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Ben Chifley Memorial Lecture
Bathurst Panthers Leagues Club
Cape York Partnerships 12/8/00
In recent times I have been thinking about the
social problems of my people in Cape York Peninsula. The nature
and extent of our problems are horrendous. I will not reiterate
the statistics here tonight, suffice to say that our society is
in a terrible state of dysfunction.
In my consideration of the breakdown of values
and relationships in our society - I have come to the view that
there has been a significant change in the scale and nature of
our problems over the past thirty years. Our social life has declined
even as our material circumstances have improved greatly since
we gained citizenship. I have also come to the view that we suffered
a particular social deterioration once we became dependent on
passive welfare.
So my thinking has led me to the view that our
descent into passive welfare dependency has taken a decisive toll
on our people, and the social problems which it has precipitated
in our families and communities have had a cancerous effect on
our relationships and values. Combined with our outrageous grog
addiction and the large and growing drug problem amongst our youth,
the effects of passive welfare have not yet steadied. Our social
problems have grown worse over the course of the past thirty years.
The violence in our society is of phenomenal proportion and of
course there is inter-generational transmission of the debilitating
effects of the social passivity which our passive economy has
induced.
In considering the sad predicament of our people
and the role which passive welfare has played in the erosion of
our indigenous values and relationships, I have had cause to think
about passive welfare provisioning and welfare policy generally
in Australia. Thus I have also been considering the history of
the Australian welfare state, its origins and its future.
The historical experience of my people in Cape
York is different from that of mainstream Australians. I will therefore
talk about two histories: the history of your mob and my own.
Before I do so, let me first say that my historical
and social discussion has been assisted by some of the analyses
of the early international labour movement. I am therefore thinking
about class. I refer to "class" in Australia because its existence
cannot be denied - it is a historical and contemporary fact, even
if the term has lost currency, indeed respectability, in public
discussion today. Indeed the Australian Labor Party talks no more
about class, let alone class struggle. The C word has departed
from the rhetoric of the official left. This is understandable,
but regrettable.
It is understandable because the political philosophy
of the Left in Australia has changed and the notion of the struggle
between classes is seen as antiquated, divisive and ultimately
fruitless given the apparent inevitability of stratification in
a free market society. This notion is after all associated with
a political and economic system that is now discredited with the
collapse of communism.
However it is harder to understand the abandonment
of class in our intellectual analysis of our society and history.
How can we pretend that class does not exist?
If the policy prescription - large scale expropriation
of private enterprises - that followed the class analysis of the
early international labour movement was wrong, it does not mean
that all aspects of the analysis are therefore invalid. Indeed,
whenever there is public discussion of the widening social and
economic divide in our country - as The Australian did in its
recent series - we are faced with the fact that there are class
cleavages in our society. And yet our policy debate is largely
conducted as if class does not exist.
Classes are treated as political constituencies
and labelled with evocative and provocative terms such as "the battlers"
and "the mainstream" and "the forgotten people" and "the elites".
The theory of the dynamics and operation of class society, as explained
in the analysis of the early international labour movement, has
been largely discarded. It does not inform policy.
But I find that I cannot so easily avoid such
analysis in seeking to understand the predicament of that lowest
underclass of Australians: my mob. For it explains our predicament
in a way that the prevailing confusions do not.
Recently, I read the comments of a prominent
young indigenous sportsman who has been speaking out, in his own
way, about his views on the oppression of indigenous people in
this country. In a blunt statement this young man said:
"Today's government and society are trying
to keep us down, keep us in our little place, and take away our
self-esteem, take away our pride ... They want to kill us all
and they're still trying to kill us all."
Most indigenous Australians would understand
this feeling, even if they would not articulate their sense of
oppression in the same way. Most indigenous Australians know the
sense that every time we try to climb we face daggers of impediment,
prejudice, difficulty and strife.
