Neoliberalism, as articulated in the way the state treats working people, including people who are residualised and rejected by the labour market, is not just an idea: it is a destroyer of lives and a crusher of souls. The state boosts and buttresses inequality instead of providing a buffer to protect people. Nowhere is this more evident than in the operation of our social security system.
A well-designed social security system should, at a minimum, prevent poverty; Australia’s current system does not. We have 3.24 million people (13.6 per cent) living below the poverty line of 50 per cent of median income, including 774,000 children and 424,800 young people. More than 1 in 8 adults and more than 1 in 6 children live in poverty.1 The poverty line in Australia is currently $914 a fortnight for a single adult living alone. The single rate of the JobSeeker payment, absent the temporary subsidy provided during the pandemic, sits at $565.70 a fortnight.
Britain’s Joseph Rowntree Foundation defines poverty as ‘when a person’s resources are well below their minimum needs, including the need to take part in society’.2 Social security is therefore not just about income security: it is about the democratisation of life for all of us by addressing the disempowerment experienced by some of us.
A well-resourced social security and public housing system, publicly owned and publicly valued, protects individuals from hardship and defends democracy from the kind of exclusion and devalorisation on the basis of class, gender, race, disability, age and sexuality that is endemic to neoliberal capitalism. Antiageism advocate Ashton Applewhite makes this point well:
capitalism is probably the biggest driver, in that we don’t respect people who don’t contribute in conventional economic terms, which means children and retired people, even though they contribute in many ways that are harder to measure, and often enable other people to contribute in conventional ways.3
It is time to move away from the concept of a social safety net and towards a social guarantee. This requires a framework that acknowledges and responds to the value of unpaid caring work and the social relations of disability; addresses the structural and social barriers that exclude people from the labour and housing markets; values the important social and economic contribution made by students, rather than consigning them to poverty and exploitation; and values people as members of society rather than cutting them down to fit the Procrustean bed of commodification.
A gender lens must be rigorously applied in framing a new system. This means not only recognising and appropriately remunerating caring work, addressing gendered violence, tackling the gender pay gap, and eliminating inequality in retirement incomes and housing, but also confronting the broader effects of neoliberalism as analysed by theorist Wendy Brown. Brown points out how the dismantling of public infrastructure translates into ‘gender subordination … [being] both intensified and fundamentally altered’ since when ‘these public provisions are eliminated or privatised, the work and/or the cost of supplying them is returned to individuals, disproportionately to women’.4
A newly configured social security system should not be seen as something peripheral to a strong economy and a decent society, but integral to both. It must be free of demonisation and be informed by the insights and experience of those it serves. It must be conceptualised in tandem with a jobs plan, complete with the proper protections of workers’ wages, conditions and rights, including the right to standard employment and the right to unionise. It must not be seen as an act of charity or largesse. Charitable organisations should not be de facto deliverers of social security in the face of the state’s abrogation of its responsibility. Critically, we must recognise, after years of blaming people for being unemployed, that you don’t address a structural problem by imposing behavioural solutions. Taking a stick to people’s backs might be therapeutic for the welfare bashers, but it will not lead to a single job.
In reimagining a social security system, let us take as a starting point the Northern Territory Intervention. What we need is the opposite. Prior to the event, John Howard set the scene for the top-down, paternalistic intervention his government was soon to implement with colonising fervour. The way he framed social security was akin to the language used in justifying military interventions to restore order in ‘failed states’: ‘We need to find ways of restoring order to zones of chaos in some homes and communities, zones of chaos that can wreck young Australian lives.’5 The ‘zones’ discourse constructs individuals, homes and then communities as being either unwell or unlawful. Implicit in this practice is the affirmation of the place of these individuals, homes and communities within the normative economic, social, legal, moral and political framework that the rest of us call Australia.
The most inviolate principle of a new framework is that it must be empowering. A social security system is an intervention. But instead of it being a top-down intervention in people’s lives, let us imagine its possibilities as an intervention (literally a ‘coming between’) that takes place in capitalism’s interstices. The people who are forced to live in these interstices are structurally excluded, historically controlled and systematically demonised. Residualised by the logic of the market, especially the labour and housing markets, they are at best pathologised and at worst criminalised for not fitting in.
It was no accident that the disempowering and disrespectful practices that constituted the Northern Territory Intervention were first applied, on the basis of race, to First Nations communities, and later, in various modified guises, rolled out for non-Indigenous people on the basis of class and gender.
These practices (exemplified by the cashless welfare card and the current suite of punitive conditionalities) are implemented not to achieve social security but to sharpen a sense of social and economic insecurity, and must be viewed in tandem with neoliberal capitalism’s drive to lower labour costs through accelerated precarity in the labour market, wage stagnation and the undermining of the union movement. The current system sends a message to workers that they should take what they can get from an increasingly insecure labour market and be grateful for it. A system that delivered social and economic security would not.
Social expenditure is currently framed as an economic cost rather than as an investment. This framing must be challenged and changed. The dominant ideology is comfortable with people being seen as exploitable, expendable and excludable. When social policy is regarded as economic investment, economic policy can also be reordered so that it can function as a social investment.
What would be the features of an empowering social security system? I suggest the following as six key components of a comprehensive social guarantee.
