Trying to find the sunny side of life - Page 6
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 15: Divided Nation
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by David Burchell
IT'S TEMPTING TO SEE CONTEMPORARY SYSDNEY – like the country more widely – as an ocean of affluence studded with small islands of "disadvantage", such as Macquarie Fields, Claymore or Minto. The problem then becomes one of attending to these poor castaways, stranded in would-be garden suburbs, remote communities or regional cul de sacs. And yet, while emotionally gratifying (it appeals, after all, to that old instinct of noblesse oblige which still suffuses the outlook of the concerned professional classes), this is a deceptive vantage-point. To borrow from the terminology of medicine, "treating" disadvantage is rarely a matter of applying a cure – far more often it's the application of a therapy, the aim of which is to soothe the symptoms rather than preventing them. It's not simply that, in our rush to achieve, we've left the poor strugglers behind. The problem is more fundamental than that.
The decisions that created the welfare suburbs which stud our major cities were specific acts of policy, and many of those policies have long since been abandoned. Yet our welfare islands owe their continued existence not to those original decisions alone, but to an entire architecture of policy misdecision which continues to this day. Indeed, you could argue that, rather than having learned from the past, over the decade of our long boom we've simply been reproducing old policy errors on a much larger scale. An historically unprecedented number of those on our welfare rolls today are there not because they are incapable of working or unwilling to work, but because of a series of obstacles placed in their path – often by the same governments which claim to be trying to help them. Employers today demand of those applying for jobs of even limited skills "pieces of paper" – often of decidedly limited practical value – which too many individuals are incapable of acquiring because they fail to complete school. Young men leaving education today without some form of qualification will be condemned to a kind of workforce twilight zone for much of their adult lives. At the same time, benefits and rent assistance are still too often calibrated to taper off as people – often trying to escape from them – start to do better for themselves, so that those who fall out of the mainstream find it hard to drag themselves back in.
Sole-parent benefits and child-care costs sometimes still seem purpose-designed to discourage tens of thousands of mothers from returning to work, and have made unwilling "welfare mums" of thousands of independent-minded divorcees. Economist Bob Gregory has pointed out that female single parents – whose most common life goals are to find new jobs and new partners – don't seem able to find either nowadays, while among married women rates of full-time employment have actually been growing. Meanwhile, as Gregory has observed elsewhere, sanctioned changes to employer behaviour, labour relations and unemployment benefit provisions in recent decades have forced tens (or maybe hundreds) of thousands of older but able-bodied men to recreate themselves as perpetual state dependants and invalids. Indeed, these trends have actually worsened over the course of the ten-year boom. In 1995 the combined total of those on the sole-parent pension and the disability pension was roughly equal to the number of people on unemployment benefits. By 2005, however, the two groups outnumbered those on unemployment benefits by a factor of five to two. And while unemployment rolls have shrunk at an impressive rate (by about twenty-two thousand a year between 1995 and 2005), the sickness benefit roll has grown faster (at twenty-five thousand a year). It's possible that a majority of all those who dropped off our unemployment rolls haven't become employed, but rather have become (at least officially) sick. These are not small, isolated, pitiable fragments of the community. Put together, they add up to an absolute majority of all those on our welfare rolls, and a very considerable proportion of the entire citizen body.
Our contemporary schooling debacle accentuates these difficulties. Until relatively recently, graduates of solid local state comprehensives had a respectable chance of doing better in life than their parents. Increasingly, as ambitious and better-resourced parents defect to other parts of the system, this opportunity seems to be melting away, and with it much of a proud national tradition of self-betterment. In 2002, the Vinson Report into New South Wales state schooling quizzed principals from "low socio-economic status" areas like Macquarie Fields. One principal in outer western Sydney reported that, over the previous two years, no fewer than four-fifths of their existing teaching staff had successfully sought placements elsewhere. Out of the senior staff, the only survivor was the principal himself. Of the current staff, forty-two of the forty-six were in their first teaching appointment. In its final report to the state government, shortly after the Glenquarie riots, the New South Wales Public Education Council examined the placement of beginning teachers in schools across the state. The report noted that one-third of the new teachers who found first jobs in state schools in New South Wales in 2004 were drafted into just 3 per cent of the state's schools – each of which, on average, will have been required to digest at least seven first-time teachers each year. If these schools were the same size as that unnamed western Sydney school documented in the Vinson Report, each one of them would turn over its entire staff every six years or so. As educationist Richard Teese has observed, this is a veritable production line of social incapacity.
TOO MUCH OF THE DEBATE OVER AUSTRALIA'S new "age of affluence" has been moralised unhelpfully – or, perhaps more precisely, it has been moralised in the wrong way. Our key problems aren't the supposed "timepoverty" of busy knowledge-workers (in any case, as researchers at the University of New South Wales recently pointed out, the most "time-poor" are actually single parents on the workforce's fringes), or supposed enslavement to poor tastes in housing design or "conspicuous consumption" (that old reliable stand-by of disgruntled aesthetes). Those who've achieved high levels of personal and financial independence may mostly be left safely enough to exercise that independence as they see fit. (And if the exercise of that independence causes them psychic trauma, they have an historically unprecedented variety of therapies and spiritualisms of which to assuage it.)