My own thinking is that this viewpoint is to be
explained by understanding the structures of class which operate
to keep our people down. There are structural reasons why we occupy
the lowest and most dismal place in the underclass of Australian
society. There are structural reasons why all of our efforts to
rise up and to improve our situation - are constantly impeded. The
concept of race has been coopted by the mechanisms of class to devastating
effect against the interests of black Australians. It means that
even among the lower classes the blacks have few friends because
the whites focus their Hansonesque blame and resentment upon the
blacks, who are either to be condemned for their hopelessness or
envied for what little hope they might have.
From my acknowledgment of the reality of class
society you should not infer that I am a proponent of socialist
or indeed any economic policies. I do not propose, indeed I do
not have, any economic policy for the country. My preoccupation
is to understand the situation of my people, which necessitates
an understanding of class.
But first I want to analyse the present situation
of the lower classes of Australia generally, and the historical
origins of the present situation.
The two major influences on the lives of your
mob have been industrialisation and the emergence of the Welfare
State. During the stage of the industrialised market economy when
the Welfare State was developing, the lower classes consisted
mainly of a huge, homogeneous industrial army and their dependents.
Since they lived and worked under similar conditions and were
in close contact with each other, they had both the incentive
and the opportunity to organise themselves into trade unions and
struggle for common goals. They possessed a bargaining position
through collective industrial action.
Many of your great grandparents and their parents
were members of this industrial army, and they got organised to
insist on a fair deal for working people and their families.
At the same time it was in the objective interest
of the industrialists to ensure that the working class didn't
turn to radical ideologies, and that the workers weren't worn
down by the increasing speed and efficiency of industrial production.
Health care, primary education, pensions, minimum wages, collective
bargaining, and unemployment benefits created a socially stable
and secure working class, competent to perform increasingly complex
industrial work, and able to raise a new generation of workers.
These two factors, the organisation of the workers
and the objective interest of the industrialists, produced an
era of class cooperation: the Welfare State. The support and security
systems of the Welfare State included the overwhelming majority
of the citizens. The welfare ideology predominated in Australia
during the long period of bipartisan consensus founded on what
Paul Kelly called in his book The End of Certainty "the Australian
Settlement", established by Prime Minister Alfred Deakin just
after Federation and lasting up to the time of the Hawke and Keating
governments in the 1980s.
At this point let me stress two points about
the Welfare State that developed in Australia from 1900.
Firstly, the key institutional foundations of
this Welfare State were laid down by the Liberal leader, Alfred
Deakin. As well as the commitment to a strong role for government
(what Kelly calls State Paternalism) it included the fundamental
commitment to wage conciliation and arbitration which became law
in 1904. Throughout most of the twentieth century the commitment
to a regulated labour market enjoyed bipartisan support in this
country. Whatever complaints the non-Labor parties harboured about
organised labour, there prevailed a consensus about the necessity
and desirability of a system of labour regulation in this country,
right up to the government of Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser. It
is important to remember the bipartisan consensus around the general
shape of the Welfare State established in the early 1900s.
Secondly, it is also important to remember that
the Welfare State was the product of class compromise. In other
words it arose out of the struggle by organised labour - it was
built on the backs of working people who united through sustained
industrial organisation and action in the 1890s. It was not the
product of the efforts of people in the universities, or in the
bureaucracies or even parliament. Whilst academics, bureaucrats
and parliamentarians soon came to greatly benefit from the development
of the Welfare State - and they became its official theorists and
trustees - it is important to keep in mind that the civilising achievement
of the Welfare State was the product of the compromise between organised
labour and industrial capital.
When the Arbitration bill was introduced into
Parliament, Deakin spoke of this compromise as "the People's Peace".
He said:
"This bill marks, in my opinion, the beginning
of a new phase of civilisation. It begins the establishment of
the People's Peace…which will comprehend necessarily as great
a transformation in the features of industrial society as the
creation of the King's Peace brought about in civil society…imperfect
as our legal system may be, it is a distinct gain to transfer
to the realm of reason and argument those industrial convulsions
which have hitherto involved, not only loss of life, liberty,
comfort and opportunities of well-being."
