Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Discomforting Truths


Sadly, we don’t expect politicians to acknowledge discomforting truths. Especially truths that weaken their argument. It’s probably a condition we are all guilty of from time to time, including columnists from the right and left of the political spectrum. Which makes it difficult to assess the merits of things like the government’s Welfare Working Group report.    

According to Chris Trotter’s article in the Otago Daily Times 13 Aug, the Welfare Working Group deliberations conjure images of Scrooge, workhouses and prisons for the poor. He also raises the revered Michael Joseph Savage from the dead to cast a disapproving eye on the proceeding. Trotter worries about the report targeting long-term beneficiaries, “overwhelmingly those on sickness, invalids and domestic purposes benefits; people who can’t work; people whose physical or mental disability makes ordinary paid work impossible; and people engaged in the raising of babies and small children.” He is also concerned by a society that defines sickness, invalidism and sole parenthood as self inflicted conditions. 

Which is all well and good but his appeal to our humanity would be more convincing if it acknowledged the following discomforting truths: 

Despite drug and alcohol addiction being a patently self-inflicted condition, successive governments have treated it as a sickness worthy of an endless benefit. Incomprehensible as it is to most people who work for a living, these ‘sickness’ beneficiaries are not expected to earn their own keep. I doubt very much that the socialists of Michael Joseph Savage’s day would countenance such muddled thinking. I imagine their compassion would run to ensuring that drug and alcohol treatment was available for anyone who wanted it, with the provision that an adult with a debilitating addiction should be in a rehabilitation programme or working for a living.  

Savage would probably approve of current benefit rates for widows. I imagine he would be in favour of and domestic purposes benefits for deserted solo parents, and parents who, because of illness for instance, cannot earn sufficient money to raise a child. But what would he say about young girls and women who make a lifestyle choice to have babies that must be supported by strangers (tax-payers) who work for a living?   

Many of these girls and young women (and the tom-cat young men who impregnate them and forget them) would be astonished, resentful and possibly hurt to be labelled selfish and irresponsible. And with some justification. They have been brought up by governments, officials and parents to believe that if they want it and it’s not against the law to have it, then it is their right to have a baby. A detail like providing for the child is irrelevant. 

One can almost see the puzzled expression on the pregnant young woman’s face when confronted by someone who does not understand this normal and acceptable behaviour. And again with some justification. For normal and acceptable is what it has become. The necessity of working for one’s keep, an adage once universally understood and accepted, is a foreign concept to people conditioned to believe they have a right to be exempt. 

Why do some people assume that uttering this discomforting truth is beneficiary-bashing? 

Arguments about beneficiary-bashing are tiresome and time-wasting. Sometimes I feel like I’m watching a re-run of debates about racial and sexual equality.  What we should be talking about is how to generate work, personal responsibility, self-reliance and social cohesion.  

I believe in cradle to grave social welfare. But unless it is tied to an individual’s responsibility to work it is nonsense. There is a necessary condition of course, full employment, by whatever means is available. If that is established there is no argument: Unless one chooses to drop out and provide for oneself, working for a living is not a matter of personal choice. It seems ridiculous that everyone is entitled to an old-age pension, including drug abusers who have not worked for twenty years, but no one has a similar entitlement  to work for a living.  

I am watching the government with considerable suspicion because full employment as a democratic given is anathema to them. However, the Welfare Working Group at least gives us an opportunity to explore alternatives to welfare dependency. For that I am grateful.   

Christopher Horan.



 

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