1. Housing first
Income security is a concept that is emptied of meaning if it is not joined with the guarantee of housing security. We need a massive injection of public resources into the construction of public housing.
The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute has estimated that, facing a shortfall of 433,000 social housing dwellings, we need to triple our stock of social housing by 2036.6 If we fail to meet this need, we are looking down the barrel of worsening homelessness and housing stress. Bad for the economy. Disastrous for people’s lives.
We must make it a priority to address the housing crisis in First Nations communities, where overcrowding ‘occurs at around three times the rate of the non-Indigenous population, with over 115,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander households living in overcrowded homes nationwide’.7
The most efficient and cost-effective way to address the shortfall in social housing stock is through direct Commonwealth government investment in public housing.8 This should be coupled with ‘more efficient financing through the National Housing Finance Investment Corporation’.9
2. Full employment
It has long been a cruel fiction to suggest that if unemployed workers were eager and disciplined enough, they would find a job. Rather than beginning from the ideological position that people are primarily to blame for their own unemployment, we need to begin with the far more accurate presumption that unemployed workers want to work, and that the reason for their unemployment lies not in some behavioural deficit on their part, but on the simple statistical datum that there are not enough jobs.
All levels of government should be engaged in addressing this reality. In addition to reconstructing the economy following the massive job losses caused by the pandemic, there should be a forward-planning approach analysing the industries where job losses are likely to occur in future and intervening early to provide free education and re-skilling for workers. This, where necessary, should be accompanied by economic development plans to create jobs in affected regions.
A national full employment policy, with strong state and local government involvement, would change the way we frame unemployment and the need for income support, making government bear the primary obligation to guarantee employment.
3. Income adequacy
People experiencing long-term unemployment, people with a disability, parents and other carers, students, older people, and those experiencing injury and illness must be guaranteed an adequate income. The adequacy of income support should, at base, be determined in relation to the level of the minimum wage.
Data on the variations in housing costs according to area and household type should also be used to determine an adequate level of rent assistance for people in the private rental market. Australia has one of the lowest payments to unemployed workers in the OECD; it is clearly insufficient to meet the necessities of life.10 The notion that an adequate income is an unreasonable expectation for those outside the paid labour force must be replaced with the concrete understanding that the only unreasonable choice in this context is the perpetuation and entrenchment of poverty and homelessness by deliberately forcing people to wage a daily battle for survival from below the poverty line.
4. Reframe conditionality
‘Conditional welfare’ as McKeever and Walsh note, ‘is as old as the idea of state relief itself and has its roots in the concept of moral hazard’,11 which might be boiled down to the constructed failure of the individual to meet their needs ‘independently’. At present, so-called mutual obligation exists primarily as a means of discouraging what successive governments have framed as ‘welfare dependency’, and therefore as a means of curbing the costs of JobSeeker payments.12
Conditionality should be understood as an institutional recognition of the existing and anticipated labour market conditions on a localised basis. Work for the Dole, PaTH, CDP, ParentsNext, so-called job clubs, compliance hoop-jumping and the complex array of breaches and sanctions must be displaced by a new approach, as outlined by Julie Connolly later in this book. A social guarantee should exist to ensure that the people excluded by the logic of the market are able to socially and politically participate in the building of a more equitable society.
5. A national employment service
The current Jobactive system is focused on compliance rather than job placement, and structured to provide short-term monetary gain for private services while imposing long-term social pain on unemployed workers. As a recent Per Capita evaluation found, it is ‘a system that penalises unemployed workers for not being in jobs that don’t exist’, blaming them for unemployment that has been structurally caused, not individually chosen.13
The current Jobactive network must be replaced by a national employment service, predicated on a practice that is responsive to: a) the local economic conditions of different regions, and b) the individual experience, need and capacity of the unemployed workers it is there to assist. It should have institutional links to a national skills and education framework responsible for the provision of skills formation, education and training through free access to a reinvigorated TAFE system.
6. A strong municipal and regional focus
While it is essential that the funding and framing of a social guarantee be national, its delivery should be adapted to local needs, with a key role for municipal and regional bodies in analysing and making recommendations and, where appropriate, determinations on such elements as design of local economic development projects.14 These might include locally supported projects such as worker cooperatives; analysis and development of social and affordable housing plans; transport plans; free, non-profit early childhood education and care services; the development of community centre hubs bringing together relevant local, state and Commonwealth government services; community-based social services; public sporting and cultural facilities; and justice reinvestment programs. The first priority should be the provision of a significant social and economic infrastructure investment to First Nations communities, the shape of which should be determined by those communities, ensuring that the active principle of self-determination replaces the colonising practices of paternalism, disempowerment and control.
The implementation of a social guarantee means equitable access to housing, employment, income security, health and education, and the broadening of democratic institutions. It should be seen in conjunction with a deepening of economic and industrial democracy, with society—through government—playing a more proactive role in the determination of economic priorities in the service of ordinary people; and a greater role for trade unions and other civil society movements and organisations.
‘What is neoliberalism?’ asks French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. ‘It is a programme for destroying collective structures which may impede the pure market logic.’15 And what, we may counter, is a social guarantee? It is an architecture for supporting and empowering collective structures by subordinating the logic of the market to the twin logic of social capacity and social need.