The Social Democrats have given three reasons
for defending the Welfare State:
Firstly to counteract social stratification,
and especially to set a lower limit to how deep people are allowed
to sink. People with average resources and knowledge will not
spend enough on education and their long term security (health
care and retirement), and they and their children will be caught
in a downward spiral, unless they are taxed and the services provided.
This is the main mechanism of enforced egalitarianism, not confiscating
the resources of the rich and distributing them among the poor,
because the rich are simply not rich enough to finance the Welfare
State, even if all their wealth were expropriated.
Secondly to redistribute income over each individual's
lifetime. This is often performed not on an individual basis (those
who work now pay some of older peoples' entitlements and will
be assisted by the next generation), and there is some redistribution
from rich to poor, but the principle is that you receive approximately
what you contribute (in the case of education you get an advance).
Thirdly because health care and education (the
two main areas of the public sector of the economy) can't be reduced
to commodities on the market, because health care and education
are about making everybody an able player on the market.
In other areas of the economy you can then allow competition.
Classical welfare is therefore reciprocal,
with a larger or smaller element of redistribution.
But now, alas, the circumstances that gave rise
to the Welfare State have changed.
The modern economy of the developed countries,
including our own is no longer based to the same extent on industrial
production by a homogeneous army of workers. The bulk of the gross
domestic product is now generated by a symbol and information-handling
middle class and some highly qualified workers. These qualified
people have a bargaining position in the labour market because
of their individual competence, whereas traditional workers are
interchangeable and depend on organisation and solidarity in their
negotiations with the employers. A large part of the former industrial
army is descending into service jobs, menial work, unemployment.
Many of their children become irrelevant for economic growth instead
of becoming productive workers like their parents and grandparents.
New growth sectors of the economy of course
absorb many people who can't make a living in the older sectors.
Also, income stratification is now in many countries being permitted
to increase. Employment is created at the cost of an increase
in the number of people on very low wages. But even if mass unemployment
is avoided, the current economic revolution will have a profound
effect on our society: it will bring about the end of collectivism.
The lower classes in developed countries have
lost much of their political influence because of the shrinking
and disorganisation of the only powerful group among them, the
working class proper. The shift in the economy away from manufacturing,
and economic globalisation which makes it possible to allocate
production to the enormous unregulated labour markets outside
the classical welfare states, have deprived the industrial workers
in the developed countries of their powerful position as sole
suppliers of labour force to the most important part of the world
economy. The lower classes are therefore now unable to defend
the Welfare State. Nor is there any longer any political or economic
reason for the influential strata of society to support the preservation
of the Welfare State.
Those who have important functions in the new
economy will be employed on individual contracts, and will be
able to find individual solutions for their education, health
care, retirement and so on, while the majority of the lower classes
will face uncertainty. And the Welfare State will increasingly
be presented as an impediment to economic growth.
In Australia the effects of this revolution
and the dismantling of the 80 year old Australian Settlement,
have been alleviated by the compromises between the traditional
Australian social system and the economic internationalisation
that was carried out during the Hawke-Keating years. These successive
Labor prime ministers presided over this transition in the Australian
economy, and they sought to introduce reform without destroying
the commitment to the welfare state. Labor eventually lost the
1996 election but the earlier endorsement of the electorate of
this compromise to a large extent forced the coalition parties
to be more cautious about dismantling the welfare state, notwithstanding
their preferences.
But the story does not end here. The welfare
state will continue to face pressure to retreat. As I have said,
it will increasingly be presented as an impediment to economic
growth. You do not need me to tell you this.
When I consider the history of your people,
I am struck by the ironies. Few Australians today appreciate their
history. They do not realise that the certainties they yearn for
were guaranteed throughout the twentieth century by the Welfare
State to which the great majority of Australians were reconciled
and committed. They do not realise that this civilising achievement
was founded on the efforts of organised labour. Instead of appreciating
the critical role that the organised labour movement played in
spreading opportunity and underwriting the relatively egalitarian
society which so many Australians yearn for today - organised
labour has been diminished in popular esteem. It has come to be
demonised, and whilst working people have a proud story to tell
- of nation building no less - this is not understood by Australians
today.
