Opinion & Commentary
Self-help beats handout state
Peter Costello's suggestion that bad parents should lose their welfare payments has provoked a predictable reaction from the welfare lobby.
The Australian Council of Social Service has denounced the idea as dangerous; the Brotherhood of St Laurence calls it fanciful.
Costello's idea would not have struck our grandparents as dangerous or fanciful. In the early days of the Australian welfare state, reformers insisted that even the age pension should go only to people of good character. In those days it was unthinkable that the taxes of honest, hardworking people might be used to support lazy or feckless claimants.
Through time, however, this principle has been forgotten. Gradually we came to regard welfare as an unconditional right, which meant anybody who needed financial support should get it, regardless of how they behaved or why they required assistance.
The idea was that nobody should be judged, still less stigmatised. This commitment to unconditional welfare has wreaked disaster. Rewarding needy people as a right has led, predictably, to a huge increase in the number of people claiming to be needy. Despite 15 years of unprecedented economic growth, one in six working-age adults is now living wholly off welfare payments.
The biggest increase in the federal government budget since 1996 has been spending on welfare payments. Record numbers of single parents are living on parenting payments and more than 700,000 people claim the disability support pension despite big improvements in the nation's health and fitness levels.
Unconditional welfare is to blame for much of this, for it has fuelled the destructive belief that government ought to support us if we fail to support ourselves. Fifty years ago, virtually nobody accepted welfare if other options were available. Today, welfare increasingly is seen as a legitimate alternative to an unattractive job. And the more people who live on welfare, the more others are tempted to follow suit.
The Hawke government was the first to attempt to roll back unconditional welfare by requiring the long-term unemployed to participate in intensive assistance as a condition of receiving their benefits.
The Howard Government has built on this with its mutual obligation policy, which requires anybody receiving the dole for more than six months to undertake part-time activity such as training or community work.
Recently, two further steps have been taken away from unconditional welfare. The first is the extension of mutual obligation to include single parents with school-age children. They will have to work part time if they want to claim government benefits, and this should reduce the average of 12 years that single parent claimants presently spend on welfare.
The second development has been the idea of linking welfare to good behaviour or good citizenship. British Labour MP and anti-poverty campaigner Frank Field argued forcefully for this when he visited Australia earlier this year, and Noel Pearson has long championed the idea for Aboriginal communities. Now Peter Costello has thrown his cap into this ring.
Costello's specific proposal is not without merit. The parenting payment is a payment for carrying out parenting responsibilities. If somebody isn't discharging this responsibility adequately, they clearly should not be left in charge of children and the Government should not be paying them to stay at home. However, it is not entirely clear what changes the Treasurer has in mind given that benefits already can be transferred to grandparents or other guardians if they assume responsibility for a child.
The principle that receipt of welfare should be conditional on good behaviour sounds chillingly paternalistic, which may be why the welfare lobby doesn't like it. But if someone wants financial help, it's not unreasonable to lay down certain conditions.
Besides, why should the community be expected to keep supporting people if they are causing misery with their irresponsible lifestyles or anti-social behaviour? If we want to proceed further with linking welfare to personal behaviour, however, two things should be borne in mind.
First, although neighbours and workmates usually can judge who needs help and who requires a kick up the backside, this is generally beyond the capacity of national bureaucracies to determine.
Before the welfare state emerged, churches, charities, trade unions and mutual aid societies provided help to those in need while promoting shared values of personal responsibility and good citizenship. With the nationalisation of welfare, this moral dimension of social aid atrophied.
Pearson understands this, which is why he wants indigenous communities to take back responsibility for managing their own welfare. If Costello is serious about reconnecting welfare with civic virtue, he will need to think about how to denationalise the welfare state in the rest of Australia too.
Second, the best way to encourage personal responsibility is to make people more responsible for themselves. It is fine linking receipt of welfare to mutual obligation and it makes sense to make welfare conditional on appropriate behaviour. But what matters most is getting people off welfare altogether.
Doing something as a condition of your welfare is good; doing something for yourself is even better.
Professor Peter Saunders is social research director at the Centre for Independent Studies and author of Australia 's Welfare Habit: And How to Kick It (Duffy & Snellgrove, 2004).
