Slow death and welfare
The violence of the current social security system should not be underestimated - leading to the slow death of many. This is not a fait a complit but rather real policy calculations people have made, which impact on the lives and deaths of others
In early 2017, musician and artist Rhys Cauzzo took his life after being pursued by government-appointed debt collectors. They claimed he owed AU$17,000 in overpaid welfare benefits. Media reports stated that before Rhys died, “he sketched pictures in his notebook of a stick man holding a gun to his head, with dollar notes spraying out of it like blood[i]”.
When asked about Rhys’ death in the Senate Community Affairs Committee, Kathryn Campbell, the then Secretary of the Department of Human Services, tried to put distance between their dogged pursual of debts and Rhys’ death, telling the committee that “there are always different dimensions to stories that appear in the media as I am sure you are aware, and we have a different take on what was reported”.
Rhys’ suffering was only the tip of the iceberg. The government had chased over 400,000 people under their automated Robodebt program. One woman pursued told the media, “It was demeaning, embarrassing, and if it wasn’t for my son … I considered suicide[ii]”. Another woman also chased by the government said, “It was dehumanising. I had only lost my husband months before. … I was grieving[iii].”
Robodebts were generated by the Department of Human Services through ambiguous computer generated calculations known as algorithms. Most of the debts claimed by the government weren’t correct which meant people didn’t have anything to owe in the first place. But still the government employed debt collectors to harass people in order to recover AU$785 million in bogus debts[iv]. Only with the success of a legal challenge that showed Robodebt unlawful, did the government finally start to back off. It also was revealed that the government actually knew that Robodebt was unlawful years before these cases were bought against it[v].
Robodebt is just one of the many government programs currently waging war on the poor.
This war affects about 20% of Australia’s adult population[vi].
Yet the broader public is largely ambivalent to people’s suffering on welfare. Part of the reason for this is because unless you are subjected to the day to day harshness of the social security system, there is very little thought that goes to people that do. Also, poverty in Australia is attributed to an individual failing – like it is their fault they are poor.
It’s not only that this narrative is untrue as outlined in my blog economics to roll the poor, but this narrative of individual failings is also used as a political football for politicians to win votes on.
People in need of welfare are a useful scapegoat for structural economic problems.
The war on the poor is fed by the fiction about deserving and undeserving poor. The undeserving poor are seen as non-contributors to society and are subjected to accusations of being lazy, bludging or addicted to alcohol, drugs or gambling.
To be bestowed with the title of “deserving poor” means you are seen to have contributed to society or the public is comfortable about your incapacity to work. People who receive the aged pension and veteran payments are the two main categories of welfare payments that are seen as deserving in that that they receive the least amount of persecution and the least amount of conditions. These groups of people are accepted as workers who have done their time either in the labour market or the battlefield for the nation state.
Deservingness overall is linked to this belief in Australia that considers all people, regardless of circumstances, can achieve the Australian dream with hard work. That you, no matter your background, can do whatever you set your heart on.
All it takes is the right mindset and hard work - so they say.
So, people who say their circumstances limit their ability to achieve are just being lazy or not taking responsibility. It is thought that these people need incentives and punishments to get them “succeeding”.
This thinking has led to a number of punitive policies that make people’s lives harder when in need of support.
All of this also overlooks the main form of welfare given by the government – the middle and upper class welfare including family tax benefits and subsidies paid to private schools and the private health system, as well as tax concessions such as those with self-managed super funds.
This is all state welfare, but does not get scrutiny because there is a belief that these parts of the population deserve their benefits.
Or we just don’t realise it’s happening.
A report prepared by Per Capital for Anglicare revealed that the federal government spends AU $68 billion per year to keep the wealthiest households wealthy. This support to the rich is transferred through tax exemptions on private healthcare and education (AU $3 billion a year), superannuation concessions (AU $20 billion a year) and Capital Gains Tax exemptions (AU $40 billion a year) [vii]. That is greater than the cost of Jobseeker, disability support, the age pension or any other single welfare group.
Also, many of the super-rich don’t work, yet they are not subject to the same scrutiny as the rest of us.
In the last twenty years, there has been a dramatic increase in punitive social security programs that attribute unemployment as the fault of the individual. Most of these programs are trialled on First Nations communities initially, and then expanded to the non-First Nations poor.
One of main weapons used in the war against the poor is the use of ‘punitive conditionality’ or ‘mutual obligation’ - the threat of sanctions and the hoops you have to jump through to get and keep your support.
You may not remember when the Liberals instituted Work for the Dole in 1997, but it is now a key aspect of the Australian welfare system enjoying support from most of the political parties. Your ability to access welfare is conditional on you doing what the government says – if you get something from the state, you need to give your labour in return.
Never mind that a lot of this work for the dole consists of useless activities – people are asked to undertake menial and pointless tasks just to fill in their days. If you don’t turn up to an activity or miss an appointment, your pay is docked or even suspended. Never mind that your life depends on getting this meagre payment.
The system set up to stop people falling into poverty, now uses poverty to punish the poor.