The second irony concerns the sacrifices that
working people and the organised labour movement made during the
painful transition period in our country that occurred from 1983
- and the complete lack of acknowledgment in the historical understanding
of the Australian community of this. Wage restraint underpinned
the reform processes pursued under Prime Ministers Hawke and Keating.
If these reforms were essential and have underpinned the current
economic performance of our country - what credit did the working
people get from the responsibilities that they shouldered for the
sake of the national economic interest? The irony is that rather
than taking the credit for the outcomes of the economic reform process
during this period (when incomes declined and profit shares surged)
the organised labour movement ended up being perceived as retarding
economic performance, and the call for labour market 'flexibility'
never abated. Indeed the pressure mounted and continues today. At
the end of the day, organised labour was left between a rock and
hard place: responsible for economic reform, but unable to claim
credit because many workers wondered whether the sacrifices had
been worth making.
That is the origin and the present predicament
of the Australian Welfare State, upon which your people have relied
for generations and whose future is of critical significance to
the prospects of your children.
The predicament of my mob is that not only do
we face the same uncertainty as all lower class Australians, but
we haven't even benefited from the existence of the Welfare State.
The Welfare State has meant security and an opportunity for development
for many of your mob. It has been enabling. The problem of my
people in Cape York Peninsula is that we have only experienced
the income support that is payable to the permanently unemployed
and marginalised. I call this "passive welfare" to distinguish
it from the welfare proper, that is, when the working taxpayers
collectively finance systems aimed at the their own and their
families' security and development. The immersion of a whole region
like Aboriginal Cape York Peninsula into dependence on passive
welfare is different from the mainstream experience of welfare.
What is the exception among white fellas - almost complete dependence
on cash handouts from the government - is the rule for us. Rather
than the income support safety net being a temporary solution
for our people (as it was for the whitefellas who were moving
between jobs when unemployment support was first devised) this
safety net became a permanent destination for our people once
we joined the passive welfare rolls.
The irony of our newly won citizenship in 1967
was that after we became citizens with equal rights and the theoretical
right to equal pay, we lost the meagre foothold that we had in
the real economy and we became almost comprehensively dependent
upon passive welfare for our livelihood. So in one sense we gained
citizenship and in another sense we lost it at the same time.
Because we find thirty years later that life in the safety net
for three decades and two generations has produced a social disaster.
And we should not be surprised that this catastrophe
was the consequence of our enrolment at the dependent bottom end
of the Australian welfare state. You put any group of people in
a condition of overwhelming reliance upon passive welfare support
- that is support without reciprocation - and within three decades
you will get the same social results that my people in Cape York
Peninsula currently endure. Our social problems do not emanate
from an innate incapacity on the part of our people. Our social
problems are not endemic, they have not always been with us. We
are not a hopeless or imbecile people.
Resilience and the strength of our values and
relationships were not just features of our pre-colonial classical
society (which we understandably hearken back to) - our ancestors
actually managed to retain these values and relationships
despite all of the hardships and assaults of our colonial history.
Indeed it is a testament to the achievements of our grandparents
that these values and relationships secured our survival as a
people and indeed our grandparents had struggled heroically to
keep us alive as a people, and to rebuild and defend our families
in the teeth of a sustained and vicious maltreatment by white
Australian society.
So when I say that the indigenous experience
of the Australian welfare state has been disastrous I do not thereby
mean that the Australian welfare state is a bad thing. It is just
that my people have experienced a marginal aspect of that welfare
state: income provisioning for people dispossessed from the real
economy.
Of course the welfare state means much more
than the passive welfare which my people have predominantly experienced.
As I have said the welfare state was in fact a great and civilising
achievement for Australian society, which produced many great
benefits for the great majority of Australians. It is just that
our people have largely not experienced the positive features
of mainstream life in the Australian welfare state - public health,
education, infrastructure and other aspects which have underpinned
the quality of life and the opportunities of generations of Australians.
