Prime Minister Julia Gillard makes it clear her government stands for Labor values, but are her positions really that different than the Coalition’s? When it comes to government handouts, the answer increasingly seems to be no — both the John Howard and Gillard governments clearly divide income-support recipients into “deserving” (aged, very disabled, full-time carers) and undeserving working-age recipients with no or inadequately paid jobs.
Over the past six years the government has tightened restrictions on who is eligible for higher-level pension payments, curtailed payments to single parents with children over eight and implemented stricter criteria for receiving disability payments. Since January this year more than 60,000 single parents were moved from parenting payments to Newstart.
Single parents have lost between $62 and more than $120 per week, with the highest losses for those who were already in paid work. As 60% of those who were moved to the lower payment were already earning part-time pay, in accordance with the policy, it is unclear why they were moved and their incentives to stay in paid work were reduced.
“I am trying to finish my last year of teaching at uni, and my 12-year-old has just started at high school,” one single parent emailed me. “I am drowning with the changes. Do I leave my studies, or lose my home? My daughter and I have been counting down until I have a job in teaching.”
On March 22, the Australian Council of Social Service released new figures showing 100,000 people with disabilities now on Newstart were well below the internationally accepted poverty line used to measure financial hardship in wealthy countries. In the same week, the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights said:
“The committee considers that the government has not provided the necessary evidence to demonstrate that the total support package available to individuals who are subject to these measures is sufficient to satisfy … the minimum requirements of the right to an adequate standard of living in Australia.”
“Why are they being kept on a payment that is widely acknowledged as inadequate and is designed as a short-term option?”
One can only assume the government is convinced its regressive income support policies are seen as appropriate by the “working” voters it seeks to reclaim or attract. By tapping into long-term prejudices against those seen as “dole bludgers”, the government has taken over the “welfare to work” push of the Coalition.
So far indications are it is unlikely the ALP government will make any serious changes to the significant deficiencies of their current income support policies. Despite evidence these policies are not improving the living standards of our most disadvantaged groups, the Labor Party is determined to expand them. The PM’s social inclusion model is very limited, as it is peopled by workers, working families, and more recently, modern families.
This approach is very different from older Labor understanding of the difficulties many have in finding appropriate jobs such as the structural barriers, prejudices and limited job vacancies most face. Gillard seems to confuse the interests of unions with the wider Labor movement, which accepted the structural barriers that create poverty and disadvantage. She and her colleagues accept the neo-liberal view that failures are mainly bad individual choices and lack of personal effort.
This set of assumptions fails to recognise the evidence in the government’s own data on current recipients of the inadequate Newstart allowance. The number of people on the payment in January 2013 was 682 873 in toto, but only 355,178 were also registered as job seekers. This means nearly 330,000 Newstart recipients were officially recognised as having good reasons that exempted them from looking for a job. The incentive to find enough paid work to move on was obviously not effective, as more than half of the job seekers (234,624) had been on the benefit for more than 12 months and that proportion is increasing.
This is not surprising as the competition for jobs for those without recent experience and often appropriate qualifications is very limited. There are, on average, at least four job seekers per vacancy. Many have visible characteristics that raise employer prejudices, with 100,000 people with disabilities now on Newstart Allowance, and this number will increase as the criteria tighten for disability support pensions.
Why are they being kept on a payment that is widely acknowledged as inadequate and is designed as a short-term option? If an ALP government can’t recognise the serious social and institutional barriers, including parenting needs and prejudices against disabilities, then we will see increasing inequalities and poverty. These policy flaws seriously damage claims that fairness is part of Labor values, as well as letting down the most vulnerable people who expect better from this party.
Agree with your article in general Eva, The ALP must lift their game, and not to appeal to the basest of human emotions, greedy, self-interest.
The difficulty the ALP face is the lack of support in the public for ANY humanitarian, decency, reforms and they are facing an indoctrinated “howardised” public. MSM reporting does not aid the better moral stance being appealed to by yourself and many others on the basis of FACT.
IMO An impossible task to remove “middle” class welfare without appearing to bash the rightful recipients of that selfish entitled portion. I agree entirely that, in fact they have been abandoned and bashed by the ALP.
The self serving, gutter politicking, MSM/LNP have ensured this.
The “hung” parliament consistently, under spurious threat by the opposition has certainly had a constraining effect on proper debate on social decency, and human values.
This Government has the economy right steering Australia through a GFC.
I do believe that a majority ALP government would then have the authority to deliver the socio economic reforms that an Australia Democracy deserves. Not to abnegate ethical mores to the LNP/MSM
Agree, the wholesale adoption of right-wing policy is the real reason why the ALP is losing support. If voters are simply given the choice between two conservative parties, they’re always going to vote for the ‘real thing’. The irony is that the country seems to be begging for a left-wing progressive government, but the “left-wing progressive” party doesn’t want to give them one.
I concur with the first two posters. The ALP has lost support to the Greens because they have moved too far to the Right and have become, like the LNP, mouthpieces for industry and their mates. Ever increasing funding and subsidising of industry to the detriment of social policy is a move away from Labor principles. Bailouts of the private sector, failures in transparency, removal of safety nets are just some examples of Labor’s move away from it’s core values.
When two dogs fight over a bone frequently a third dog will grab it. (Wishful thinking.)
Agree with this article. Hard to believe it is a Labor govt treating people this way. In the treatment of single mothers it seems feminism meets Calvinism – the Protestant work ethic lives on but ignores that the reality of parenting is that every family is different and not all can find the perfect match of child care and working hours when taking into account the skills and aptitude and educational/life opportunities of the parent job-seeker, the needs, health etc of individual children, health and mental wellbeing of sole parents, some of whom have minimal or no support from other adults. Not to mention the concern many parents have when children start high school at the tender age of 12 and after school care programs are only provided in primary school. Not having adult supervision for some adolescents (some kids are trouble magnets, some environments contain more danger than others) risks that the kids will either be in danger from others or will themselves engage in unsafe, even unlawful activities. I felt a sense of irony when the speeches of apology were made to those who suffered through forced adoption practices, because it seemed to me that the same government’s treatment of single mothers today demonstrates a disconnect – a wilful ignorance of feminist history: that it was only by providing support to such parents that they had a choice to keep their babies, and that arbitrarily drawing a line when children turn 8 and actually fiscally punishing those studying and working part time whilst falsely arguing that it was ‘designed to encourage participation’ is a travesty of Labor values. If that is ‘design’ then it is a design, as Eva says above, to capture votes – probably from so called ute men, the readers of Andrew Bolt, and those infected with mean-mindededness. This is one reason there has been such unrest in the ranks. Leaders are supposed to help inspire the electorate to think bigger and better, and simply pandering to existing prejudice is intellectual laziness. I despair if these policies remain.