Almost 10 years before he became one of the nation’s most accomplished welfare bums - living off the very parliamentary super scheme he railed against as Opposition Leader and now gloats about receiving in his newspaper column - Mark Latham was making a lot of sense about the explosion of welfare dependency in Australia.
Latham was especially energised by the surge in the number of Australians on the disability pension. He tackled the issue at length in his dour but valuable1998 tome Civilising Global Capital. The book was ridiculed as an unreadable doorstop by the Libs, run down by envious Labor non-thinkers as the showy work of an intellectual poseur who was using it only to position himself for the leadership.
But it contained a lot of provocative thinking about the (dictionary definition) incredible rate at which Australians were signing on in their 50s, 40s, even their 30s for a life on handouts as they convinced the welfare state that they quite simply could never work again.
When Latham was writing and talking about the issue there were 600,000 Australians on the disability pension. A decade later there are 700,000.
Despite the occasional toughness of his language, Latham was not motivated in his examination of the issue by work-for-the-dole gimmickry, where the true intention was to grab votes by humiliating the unemployed rather then encouraging people from welfare to work. He came at it from a humane and socialist perspective - he was arguing from a position of dignity.
He was particularly galled that so many people in his own party, including his leader Kim Beazley, were hostile to his even raising the issue. He had every right to be. It seems bizarre that so many people can be drawn to the left of politics by the old Marxist idea of the alienation of labour, and are driven by a desire to give workers more power and purpose in production, but will shun any discussion of the hundreds of thousands of people in society who produce nothing at all, fearing it sounds too much like a populist welfare blitz.
Both for Labor and the Coalition, the ambitious examination of the disability pension has become the policy that dare not speak its name. It is certainly easy to accuse any party advocating serious reform of being callous and cruel. That lazy task has fallen to oppositions of either hue over the past 15 years. It’s frustrating, because at no stage in this simmering debate has anyone been talking about kicking the disabled off the pension. Rather, the question has been - what about the people who are accessing the pension who are not fully disabled, perhaps only barely disabled - or not disabled at all, but simply in a family environment or a community setting where their work-averse behaviour has somehow been turned into a recognised medical condition.
A couple of years ago The Daily Telegraph spent some time in Sydney’s poorest suburbs working on a special report about welfare dependency and found one family which had turned it into an inter-generational art form, with the 20-year-old grandson telling the paper he had never actually had a job at all because he had ADHD and as such qualified for the disability pension.
The usual knee-jerk criticisms have been meted out this week against Tony Abbott.
Abbott, according to that tired journalistic construct, was apparently “embarrassed” by the emergence of a document he submitted to the Coalition Police Development Committee last year, just a few days before he became Opposition Leader, where he advocated sweeping changes to the disability pension.
Abbott estimated or guesstimated that around one-third of the 700,000 people receiving this pension had what he called “less serious medical conditions” and should be forced to apply for at least two jobs a year, and have annual medical assessments to monitor their condition.
He wasn’t talking about people who are paralysed from the neck down or riddled with a terminal disease - but people whose disability is manageable, or slight, and would not prevent them from part-time work or full-time work in a lighter or modified capacity.
When this document emerged Labor was quick to suggest it was another example of Abbott’s apparent heartlessness, and some disability advocacy groups came out demanding he drop the policy forthwith. To his credit Abbott did not. While he was clearly irritated by whatever internal party machinations had resulted in the leak, he wasn’t prepared to be cowed into withdrawing a moot policy. It was almost as if he was busted for thinking, in much the same way that Latham was.
Abbott said on Wednesday that he wanted the Opposition to try new ideas, and that Australia needed to maximise the productivity of its people if it were to remain prosperous. “That means trying to ensure that as many people as possible are in the workforce,” he said.
To many this remains a form of heresy. Apparently it’s better to maintain a welfare program which would consigns people to a dispiriting life of indolence, exposing them to the mental health anguish which comes with non-participation, rather than ask them some slightly tougher questions about what they could actually do.
Compared to the rest of the developed world, Australia’s disabled pension is so generous that it probably masks the true rate of unemployment here. Our jobless rate might be less cause for cockiness if the pension was not offered so readily. But the flipside would be that our economy would be stronger, we would have fewer headaches about importing workers through our immigration program, and we’d have a whole lot less alienated Australians living in subsistence conditions with no sense of value. On current trends it will take less than a generation for the number of disabled pensioners to top one million; many of them are being killed with the false kindness of a system that could do so much more to bring them back into the fold.
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