Like what you've read?

On Line Opinion is the only Australian site where you get all sides of the story. We don't
charge, but we need your support. Here�s how you can help.

  • Advertise

    We have a monthly audience of 70,000 and advertising packages from $200 a month.

  • Volunteer

    We always need commissioning editors and sub-editors.

  • Contribute

    Got something to say? Submit an essay.


 The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
On Line Opinion logo ON LINE OPINION - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

Subscribe!
Subscribe





On Line Opinion is a not-for-profit publication and relies on the generosity of its sponsors, editors and contributors. If you would like to help, contact us.
___________

Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

A critical examination of welfare state constructions of income support recipients and addiction

By Philip Mendes - posted Friday, 22 March 2019


Currently there is little consensus about the purpose of the Australian welfare state even though we spend over $170 billion dollars per year.

Some construct the welfare state as aiming to promote fairness and equity, and empower disadvantaged people. Others identify a community responsibility to assist those who are less fortunate, but are mainly concerned with protecting social cohesion. Some argue that welfare programs should prioritize controlling and disciplining the poor as a warning to the mainstream to remain economically self-reliant.

That 3rd view, which is often called neoliberalism, is highly influential as reflected in the current Parliamentary inquiry into Intergenerational Welfare Dependence.

Advertisement

Welfare dependence is a popular term often used in the News Corp media to depict the increasing (and prolonged) financial reliance of individuals or families on income support payments for their primary source of income. Yet in the real world there is no serious evidence that such an indeterminate psychological concept of illness or addiction exists.Rather, it assumes an ideal world in which anyone who wants work can find work at a living wage, and all citizens enjoy equal opportunities from the time of birth. In contrast, the real world is based on social and economic inclusion and exclusion, and fundamental inequities. The American political scientist, Professor Sanford Schram, Professor of Political Science at Hunter College in New York, has recently published a detailed book chapter titled "Neoliberalizing the welfare state"which exposes the absurdity of this term being used in an attempt to medicalize a debate that to the contrary reflects deep seated political and ideological contention around the causes of social disadvantage.

In fact, what we are arguably talking about here is chronic material disadvantage. That is why some individuals or families have an increased and prolonged reliance on income support payments for their primary source of income. The recent ACOSS report on Poverty confirmed that in 2015-16, 3.05 million people or 13.2 per cent of the population, were estimated to live below the poverty level.

On the basis of years of research with disadvantaged populations – particularly young people who grow up in out of home care who are a particularly vulnerable group due to the failure of all Australian States and Territories to currently provide ongoing support once they turn 18 years of age – I would argue that outcomes for such groups reflect the connection between two key factors: one is their Individual Agency or resilience (within a social context), and the second being the availability or otherwise of positive relationships via what we call Social Capital through professional and informal support networks.

Those young people and families who overcome disadvantaged backgrounds mostly do so because individuals and/or groups in their local community provide support that gives them opportunities to access education, training, employment, and other social and economic resources that otherwise would not have occurred, and enhances rather than limits their individual choice and agency including particularly their capacity to participate in the social and economic mainstream.

Before critiquing the neoliberal approach, I want, however, to diverge for a minute here, and talk about some of the specific ways in which this labelling of individuals as hopeless or helpless is impacting on drug and alcohol service clients.

Firstly, there is the long-standing targeting since 2007 of people allegedly involved in alcohol and drug abuse by the introduction of various compulsory income management measures including most recently Cashless Debit Cards affecting over 27,000 people to date.

Advertisement

Secondly, there is the removal of exemptions from mutual obligation requirements for people involved in drug and alcohol use, and the associated tightening of reasonable excuses for non-compliance due to drug and alcohol use. These measures are intended to reduce substance use barriers to job search.

Thirdly, there is the introduction of the two year drug testing trial aimed at 5,000 new recipients of Newstart Allowance and Youth Allowance across three locations in NSW (Canterbury-Bankstown), QLD (Logan) and WA (Mandurah). The trial aims to address substance use issues that act as barriers to employment, and includes the planned placement of those who test positive on income management for 24 months, and the referral of those who have two positive tests for medical treatment. If this trial is genuinely about helping vulnerable people to access health treatment services, then I am curious why the trial only applies to illicit drug use/abuse; and does not also extend to those who are applying for Parenting Payment, DSP, or even the age pension, or for that matter many people in full-time employment. To be sure, there is statistical evidence that unemployed people are more likely to use illicit drugs, but there is only limited evidence on cause and effect.

