Family Carers are the sleeping giant of Australian politics

What is the biggest common-interest constituency in Australia? Trade unions? The green movement? Small business?

The answer may surprise many of our political elite. Home-based carers of people with a disability, chronic or mental illness, and the frail aged, number some 2.7 million people. Together with the people they care for (almost the same number again) they are the largest common-interest community in the country.

This vast number of people are the most hidden, ignored and unrepresented community in Australia. Indigenous people are high in need but their plight looms large in the national political consciousness. Carers don’t rate a blip on the national radar.

Family carers are not sexy. No politician has ever lain awake at night wondering how to deal with the electoral consequences of disappointing carers of people with a disability.

No university students have ever taken to the streets in protest over the plight of the many full-time carers who receive an income that is one quarter of the aged pension.

Unlike the green movement, carers’ issues do not appeal to the fashionable, the glitterati, or pop stars wanting a cause. The carer’s world is a very private world. It unfolds within the home, not on the TV news.

And few people from outside can appreciate just how fragmented and dysfunctional the service system is from the client’s and carer’s standpoints or how disempowering it is to be at once dependent on that system but also paralysed by its gross inadequacy.

Yet carers, and the people we care for, are the sleeping giant of Australian politics.

Can you imagine the shape of Australian politics if family carers were to occupy as prominent a place in political affairs as the green movement?

We would see politicians jostling to win electoral preferences from families of people with disabilities (as we now see them jostling to win green preferences).

We would see treasurers trying to buy the votes of carers by introducing billion-dollar programs (just as they now throw around billions of dollars to buy votes from a raft of other constituencies).
 
We would see political parties trying to recruit leaders from family/carer support groups (in the same way they now seek to recruit high profile environmentalists).
 
Is this far-fetched? Dell Stagg doesn’t think so. This Adelaide sole parent who cares for her 39-year-old daughter at home says there are many more people like her in carers’ groups than in most of the noisy lobby groups that influence politicians and public policy.

Dell Stagg was advised by a friendly Commonwealth bureaucrat in 1991 that people like her would never get anywhere unless they organised politically. Thirteen years later, when her domestic life has finally reached some stability, Dell is getting round to it.

She is doing what she wishes she had done in 1991. She is organising family carers into a political party. The sleeping giant is waking: http://www.peoplepower.org.au.

Unlike the radicals of the 1960s and 1970s who began with “Power to the People” and ended up in managers’ offices, Dell Stagg aims to empower people like herself without any hint of personal ambition or careerism. Those things have passed her by.

If empowerment is the objective, Dell’s steering committee (which is currently gathering members for federal registration) is the real deal. Its statement of Core Principles contains a radicalism that would embarrass the New Left and economic rationalists alike:

Government and public policy should be built around:

1. Person-centred arrangements (services and institutions should be tailored to meet the personalized needs of individuals and their families - the “one size fits all” model belongs in the dustbin of history)
2. Empowerment of persons and their families (transferring resources and power to persons, their families and their representatives, enabling them to grow in community and capacity, not isolation and powerlessness)
3. Choice (individualised funding arrangements should become the norm throughout social and community services so that persons and their families can build the lives they want)
4. Subsidiarity (authority should be devolved to the lowest level of practical decision-making)

This year’s federal election will come and go. It is a highly theatrical clash between the two establishments in our country – the establishment of the Right (the big end of town, corporate power) and the establishment of the Left (public sector bureaucrats, trade unions, and the cultural elite).

It is the election after this one that many family carers are looking forward to.