Of course some government money has been spent on Aboriginal health
and education. But the people of my dysfunctional society have
struggled to use these resources for our development. Our life
expectancy is decreasing and the young generation is illiterate.
Our relegation to the dependence on perpetual passive income transfers
meant that our people's experience of the welfare state has been
negative. Indeed, in the final analysis, completely destructive
and tragic.
The two questions I ask myself about the Australian
Welfare State in general and the future of Aboriginal Australia
in particular are:
First, why were the lower classes not prepared
for the changes in the economy and the accompanying political changes
in spite of the fact that the labour movement has been a powerful
influence for most of the century? The stratification of society
is increasing, but the lower classes are becoming less organised
and less able to use their numbers to influence the development
of society via our representative democracy.
Second, why are we unable to do anything at
all about the disintegration of our Aboriginal communities?
Let us admit the fact that we have no analysis,
no understanding at all. All we have is confusion dressed up as
progressive thinking.
When I have been struggling with these questions,
I have gone back the early thinking about history and society
of the nineteenth century international labour movement. A main
idea was that social being determines consciousness, that is,
economic relations in society determine our thinking and our culture,
and that our thinking is much less conscious and free than we
think it is.
If we allow ourselves to analyse our society
in the way I think early social democrats would, I think we would
come to the following conclusions:
Society is stratified. There is a small group
at the top that is influential. There is a middle stratum that
possesses intellectual tools and performs qualified work. The
third and lowest stratum lacks intellectual tools, and does manual,
often repetitive work.
The middle stratum consist of two groups with
no sharp boundary between them. One performs the qualified work
in the production of goods and services (the 'professionals'),
the other (the 'intellectuals') has as their function to uphold
the cultural, political and legal superstructure that is erected
over and mirrors the base of our society, the market economy.
I believe that a main function of our culture,
from fine arts to footy today is to make people unable to use their
intellectual faculties to formulate effective criticism and analysis
while still allowing them to do their work in the economy. In this
talk I use the word "culture" in a wide sense, including not only
art and literature but also our social and political thinking. To
intellectually format people, but still let them acquire the knowledge
and develop the faculties needed for them to be productive is a
complicated process. Therefore our culture is complex and difficult
to analyse.
Our society and our culture is not a conspiracy.
There are no cynics at the top of the pyramid who use their power
to maintain an unnecessarily unequal society. Stratified society
is perpetuated because of the self-interest that everybody has
in not sinking down. People believe what it is in their interest
to believe. Influential people believe that a stratified society
will always be necessary for economic growth and development.
Their subordinates, the intellectuals of the middle stratum who
maintain our culture, sense the cues from above, then produce
ideology for the conservation of the current state of things,
but are not conscious of the reasons for their actions.
So, the objective function of our culture is
to stop people from breaking away from the hierarchy, but at the
same time allow them to develop specialised areas of competence
and creativity so that they can participate in production and
even develop the economy. Our culture treats you in two different
ways depending on whether you are born into, or moving towards,
the lower stratum or the middle stratum of society.
Workers need only limited intellectual tools.
After a basic education, the face that Culture shows the lower
stratum is one that has the objective function of deterring them
from unauthorised intellectual activity, that is to use their
language and their knowledge to analyse our society and their
position in it.
It is therefore wrong, as the present prejudice
does, to regard the lower stratum as hopeless yobbos who refuse
to participate in a cultural life that would make their lives
richer. On the contrary, they are right in rejecting most of our
culture, but they throw out the baby, the useful intellectual
tools, with the bath water. Most people unnecessarily have a bad
conscience for their lack of interest in culture. They shouldn't.
Most of our art, literature, history writing, philosophy, social
thinking and so on really is as irrelevant as most people think.
Not by accident, not because those who made it are useless and
isolated from real life, but because it is one of the objective
functions of our culture to deter most people from acquiring intellectual
tools. I think that much of our official culture exists in order
to scare the majority of the people away from acquiring the habits
of critical reading and analytical thinking. And at the same time
as our schools often fail to interest children in reading and
social and political analysis or even convinces them that such
activities are futile, students are given the option of taking
subjects like Soccer Excellence or Rugby League Excellence or
Film Studies at High School as if these are the qualifications
necessary for their futures.