 

This Bill was opposed by Labor and Greens Senators involved in the Senate Inquiry due to concerns about a lack of scientific evidence in favour of the approach, the high cost of the trial, limited availability of treatment services and workforce resourcing in the trial sites, fears of unintended consequences such as labelling of affected participants, and particularly a failure to adequately consult with local stakeholders. From an analysis of the Senate Inquiry report, including both written submissions and oral submissions to public hearings, I could see little evidence of engagement with likely service users.

Finally, there is the announcement by the South Australian Government of increased powers to enforce drug tests on parents involved in the child protection system.

In combination, these measures suggest to me an increasing stigmatization of drug and alcohol service users as second class citizens who are not entitled to the same rights and protections as other Australians. I wonder whether this group of service users, who include many Indigenous Australians, are being targeted as guinea pigs to trial forms of conditional welfare that will later be introduced for much larger groups of income support recipients.

So let's have a critical look at what neoliberals believe, and why do they talk about welfare dependency?

Neoliberals as a group argue that the welfare state is a bad thing, that welfare spending should be massively reduced, that income support should not be used as a means of redistributing power and promoting greater social and economic equity, that some form of paternalistic government regulation should be employed to discourage reliance on welfare, and that ideally the type of non-government or volunteer relief and services (that failed dismally to protect the poor and unemployed during the Great Depression) should replace government provision.

Neoliberals attribute poverty to individual rather than structural deficits. People are poor or unemployed due to particular behavioural characteristics such as incompetence or immorality or laziness. Welfare programs are assumed to have a 'perverse' effect: that is they produce poverty instead of relieving it. This 'perversity thesis' dates from the time of the Poor Laws in England when critics of social assistance argued that it promoted idleness and mendicancy, instead of relieving distress.

Neoliberals construct welfare recipients as holding fundamentally different values and attitudes to the rest of the community. Dependence on welfare is interpreted as an addiction not dissimilar to that of helpless dependence on drugs, alcohol or gambling. This is arguably the weakest component of the welfare dependency approach, the argument without any evidence that reliance on income support can be diagnosed as some type of personal pathology or mental health condition. Regardless, the culture of poverty thesis of ethnographer Oscar Lewis is inducted to identify values, attitudes and behaviours unique to welfare recipients. This 'dependency culture' is then allegedly transferred to the children of welfare recipients leading to what has been called inter-generational welfare dependence.

Neoliberals believe the state should act to motivate and discipline welfare recipients, and reintegrate them with mainstream social values and morality, such as self-reliance and the work ethic. Income support should shift from being a right or entitlement to a privilege. Welfare dependent individuals should be given incentives to choose employment over welfare. For example, neoliberals suggest various measures that restrict the availability of income support payments including longer waiting or qualifying periods, tougher eligibility criteria, and shorter periods of eligibility.

The limitations of the neoliberal/welfare dependency argument

There are two fundamental limitations that render this argument unsuitable for application to the real world. Firstly, there is little evidence that people who are reliant on income support payments actually hold fundamentally different values and attitudes to the rest of the community.

For example, a longitudinal study of the US welfare system discussed by Mark Rank in Living on the Edgefound that claimants shared the values and principles of Middle America, and that any significant differences related to opportunities and resources rather than to individual motivations.  

Sociologist Tracy Shildrick conducted years of research in deprived neighbourhoods in the UK, and found no evidence of 'intergenerational cultures of worklessness' or 'families who have never worked for generations'. To the contrary, she identified in Poverty propaganda: Exploring the myths a strong commitment to paid work, but noted that many people sought stable and decently paid jobs, but instead were trapped in a pattern of low paid casual employment (2018, p.7).

