There's more to social welfare and community than economic advantage

Having just read your article and the other article to which you refer I have to point out several realities with regard to Social Circumstance and the development of so called "good community".

As a practioner in the area of community development since 1984 I have come to realise several realities with regard to community.

The first of these realities is:

• That good or bad communities have no relation to the economic status of their members. Three-meter fences around quarter-acre blocks in the affluent "burbs" are now the norm, whereas they don’t exist in most rural communities.

The second of these realities:

• That the broader community, particularly those with a so-called social consensus, don’t know this, and as such they need to justify their own community circumstance (one in which the pursuit of wealth is of primary importance) by ensuring that resources whether through the direct giving of welfare or through a mutual obligation scheme continues to happen.

The third of these realities:

• That it is the values held by the individuals in a community that direct its ability to form a cohesive or conversely a fragmented community.

The current debate about how the social welfare cake will be divided to large extent is window dressing and ignores the above realities of our Western value systems and what makes for good stable meaningful community life.

The question we should continue to pose is what sort of "ideal" society would we want our children to grow up in?

Already surveys of children in schools show that children place the pursuit of material wealth above all other areas of importance including mutual respect and love. They are buying the argument that wealth equates to happiness and therefore if you don’t have wealth ergo you can’t be happy.

In current Liberal philosophy and third-way philosophy this has taken a more sinister and disturbing route, that being that of the notion that you must contribute (economically) to society to be of value as human. For the past five years I have worked with people with a mental illness and have seen their suffering as a result of the treatment they receive and the anguish this notion of having contribute to the economic well-being of the country. How shallow are we to think that people with metal illness can’t be afforded respect and dignity without bringing into question their humanity based on their earning capacity.

What I am suggesting is that our society must make a fundamental shift in what it currently values in order to develop as a society. That is that the lessons of history must be learned with regard to the pursuit of wealth being a hollow substitute for meaningful interpersonal relations with people. The value of the human experience is worth more than the sum total value of the economic contribution made by the chemicals that make up the living person.

Am I suggesting then that the community in Swifts Creek has it right and the Community of Doncaster has it wrong? Perhaps.

What I do know is that when I go to Swifts Creek I can leave my car unlocked with my wallet in the front seat, I can play a game of tennis at the Community tennis courts and leave my two dollars in the honour box with approximately twenty other two-dollar coins. The local people are happy to spend time talking with you. The children ride their bikes to school and leave them leaning against a tree not in some cage so that they can’t be stolen.

Recently I was asked by the Secondary School at Swifts Creek to develop a program for their young women, which would make them more resilient in the real world. In short I was being asked to disassemble a value system to which we would hope every community would be able to aspire. Why?

The reason was one of economics, the wood mill had closed and the town had no employment. Work options would need to be sought outside Swifts Creek and these young women would need to learn the hard lessons of our dog-eat-dog society if they where going to survive.

I know I have strayed from the thrust of your paper and the reforms that must happen to the Social Services System but what I was trying to relay was a sense that this is not a simple debate with simple solutions. We are talking about real people who have a value system, which is being manipulated by well meaning but misguided do-gooders.

This is the first time I have put my thoughts on paper about this and I hope it helps to allow people to understand what is happening.