Class and moral obligations

A linguistic definition implies the term deserving to mean “of service”. The criteria stipulated for the receipt of an old age pension in Victoria at the beginning of the twentieth century confirms this interpretation. In order to receive a pension one had to be able to demonstrate that one had been of service to prevailing principles of prudence, goodness, self-help, foresight and respectability, all viewed by the producers of the old-age pensions report to the Royal Commission on old-age pensions in 1897, as having contributed to the future wealth of the state and the cost of government. In other words, to have served the state in exchange for what was then seen as state funded charity. 

The payment of an old-age pension by the Australian Commonwealth government in 1909 removed service to specific notions of morality from the criteria. However, the association between morality, particularly in relation to sexual activity, and deservingness of assistance persisted, although in diminishing strength, through the twentieth century. Perceptions of monogamy and fidelity, however difficult to verify, were still used by some as measures of moral worth in Victoria’s nineteenth-century society. 

Among the have-nots in nineteenth-century Victoria, a willingness to work and a lack of responsibility for one's own destitution were typical criteria of eligibility for welfare assistance. In the aftermath of the 1890s depression, however, it was realised that charity, even with increased government subsidy, was “hopelessly inadequate” as a way of alleviating widespread poverty which was suffered by deserving and undeserving alike.

Moreover, the greater extent and severity of world poverty which, during the twentieth century, was regularly shown on Australian television screens, tended to make a mockery of local relief programs predicated on nineteenth-century notions of goodness, morality and associated deservingness. Welfare programs in Australia came to be more closely linked to affordability as determined by investing bodies such as governments and employers, and when this was shown to be almost as difficult to define as deservingness, emphasis came to be laid by governments on an older, less arguable, concept of mutual obligation. 

Because survival in Australia was so closely and commonly tied to paid work, the Christian concept of eligibility for salvation, which had governed the delivery of poor relief by nineteenth-century moral reformists, came to encompass eligibility among the improved for paid work. Paid work was viewed by both the eligible and the less eligible as necessary to immediate salvation. But employment was determined by the needs of employers rather than the concerns of moral reformists.

Assessments for and against applicants for work and/or poor relief continued to be the province of those in relatively secure positions however. This imbalance of decision-making power in matters of individual and/or family survival became the focus of much resentment among semi-skilled workers and their families. It also constituted the fundamental division between nineteenth-century haves and have-nots in Victoria's pluralist society. 

Where work opportunities were not available in nineteenth-century Ballarat, the miners and labourers, who viewed themselves as more deserving of consideration than those engaged in less hazardous work, initially communicated charters of social and industrial reform to governments by way of land and labour movements. The popular concept of equality in terms of opportunity, freedom from servitude and an evenly spread distribution of wealth had its basis in the teaching that all men were equal before God. This teaching was based on the Roman Church's interpretation of universal law and its translation to social equality among men, but the Church’s interpretation was not fully transferable to nineteenth-century Victoria's secular social and political systems, much less to the domestic arena, although it was used as the basis of law and medical practice.

In the industrial arena the equation of universality with equal opportunity and freedom from servitude was translated, primarily by the industrial classes, into a socialist political platform that included immigration controls to prevent employers from importing cheap labour, the protection of industry, and the payment of a "fair and reasonable wage" determined by a Conciliation and Arbitration Court. Such political reform was viewed by many as creeping socialism. Socialism was viewed by the governing class, as well as most employers, as a system incompatible with the operation of a free-enterprise economy.

The notion of basic equality, therefore, came to be overlaid among all groups with varying criteria of deservingness in order to justify the expectation of special treatment in favor of those less able to compete. The labouring classes built on this expectation, gradually asserted their own criteria of social value through their new political party and acted to influence deliberations in the industrial court through union representation. 

Successful individuals in nineteenth-century Australia, therefore, came to be loosely classified along lines of inherited wealth, which signified security and freedom from servitude, or commercial success, which signified business acumen and relative freedom from servitude, and/or sporting prowess that signified manliness. In nineteenth-century Ballarat, these distinctions were blurred by widely fluctuating fortunes on and off the goldfields, and by the many philanthropic gestures from the fortunate toward those who had fallen ill or become incapacitated in the process of seeking gold.

