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

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).