Opinion & Commentary
Conditional welfare makes sense
Following its dramatic intervention in 60 Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, it is reported that the federal cabinet now wants to extend the principle of conditional welfare to all Australian families, white and black, urban and rural.
The plan is that any parent who allows their child to play truant from school, or who spends their family payments on alcohol, drugs and gambling rather than putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their children's heads, will have 40 per cent of their payments withheld by Centrelink. This money will then be spent on ensuring their rent is paid and that their children's food and medical expenses are covered.
This is potentially a radical move. The Government intends to take over key responsibilities from parents whose lives are too disorganised to provide adequately for their children. The message is that if you don't organise your life and your finances to ensure your children are properly cared for, the Government will come and hold your hand until you are responsible enough to make your own decisions again.
This proposal raises three sets of issues: is it ethically justifiable, is it practicable, and how effective will it be in encouraging better parenting?
The ethical question is the easiest to answer. Critics will claim people have a right to these payments and that the Government is being too paternalistic and judgmental in making them contingent on how they behave. But the right to receive payments in respect of your children implies a duty to look after them properly. If you accept family payments designed to help you care for your children, whom you then neglect, you can hardly complain if Centrelink decides how some of this money should be spent in future.
Remember, too, that taxpayers have a right to expect their money is used to good effect. The commonwealth Government will spend more than $90billion this year on welfare and family payments intended to ensure that everyone - and particularly children - can enjoy an adequate living standard. If some recipients are blowing this cash on booze, drugs or pokies, with the result that their children are being neglected, then the working people who pay all this tax are perfectly entitled to insist that their money be more wisely spent.
So how will the new system work? Details are sketchy, but it is crucial that only truly dysfunctional families should get caught in Centrelink's paternalistic net.
Among all the criticisms that have followed John Howard's decision to intervene directly in 60 indigenous communities in the Northern Territory, the only one with real substance is that the Government is failing to discriminate between parents who are coping and those who are not. Welfare is being withheld from everyone in the targeted areas, irrespective of whether or not they have been doing the right thing by their children. This is not only unfair, it is also likely to be counterproductive, for decent, competent parents will rightly feel outraged at being tarred with the same brush as their drunken, neglectful or abusive neighbours.
Therefore, when they come to roll this policy out across the rest of Australia, ministers must find a way of distinguishing between the parents who really are not coping and those who are managing. The last thing we need is more responsibility being taken away from responsible people.
In the case of truancy, this shouldn't pose too much of a problem, for schools keep attendance records and Centrelink should be able to access these to identify parents who are failing to send their children to school. But it will be more difficult for what is essentially a centralised bureaucracy to gauge whether parents are drinking or gambling to the detriment of their children's welfare.
If we really are serious about making welfare conditional on behaviour, then we need to think about how its management can be decentralised so that local people can make informed decisions based on their knowledge of their neighbourhoods. This is precisely what Noel Pearson has recommended for Cape York, where he wants a new family responsibilities commission, including representatives of local communities, to make decisions on a case-by-case basis. It is also what used to happen when churches and charities ran welfare, and it's what happens in countries such as Switzerland, where welfare is dispensed by the communes. Big bureaucracies are too cumbersome and remote to monitor behaviour effectively at local level.
The final question to ask is whether this initiative will be effective in producing more responsible parenting. Turn the question on its head: what do you think is the effect of giving people regular payments, irrespective of how they behave? The British Labour MP Frank Field points out that unconditional welfare is a relatively recent development. In the past, churches, charities and government welfare bodies tried to distinguish between those who deserved help and those who did not. They rewarded good behaviour and penalised irresponsible or antisocial conduct. The result was that community standards were upheld and reinforced, and people who did the right thing felt confident the community was backing them.
What happens when you stop insisting on these standards? In the past 40 years we have jettisoned distinctions between deserving and undeserving cases. Since the 1960s, welfare activists have insisted there are no undeserving cases and that everyone has a right to support. And in a postmodern age, many of us have become reluctant to make judgments about the good and bad behaviour of others. But as Field and Pearson suggest, when we stop making judgments, community norms can rapidly be corroded.
When governments hand out money, there are always behavioural consequences. The choice is between conditional welfare, which tends to reinforce socially responsible behaviour, and unconditional welfare, which tends to undermine it. On this issue, the federal Government is on the right track.
Professor Peter Saunders is social research director at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney and author of The Government Giveth and the Government Taketh Away, published next week.