And if people can't be prevented from independent
thinking by means of discouragement and strict formatting, there
is a last net which catches almost everybody who makes it that
far. I believe that most of what is seen as progressive and radical
thinking today in our cultural, academic and intellectual life
are simply diversions for keeping rebellious minds occupied and
isolated from the social predicament of the lower classes.
The great mistake of the Social Democrats of all
countries is that they put all their efforts into economic redistribution
and failed to build a movement that could take up the battle about
the laws of thought. The Social Democrat leadership thought they
were going to solve the problems with some major reforms and settlements
between industrialists and representatives of the majority. Now
when the economy is changing, and the Welfare State is being dismantled,
the majority of the population are unable to take part in the analytical
debate about their future.
Of course many people will think it is outrageous
when I dismiss much of our contemporary cultural and academic
life as being just a big confusion-producing mechanism in the
service of social stratification, that keeps dissenters occupied
and makes it difficult for people to analyse our society so that
they can organise themselves politically and try to rid society
of the things that divide us and consume our energies (drugs,
crime, ethnic conflicts, discrimination and so on).
But I have been driven to this desperate conclusion
by the fact that our current thinking can't provide any solutions
to our problems. And for Aboriginal people, the prevalent analyses
are more than confusing, they are destructive.
Aboriginal Policy is weighed down by mixed-up
confusion. Many of the conventional ideas and policies in Aboriginal
Affairs - ideas and policies which are considered to be "progressive"
- in fact are destructive. In thinking about the range of problems
we face and talking with my people about what we might be able
to do to move forward, the conviction grows in me that the so-called
progressive thinking is compounding our predicament. In fact when
you really analyse the nostrums of progressive policy, you find
that the pursuit of these policies has never helped us to resolve
our problems - indeed they have only made our situation worse.
Take for example the problem of indigenous imprisonment.
Like a broken record over the past couple of decades we have been
told that 2% of the population comprise more than 30% of the prison
population. The situation with juvenile institutions across the
country is worse. Of course these are incredible statistics. The
progressive response to these ridiculous levels of interaction
with the criminal justice system has been to provide legal aid
to indigenous peoples charged with offences. The hope is to provide
access to proper legal defence and to perhaps reduce unnecessary
imprisonment. To this day however, Aboriginal victims of crime
- particularly women - have no support: so whilst the needs of
offenders are addressed, the situation of victims and the families
remains vulnerable. Furthermore, it is apparent that this progressive
response - providing legal aid support services - has not worked
to reduce our rate of imprisonment. In fact Aboriginal legal aid
is part of the criminal justice industry which processes Aboriginal
people routinely through its systems. It is like a sausage machine
and human lives are processed through it with no real belief that
the outrageous statistics will ever be overcome.
The truth is that, at least in the communities
that I know in Cape York Peninsula, the real need is for the restoration
of social order and the enforcement of law. That is what is needed.
You ask the grandmothers and the wives. What happens in communities
when the only thing that happens when crimes are committed is the
offenders are defended as victims? Is it any wonder that there will
soon develop a sense that people should not take responsibility
for their actions and social order must take second place to an
apparent right to dissolution. Why is all of our progressive thinking
ignoring these basic social requirements when it comes to black
people? Is it any wonder the statistics have never improved? Would
the number of people in prison decrease if we restored social order
in our communities in Cape York Peninsula? What societies prosper
in the absence of social order?
Take another example of progressive thinking
compounding misery. The predominant analysis of the huge problem
of indigenous alcoholism is the symptom theory. The symptom theory
holds that substance abuse is only a symptom of underlying social
and psychological problems. But addiction is a condition in its
own right, not a symptom. It must therefore be addressed as a
problem in itself. Of course miserable circumstances make people
in a community susceptible to begin using addictive substances,
but once an epidemic of substance abuse is established in a community
it becomes independent of the original causes of the outbreak
and the epidemic of substance abuse becomes in itself the main
reason for why addiction and abuse becomes more and more widespread.
