further from the truth. Choices are massively constrained for those who have been systematically locked out of the nation’s prosperity. There’s not much choice between a rock and a hard place. But, of course, such a world-view lets governments off the hook. It denies the reality of the social. It rewrites history.    There is, of course, no solution to any social problem except one that follows from the very conditions of the problem. Approaches to social exclusion that are derived from a magisterial view of a purported moral underclass are destined to deliver the possibility of compliance but never the reality of social justice.    You, they are warned, are responsible for your own situation. You need to get up off your backsides. You need to make a new beginning. Then you will have something to be proud of.    No. “They” do not need to make a new beginning. We need to make a new beginning. By this I mean two things. Firstly, that the problem does not lie with individuals needing to get their act together. It lies with society needing to be reorganised, turned upside down, changed. Secondly, this can never be the lone act of a determined individual. It needs to be collective. The problem can only be solved by means of a solution that finds its makings in the heart of the problem. The problem is social. It must have a social, a collective, a political solution.    This is nowhere more in evidence than in the locational nature of much, but not all, of Australia’s disadvantage. The Federal Government is correct in identifying this as a problem that must be tackled. It is also right to pilot models that take a family-centred approach to supporting and resourcing households to move out of poverty. But the point is completely missed when these communities are then constructed as being hubs of personal dysfunction, as if a whole bunch of bad or lazy people moved to a place and that’s why there’s high unemployment there. The Government knows only too well how labour markets work and the structural and historical causes of high unemployment in a given area are never hard to work out.    Kathy Edin, a sociologist from the United States, described something to an Australian Conference audience that still shocks me when I think about it. She described the US welfare reform program, targeting single mothers. Picture this:    A large billboard poster depicts a black single mother on her way to work. Her young daughter, who is being dropped off somewhere, looks up at her and says: “At least now I can be proud of you.”    And this from the country where the minimum wage took 10 years (between 1997 and 2007) to be adjusted!    Not that Australia has anything to boast about. Our basic unemployment benefit is rated as the lowest in the OECD. It has had no real adjustment since 1994. People experiencing unemployment are kept below the poverty line. When you have a conservative outfit like the OECD telling us that we need to lift the level of unemployment benefits surely it’s time for our Government to sit up and take note.    As life is privatised, the individual who stands accused of having failed to make it in the market is subjected not only to new heights of intrusive surveillance but also to a veritable theology of damnation. As the late Milton Friedman put it, in Capitalism and Freedom: “The major aim of the liberal is to leave the ethical problem to the individual to wrestle with.”    The abstract individual is, under the banner of neoliberalism, endowed with the ability to wrestle with the ethical problem. This abstract individual is as free as an angel to move in and out of the market, buying and selling, working and resting, praying and philosophising. The people on the margins, however, are made to feel wretched. They are forced underground, especially when they tire of having to seek assistance from charities. They resurface in our prisons or on our streets. They’re forced to hock their furnishings, their personal possessions. They seek consolation in the arms of loan sharks and payday lenders.    The welfare dependency discourse seeks to ensure that the State assists with the transfer of ever-increasing proportions of national wealth to those who are “not dependent” and therefore not at risk of moral turpitude.    This discourse was central to the 1999 discussion paper released by Senator Newman, “The Challenge of Welfare Dependency in the 21st Century”.    It was, however, as analysed in O’Connor’s excellent 2001 article in the Australian Journal of Social Issues, the writings of Gilder and Murray in the US, that popularised into an unquestionable doxa the claim that: “real poverty is less a state of income than a state of mind” and that the government dole blights most of the people who come to depend on it and that, therefore, cutting welfare would benefit the poor because welfare has a dramatically “negative impact on motivation and self-reliance”.    Murray called for the complete abolition of all federal welfare programs and income support structures.    And still there are some who wonder how the personal is political?    The politics of cruelty has penetrated the lives of those who are being herded on the edges of the labour market.    Charity may well tide them over until their next crisis. It is justice, only justice, however, that will fulfil their long-term dreams.    We continue in Australia to be subjected to social policies that are best defined as being paternalistic. Paternalism starts (and ends!) with a highly unequal relationship of power. To “supervise the poor”, as Larry Mead advocates, is really to control and coerce people on the basis of race, class, gender, and disability. The New Paternalism is a relatively recent version of this approach. The focus is on the supposed individual deficit rather than on the structural deficits. The very name bespeaks the manner in which people are being objectified and treated like young children who supposedly have no capacity to make decisions or take control. Any decision imputed to “them” is roundly condemned by a moralising discourse from on high.    The New Paternalism is exemplified in such policies as mandatory income management (such as we see in the Northern Territory Intervention) or using the threat of financial penalties on people in receipt of Unemployment Benefits, as if this could improve a person’s chances of employment.    The New Paternalism is built on the following assumptions:    People are largely to blame for their own marginalisation; people who are marginalised are naturally without power; power naturally rests with those who deserve it; those with power can, at best, use their power to bring about a change in the behaviour of those without power; those with power can, at worst, ignore the problems of the people who are marginalised; the problems experienced by people who are marginalised are their own problems; but their problems bleed into the “mainstream” through increased costs, increased crime, loss of productivity, market constraints, and disorder.    So we end up with solutions that worsen the problem of inequality. As if compulsory income inadequacy, or its accursed cousin compulsory income management, could actually help create the space for dignity and liberation!    When we ask the social question, we find the seeds of the social, and therefore political, solution.    How can we know the guts of the social problem except by listening to those who are forced to live in the guts of the social problem?    Living in the guts of the social problem does not produce silence. There is a rich and constant flow of exchanges between the people who share in the same experience and who are fighting to stay strong. Living in the guts of the social problem, the problem of inequality, does not produce silence. But the refusal to ask the social question does produce an inability to hear.    * Dr John Falzon is Chief Executive Officer of the St Vincent de Paul Society National Council of Australia.    May 2011    Reverse the Tax Concessions for high income Australians. (Australia Institute)    One of the reasons Australia is such a low-tax country is that the former Howard government gave away much of the then budget surplus in tax cuts for the wealthy. In the years 2003-11 those tax cuts gave someone on average weekly earnings $26 per week while someone earning five times that received a tax cut of $367 a week. Tax cuts at the top end would have been even higher if the Rudd government hadn"t repealed Howard"s plan to give people earning above $180,000 more "tax relief".    In just the period leading up to the 2007 election the Howard government promised tax cuts of $70 billion over four years. In the meantime, tax assistance through generous superannuation concessions which favour the wealthy was increased from $10 billion to over $30 billion. Visit the related web page
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