Taking issue with Marcus Browning
All's comfy for the idle rich

In August last year Employment Services Minister Tony Abbott, who has 
just announced an increase in the work-for-the-dole to two full days a 
week for all unemployed, gave an address to the right-wing Centre for 
Independent Studies in which he set out the Howard Government's ideological 
and philosophical arguments for the cheap labour scheme.

The first thing that should be noted is Abbott's title of Minister for 
Employment Services, a Howard Government invention. There is no ministerial 
portfolio in this government which has the words "social security" in its 
title: it arises out of the Government's methodical privatising and 
dismantling of the welfare system.

Work-for-the-dole can be characterised as forced labour (if you do not 
comply your payments are cut), or free labour for employers (slave labour), 
or poverty-level labour, etc, but it is not social security or welfare.

The key to the Government's propaganda is a simplistic exercise in verbal 
acrobatics, which involves blaming the unemployed for their plight while 
claiming to be doing the opposite.

"Why do some people not work?", asks Abbott rhetorically.

"Because they don't have to", he answers. "Australians", he claims, "feel 
almost as uncomfortable with the idle poor as the idle rich".

The idle rich, of course, get that way by sponging off and exploiting the 
rest of us; getting rid of them would be the first step toward solving the 
problems of the "idle poor".

But back to today's reality and the question — what must a government do 
to begin resolving the unemployment crisis? Job creation, perhaps?

No, says Abbott, "those who can't [find employment] will have the dignity 
of doing something for the community", in fact, doing something for 
nothing. Note the paternalistic use of the buzz word, "dignity".

According to Costello "the alternative to working for a wage is working for 
the dole".

The Government is not offering a solution — certainly the solution isn't 
the destruction of welfare, paring it back to the barest minimum of a 
safety net for the very poorest and neediest society produces (if in fact 
they plan to do even that).

The fact is that as an inequitable, class society we need a welfare system, 
based on the principle of universality and funded by a progressive taxation 
system, which not coincidentally is what the government's tax restructure 
has set about eliminating.

Such a welfare system should provide universal benefits and not just be a 
means of preventing the poorest from becoming totally destitute.

This can only mean government provision of services and benefits.

Benefits must provide a level of income at least of the basic wage to 
maintain a decent standard of living (how easily Abbott's work-for-nothing 
dignity can be shown up as a cynical platitude).

It is not just the unemployed who are the victims of privatisation and the 
Government's abrogation of its responsibilities to the community.

The universal provision of the aged pension has been undermined and needs 
to be restored.

The provision of universal welfare and social security is one of the 
elements necessary to bind society as a cohesive and cooperative whole: a 
society must provide for its people in times of unemployment, sickness and 
old age.

Integral to this is the provision of housing, public health services, 
education ... all the things the Howard Government is in the process of 
getting rid of.

It is interesting to note that Abbott, in espousing his dole-as-a-state-
of-mind theory, quotes a welfare reform expert from the US, Professor 
Lawrence Mead, who advises governments to ignore the social and economic 
realities when dealing with the unemployed: "Whether recipients go to work 
is determined mainly by what goes on inside the welfare system and not by 
economic or social conditions."

This is precisely what the Government is doing — forcing people off 
welfare by coercion in the full knowledge that the jobs simply aren't 
there, and bullying even the most needy who are dependent on welfare into 
the dead end work-for-the-dole scheme under threat of losing their payment.

The result is a large labour pool competing with those in employment for 
too few jobs — a recipe to pit worker against worker and drive down wages 
and conditions.

Abbott, it appears, has the US model in mind, a system where protection and 
insurance against life's blows is a matter for the individual and 
determined by how much money you have.

In that model Abbott's "idle rich" shield themselves from the dispossessed, 
the poor, the unemployed, behind electric fences and private security 
guards, ensconced in hi-tech fortresses in a country with the biggest 
prison population in the world.

Perhaps Abbott had this in mind when he described work-for-the-dole as "a 
halfway house between life on welfare and paid employment".