The symptom theory absolves people from their personal responsibility
to confront and deal with addiction. Worse, it leaves communities
to think that nothing can be done to confront substance abuse
because its purported causes: dispossession, racism, trauma and
poverty, are beyond reach of social resolution in the present.
But again, the solution to substance abuse lies
in restriction and the treatment of addiction as a problem in
itself. When I talk to people from Cape York Peninsula about what
is to be done about our ridiculous levels of grog consumption
(and the violence, stress, poor diet, heart disease, diabetes
and mental disturbance that results) no one actually believes
that the progressive prescriptions about "harm reduction" and
"normalising drinking" will ever work.
A rule of thumb in relation to most of the programs
and policies that pose as progressive thinking in indigenous affairs,
is that if we did the opposite we would have a chance of making
progress. This is because the subservience of our intellectual
culture to the cause of class prejudice and stratification is
so profound and universal. What we believe is forward progress
is in fact standing still or actually moving backwards.
Much of my thinking will seem to many to indicate
that I have merely become conservative. But I propose the reform
of welfare, not its abolition. Like all of you here tonight I
am also concerned for the long term preservation of our commitment
to welfare as a nation. If we do not confront the need for the
reform of welfare and to seize its definition, then we will lose
it in the longer term.
The fact is that Australia is at a critical
time in the history of the Welfare State. Its reform is imperative.
It is worth remembering that Paul Keating actually commenced the
new thinking on welfare with Working Nation.
This country needs to develop a new consensus
around our commitment to welfare. This consensus needs to be built
on the principles of personal and family empowerment and investment
and the utilisation of resources to achieve lasting change. In
other words our motivation to reform welfare must be based on
the principle that dependency and passivity are a scourge and
must be avoided at all costs. Dependency and passivity kills people
and is the surest road to social decline. Australians do not have
an inalienable right to dependency, they have an inalienable right
to a fair place in the real economy.
There is an alternative definition of welfare
reform that will take hold in the absence of the definition that
I have just outlined. This alternative definition sees welfare reform
as a matter of moral judgment on the part of those who have security
of employment and who 'pay taxes' in relation to people whose dependency
is seen as a moral failing. Indeed this alternative definition is
laced with the idea that welfare reform should be about punishment
of bludgers. In other words we are seeking to reform welfare because
we are concerned about the sentiments of those who work and who
pay taxes - and welfare recipients owe these people a moral obligation.
Welfare reform in this alternative definition could also be merely
a means of reducing government commitments and decreasing taxation
of those who already have a place in the economy.
I have departed somewhat from the traditions
of this annual lecture in that I have not explicated my vision
about the Light on the Hill. But in order to have a vision one
needs to have an analysis of ones' present situation. I contend
that people who want to be progressive today, are in objective
fact, regressive in their thinking. This is especially and painfully
obvious if you know the situation in the Aboriginal communities
of this country. Petrol sniffing is in some places now so endemic
that crying infants are silenced with petrol-drenched rags on
their faces. In one of our communities in Cape York, among less
than a 1000 people there were three murders within one month a
few months ago. And we don't know what to do.
And to be honest, in its cups, the late
Prime Minister Ben Chifley's party today does not know what to
do now that the economy has changed and by default its traditional
political base is decreasing, and the class divisions are widening.
Too many Australians remain with uncertain prospects. How could
we be so bereft of solutions today when these negligent thinkers
and trustees in the academies and the bureaucracies who most benefited
from the Welfare State that was created from the sweat and organisation
of working people, have had a century to anticipate our current
predicament and to prepare us for this day - at the least prepared
with understanding?
Those of us who wish for social progress must
realise that there are important insights in the materialist interpretation
of our history and our culture, which the labour movement unfortunately
left behind in favour of the confusions that have preoccupied
and diverted those academics, bureaucrats and parliamentarians
who became the intellectual trustees of the Welfare State and
the interests of working people and their families - a responsibility
which they grievously failed to fulfil. |