Such gestures, however, implied a greater concern for the less fortunate, along with widows and orphans, than for the poor as a class, and this distinction was to be reflected in the passage of laws affecting the welfare of all dependent groups, in particular, laws governing eligibility for Victoria's old age pension. 

Supporters of an old age pension in Victoria argued that it would enable considerable savings by government because there would be no need of costly charitable institutions for the aged. Politicians sympathetic to the working classes took it further than this arguing that pensions were a "right" gained by people who had contributed to the general well being throughout their working lives. Both arguments, therefore, held the prudent management of money to be the primary consideration in determining whether a pension ought to be introduced and, if so, then only as a measure of support for those who had already demonstrated their ability to live frugally. 

Given that the perception of deservingness has been appropriated by the blue-collar classes in order to gain sympathy from the white collar classes, and that the notion of disadvantage has been extended from the physically disabled to the informational and/or technologically illiterate, the distribution of advantage in the form of work-related opportunity in a knowledge-driven economy is becoming increasingly difficult to equalise in practice. Ageism, however, is still, perhaps, the most entrenched category of discrimination and concomitant exclusion from the distribution of work-related financial advantage. 

The old-age pension was premised on the notion of full employment something demonstrably beyond the reach of even working nations, and this inconsistency is not encompassed in the rhetoric about rights, equity and/or participation. This suggests that ideas about deservingness were closely related to the younger person’s labour market performance. The expectation was that younger people in work would be paid enough to provide for their own old age and that they would not be excluded from paid work for long periods.

The unwillingness to spread the benefits of paid work across a broader age range raises the notion of class, which, in nineteenth-century Australia, was closely aligned to income or the lack of it. In nineteenth-century Britain, the main determinants of greater eligibility (or class) were pedigree, property ownership and associated income, while in nineteenth-century Australia, where pedigree was uncertain, and property ownership beyond the reach of many. The appearance of respectability became the commonly used determinant of eligibility, and eligibility translated to class. Even so, the ones who set the criteria were the pedigreed owners of property, or their representatives, and the men they accorded most respect to, were the men who did not need looking after, that is, the financially independent and/or the entrepreneurial. 

The late 1970s and early 1980s saw a revolution in computing and communications technology, which, by the 1990s had swept the world and challenged Australian definitions of poverty, productivity, growth, deservingness, respectability and class. The illusion of respectability gave way to the promotion by governments of voluntary participation, mutual obligation, multicultural diversity, reconciliation of differences between black and white Australians and efforts to combat social fragmentation between haves and have-nots through programs of community-values education. Almost all of these objectives had also been elements of nineteenth-century campaigns in Ballarat for self-improvement among the workless and the younger members of the community. 

During the nineteenth century in Ballarat, the most widely recognised human improvements were assessed in terms of skill, industriousness, trustworthiness, good manners, education, and the ability to support oneself as well as a wife and family. Individual initiative and Christian traditions thus formed the basis of Ballarat’s collective norms and the results have come to comprise the contemporary concept of social capital; a concept that gained currency during the 1990s, and which is often implied to be a pre-requisite to the development of social cohesion. 

The concept of social cohesion, however, not only relies on large deposits of social capital, but the conservation of social capital by way of voluntarism. This suggests that both are fundamentally reliant on the unpaid efforts of otherwise workless women. The impoverished individual cannot view ready access to public services, utilities, gardens, galleries and libraries, as assets he or she can structure or restructure at will to improve his/her own financial position. Such assets are effectively owned and managed by the state and while they improve the quality of life for all citizens, they are no substitute for paid work and independence, or even interdependence, among the educated and/or improved.

Deservingness now rates before class when it comes to the monopolisation of advantage, and this suggests a need to re-appraise perceptions of deservingness as they act to re-shape social priorities and accordingly, to re-shuffle professional opportunities.