The greater problem is that the new tide of affluence doesn't seem to have brought with it a comparable widening of this experience of personal independence. Australians have always hankered to be able to fend for themselves, but too many are still condemned to hankering. Our incomes may have doubled since the 1970s, but the numbers of those stuck on welfare has stubbornly refused to fall. Unemployment – at least as officially recorded – has halved over that time, yet the numbers of people excluded from the workforce have arguably risen, as the labour market for the unskilled has dwindled. Self-employed tradespeople and contractors nowadays may seem to live in a land of milk and honey, but too many waged employees endure fearful working existences. If we're dissatisfied with our national achievement, this may not be on account of some kind of intangible ennui. Rather, there's a promise there that lies unfulfilled, and the riots in our struggle-towns may only be the most violent indications of it.
Still our debates over work, incomes, tax and welfare continue to roll along the same well-signalled rail lines laid down for our ideological traffic thirty, forty or even fifty years ago. On the left, the size of our welfare outlays, or of our public housing stock, is still too often treated as if it were a marker of our degree of civilisation – as if tending to incapacity were an act of humanitarianism. Clearly, welfare recipients should have the right to a dignified standard of life. And in a society where most citizens aspire to own their own house in their own name, there is no particular electoral incentive for government to care too tenderly for those who cannot, unless others call them to account. Yet it's worth remembering that the advocate's outlook is a partial view. The measure of a civilised society ought not to be the size of its welfare outlays, or of its public housing sector, but rather the success of individuals and families in achieving some stable lifestyle and accommodation which can give them self-reliance and self-respect. To treat the body of public renters and welfare beneficiaries as foot-soldiers in an imagined global war between market and state provision is unfair to the hopeful, if struggling, households who inhabit that "stock" or collect those funds. They don't want to become trophies of a social vision – mostly, they just want to move on.
By contrast, conservatives have always liked to trumpet their rhetorical and ideological commitment to personal striving and independence. Yet in practice this instinct – which is no doubt sometimes sincerely felt – generally loses out to the right's more visceral revulsion against the power of state agencies, even where they can play an active and constructive role in encouraging personal independence, rather than stifling it. If the current federal government leaves behind it a single significant initiative in social policy, it will be the Job Network. In theory, the Network is supposed to "empower" jobseekers by providing with choice of job-search providers, and granting them the status of a customer rather than a supplicant to public bureaucracy. In practice, though, it serves in good measure to create and then entrench different categories of the jobless, divided by how expensive (which is to say how unprofitable) they are to help. And since few self-respecting businesses would get into an industry ordered along these peculiar lines, the experience of job-seeking under the Job Network often seems to involve less a change in customer status than a transfer of dependency, from being the supplicant of a government bureaucracy to being the recipient of Christian charity. This is hardly a monument to personal independence. Rather, it is a memorial to the ideological impasse of our times.
On the right, it's been convenient to measure the economic successes of the last decade by the flood of cash they've brought in their wake. The left – as is far too often its wont – has reacted to these claims in a negative, call-andresponse manner, either by decrying Australia's affluence as a triumph of poor taste, or seeing it as a kind of financially induced hardening of the moral arteries of the nation. Yet both of these positions, viewed from the wider historical perspective, look myopic. A century ago, Australia's quest for nationhood was measured by the extent to which the entire nation was integrated into a common public life and culture – a life and culture which had been designed, up until that point, chiefly for the enjoyment and satisfaction of the propertied classes. On this measure, the last decade has been a conspicuous historical failure in our national life – a failure made more egregious by the numerous opportunities the wealth and tranquility of the times have offered us. If full citizenship resides in possessing a secure stake in the nation and its culture, we may well have more non-citizens now than we did half a century ago. And their travails may well continue to haunt our midsummer nights.
IN OCTOBER 2006, AFTER EIGHTEEN MONTHS IN PRISON for other offences and a turbulent relationship with his warders, Jesse Kelly pleaded guilty in Sydney's Downing Street District Court to two counts of aggravated dangerous driving causing death. This time the newspaper reports made no mention of any crowd of well-wishers outside the court. In his summing-up, Justice Brian Knox SC observed that Kelly seemed to have viewed his long-running cat-and-mouse relationship with the local police as a kind of game – noting, with true judicial sententiousness, that "if it was a game, it was a particularly deadly one for his two passengers". Kelly was sentenced to a maximum jail term of seven years and nine months, with a minimum sentence of five and a half years. In handing down the sentence, Justice Knox concluded: "I do not find there are strong prospects for rehabilitation." After the verdict, Jesse's loyal grandfather, Peter Parker, spoke to reporters outside the court: "I think Jesse accepts the sentence as it stands. But who knows what lies down the road." ♦