Similarly, a 2015 study of 51families living in poverty in Northern Ireland by Daly and Kelly, Families and Poverty: Everyday life on a low income,

reported that bad individual choices and behaviour cannot in isolation be blamed for disadvantage given the range of structural factors such as illness and family violence and abuse that framed the lives of many of these families.

Arecent 2018 reportby the Good Shepherd agency in Victoria titled The experience of single mothers on Welfare to Work similarly reported that of 26 single mothers interviewed, more than two thirds were involved in paid work ranging from stable employment to casual or short-term:

Secondly, the model totally ignores the different life opportunities that those growing up and living in poverty experience compared with those who enjoy greater social and economic resources. The finding that children of the poor and unemployed - deprived of adequate educational, training and employment opportunities – are more likely to end up poor and unemployed is hardly surprising.

Towards effective intervention: Co-design program development with service users

Increasingly, policy makers are recognizing that top-down paternalistic approaches to social problems do not work, and instead turning to co-design approaches. Co-design which is sometimes called co-production refers to a bottom-up process whereby policy makers partner as equals with excluded groups such as service users and carers. Their experiential knowledge and capabilities are utilized via a process of mutual education to define a social problem, identify needs to be met and an associated range of potential service options, plan and implement a program, and evaluate the outcome. Co-design or co-production processes emphasize the importance of facilitating participation by diverse groups, and ensuring access for all who want to participate which often means paying service users for their time and/or funding skills training for them. Additionally, the result of a co-design process must be subject to negotiation with participating groups, and cannot be predetermined.

Co-design processes are generally informed by community development principles. By community development, I refer to the employment of local community structures and networks to address social needs and empower groups of people. A community development approach to a social problem such as unemployment or substance abuse would involve engaging with community members who were unemployed or substance users, consulting with those community organizations that are involved with and have knowledge of the experiences of disadvantaged groups, and ensuring that the local community per se plays a key role in both defining the causes of the problem, and identifying potential policy solutions. Key principles would be the inclusion of all local residents including potentially marginalized minority groups such as illicit drug users and the homeless in the policy development process, and the empowerment of disadvantaged groups by giving them the capacity alongside other community members and organisations to participate in the development and implementation of policy strategies. Empowerment goes well beyond mere consultations with service users which they often view as tokenistic, rather it aims to redistribute power and control to service users so that they have the authority to genuinely influence service delivery and policy change.

In the case of welfare dependency/chronic social disadvantage, a co-design process based on community development principles would involve the following: policy makers would convene public meetings in those localities known to have high numbers of persons long-term reliant on income support. These meetings would seek to engage two principal groups: long-term income support recipients and representative service user organisations; and representatives of the key non-government and government services that currently work with these disadvantaged groups. These two groups would seek via open discussion to consensually identify the problem and its causes (whether it is welfare dependency or financial poverty, and whether the cause is personal actions or lack of jobs or limited housing), the potential solutions, and a service delivery plan. Additionally, those two groups would later participate in a review or evaluation to determine whether the programs had worked, and to plan future service and policy strategies.

The stark difference between co-design/community development bottom-up strategies that are informed by lived expertise, and the top-down processes involving limited consultations used to introduce compulsory income management, drug testing trials and other forms of conditional welfare that often target drug and alcohol service users should be obvious.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. All


Discuss in our Forums

See what other readers are saying about this article!

Click here to read & post comments.

14 posts so far.

Share this:
reddit this reddit thisbookmark with del.icio.us Del.icio.usdigg thisseed newsvineSeed NewsvineStumbleUpon StumbleUponsubmit to propellerkwoff it

About the Author

Associate Professor Philip Mendes is the Director of the Social Inclusion and Social Policy Research Unit in the Department of Social Work at Monash University and is the co-author with Nick Dyrenfurth of Boycotting Israel is Wrong (New South Press), and the author of a chapter on The Australian Greens and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in the forthcoming Australia and Israel (Sussex Academic Press). Philip.Mendes@monash.edu

Other articles by this Author

All articles by Philip Mendes

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Photo of Philip Mendes
Article Tools
Comment 14 comments
Print Printable version
Subscribe Subscribe
Email Email a friend
Advertisement

About Us Search Discuss Feedback Legals Privacy