Ideas@TheCentre
Paternalist not punitive management of underclass
The federal government’s ‘new paternalist’ efforts to improve the circumstances of the underclass deserve support, although some of the initiatives that have been implemented deserve closer scrutiny.
To break the intergenerational cycle of welfare dependence and poverty, the next generation of children must be given the chance to develop their full human potential. Restoring social norm in dysfunctional communities, particularly concerning the care of children, is the new frontier of liberal equality of opportunity in the twenty-first century.
To give all children a fair go, the basics must be in place, starting with regular school attendance.
To this end, the Commonwealth department of Families, Housing, Communities and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) is trialling a program that sanctions parents who fail to send their children to school by withholding part of their government benefits.
This might sound similar to the income management regimes introduced as part of the Northern Territory Intervention (NTI) in 2007 and as part of Noel Pearson’s Family Responsibility Commission in Cape York. But suspending welfare for non-attendance is a radically different policy.
The premise of income management is the choices that dysfunctional people make have to be circumscribed to ensure the household income pays the bills and puts food on the table, and is not squandered on alcohol, drugs or porn. It’s a heavy handed way of trying to approximate family normalcy and ensure clean, rested and well-fed children turn up at school each day ready to learn.
In contrast, the premise of income suspension is that dysfunctional people are capable of responding to rational economic incentives. This massively underestimates the pathologies in those communities. If parents are incapable of providing for their own children’s basic needs, the threat of losing money is unlikely to make them more capable. International evidence suggests that income suspension does not work for this very reason.
It might be argued that the best policy is to use income management and suspension in tandem. The danger, however, is that the enemies of the NTI, such as the Australian Greens, deliberately confuse income management with suspension to mischievously brand both approaches as excessively punitive.
If the trial shows that suspension does not work (and I suspect it won’t because it will apply to the families with the worst problems), this will strengthen the arguments on the Left for abolishing the NTI and the national roll-out of income management.
A better strategy might therefore be to dispense with punitive measures from the start and instead focus on bedding down the paternalist policies that have a better chance of succeeding.
Dr Jeremy Sammut is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies and the author of several research papers on child protection in Australia.
