Opinion & Commentary
Rudd's NT welfare revolution
The Rudd government’s decision to retain and recast key aspects of the Howard government’s intervention into the Northern Territory is to be applauded.
The changes the government have proposed will address the main objections to the original intervention, while confirming that a major political and policy shift is underway and is fundamentally reshaping the way governments tackle social disadvantage.
The most controversial aspects of the intervention involved the suspension of the racial discrimination act, and the fact that welfare quarantining was compulsory, even for responsible people who could manage their money and properly care for children.
The racial discrimination act is to be reinstated. But in a neat circumvention of the rights-based opposition to the intervention, the intervention legislation, in order to conform to the RDA, will be rewritten as a ‘special measure’ (like Abstudy) to protect and improve the rights of indigenous people.
However, the real significance of the government’s policy is the way it sets aside the Labor Party’s standard rights-based approach to social policy, and will continue to address the social disintegration in indigenous communities by controlling socially irresponsible spending of welfare payments.
The federal government’s discussion paper on the future of the intervention sets out two options. The first, and remarkable no change option, is that all welfare payments will continue to be compulsorily quarantined in prescribed indigenous communities. The alternative option is that responsible recipients will be able to apply to Centrelink to opt-out of the income management system.
The government has resisted calls for an entirely voluntary system and appears to have learnt the lessons of the experiment with welfare quarantining in Cape York.
The great strength of income management is the assistance the system provides to people trapped in dysfunctional communities, whose confidence and capabilities have been sapped by long-term welfare dependence. The ‘dutiful but defeated,’ particularly women, are given the opportunity to regain control over their lives and families.
In both the Territory and in Cape York, income management has resulted in more money being spent on nutritious food, clothing and rent. Less money has been ‘humbugged’ and spent on grog, drugs, and gambling. By giving people a hand up (income management is ‘muscular’ social work) people are empowered to budget and save.
This is one of the reasons many indigenous women in the Territory support the intervention, and is why many women are unlikely to want to opt out of income management. In a promising sign of normalcy, as the government’s discussion paper notes that income management has led to more males making financial contributions to family shopping.
The fatal weakness of a voluntary system would be that the most dysfunctional people, the bad behaviour of whom causes much of the chaos in indigenous and other communities, would be unlikely to volunteer to be income managed. The NT Intervention solution for this problem was universal quarantining. The Cape York solution is to create a Family Responsibilities Commission with the authority to compulsory quarantine the welfare of disruptive members of the community.
Under the Rudd government’s proposed policy, permission to opt-out will be a bureaucratic process and based on an assessment of people’s skills, responsibilities, and vulnerabilities. The effectiveness of the new arrangements in determining who should and should not be permitted to exit the system will depend on the criteria used to assess applications. The discussion paper signals that decisions will be based on input from key community groups, including, one hopes, police, education, and health.
It could work like this. Local police might have to confirm that neither the applicant nor an immediate family member is habitually intoxicated or known to police due to frequent domestic violence and other violent incidents. In relevant cases, the local school might confirm that children regularly attend and are properly fed and cared for. The local doctor or nurse might have to provide a character reference addressing the key criteria.
What makes the Rudd government’s decision to continue welfare quarantining so politically significant is that it has decided, in effect, that the right to unencumbered welfare should be an earned entitlement and conditional on behaviour.
Instead of blaming poverty and dysfunction on low payments and social injustice, the causal links between welfare, social disadvantage, and social degradation are being acknowledged and addressed. By deciding to concentrate on protecting indigenous communities from anti-social behaviour, and by choosing to focus on promoting family responsibilities and community standards, the government has conceded the liberal and conservative critiques of the modern welfare state and the destructive impact of welfare dependence on personal responsibility and social norms.
The next step will be to examine the roll out of welfare quarantining into non-indigenous welfare dependent communities where welfare is also not being spent in the interests of children and families.
The Left may think it has reclaimed control over the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy. But closer to the ground Leftist orthodoxy is in retreat. Against all the instincts of the contemporary Labor Party, the charge is being lead by the Rudd government which, to its great credit, is putting the interests of the vulnerable before the rights of the irresponsible.
Dr Jeremy Sammut is a research fellow in the Social Foundations Programme at CIS.