The city version of Work for the Dole is harsh, but communities living in remote Australia have had to endure an even harsher program called the Community Development Program (CDP). CDP targeted mainly First Nations people living remotely and is especially cruel, causing people subjected to the program to breach it. Breaching often led to a two-month Centrelink suspension, meaning these individuals and their families may go without often one of the only sources of income[viii]. Threatened with pending Racial Discrimination Act case the Liberal Morrison government stopped CDP and now we are waiting for a replacement although suspensions continue.
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A lot of people are stuck in work for the dole because there just aren’t enough jobs for everyone. The Australian Council of Social Service estimates that, for every job vacancy in Australia advertised, there are eight people looking for a job or more work, and twice that if we include people changing jobs[ix]. After the COVID recession, this number increased to one job for every thirteen people looking[x]. In remote Australia, this number is much, much higher.
Also, some people cannot work formally – they may have an illness, caring responsibilities, parenting responsibilities or other reasons not to be able to have a job. They also need support, not punishment.
Waging this war on the poor is even more sinister given that it is government policy to count 5% unemployment as the “natural rate of unemployment[xi]”. This is a critical point – in its calculations of what it calls “the full employment level of unemployment”, the government actually expects 5% of us to be unemployed.
So why then persecute people?
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ParentsNext was another example - the government’s welfare program that targeted single mothers. Now scapped , but useful to reflect on what government did to people on it.
ParentsNext compeled mainly single mums to attend work ready activities, and if they miss these activities, they risk losing their benefits – their primary and often only source of income.
This means that people have to reduce their focus on parenting their very young children to engage in activities set out by the government, regardless of whether the activities are relevant or desired.
In my interviews with women who were put on this program, they talked about having to go to swimming lessons, library classes or study – things they were already doing[xii]. Others were told to do things that were just inappropriate – one single mum I spoke to recovering from a severe domestic violence situation that left her with a permanent disability, told me that she was told to take up bricklaying for 18 hours a day.
She recounted her reply to this supervisor’s ridiculous suggestion:
“How do you expect me to go into bricklaying and for 18 hours a day? Are you going to be giving me free childcare? … So do you expect me to drop off my daughter at 5 a.m. in the morning. And someone pick her up at 6:00pm. So when does she see her mother? She doesn't have a father in the picture. She doesn't have anyone else. So what are you trying to do to my child?”
Parentsnext was a sinister program, attacking mainly women who do society’s care work, calling them unproductive, and punishing them for doing such the work the economy relies on. Crudely put: if women didn’t raise the next generation of tax payers, there would be no economy for the government to lord over. Only becuase of amazing advocacy of single mums did the government actually get rid of this terrible program. Although mums with older kids still get subjected to mutual obligations.
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Despite billions dollars of taxpayers’ money being spent on setting up and administering programs like Parentsnext, Work for the dole and Robodebt, overwhelmingly the evidence shows that welfare conditionality and mutual obligation doesn’t work[xiii].
Still, this war on the poor has made poverty a business for many “service providers”. Whilst still the traditional not-for-profit organisations take on government contracts (which limit their ability to be publicly critical of the government’s war on the poor), increasingly private companies are also taking on government contracts to administer punitive and mean government welfare programs.
There are over 1,700 providers across Australia vying for public money to manage the social security payments of over 750,000 people in programs such as Work for the Dole and ParentsNext[xiv].
The war affects more people than most realise. The Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey found that, over a 15-year period, 71% of Australians have someone in their household who will receive welfare[xv].
Yet the system is contributing to poverty.
And even death.
The slow death of the poor
This war on the poor is contributing to a slow death of those needing social security payments. According to research by the Australian Council of Social Services, 55% of Newstart recipients are living below the poverty line. Newstart is between AU $40–AU $50/day to cover people’s housing, food, clothing and transport. For a long time, Newstart has been dramatically inadequate for people relying on it, forcing many to live below the poverty line. Research has revealed that, in the last 25 years, poverty for households at the level of Newstart has increased by 389%[xvi]. People on disability support and the aged pension get more than those on Newstart, but even these payments put people into poverty.
Researchers have found that living on Newstart makes it significantly more likely that you will have five or more health conditions than wage earners[xvii]. You are also around two times more likely to be hospitalised.
Research has also shown that living below the poverty line more broadly increases the risk of people having poor health outcomes including not being able to afford a balanced diet or medicine incurring additional costs, not being able to afford appropriate accommodation, and having to make risky decisions that affect your life.
Being poor also means that, compared to the least disadvantaged people in Australia, you are 2.6 times as likely to have diabetes, 2.3 times not to fill a drug prescription because of cost and 2.1 times to die of potentially avoidable causes[xviii].
If you are First Nations, the effect of poverty on your life is even worse. Compared to non-First Nations people, First Nations people are 2.9 times as likely to have long-term ear or hearing problems among children, 2.7 times as likely to experience high or very high levels of psychological distress, 2.1 times as likely to die before their fifth birthday, 1.9 times as likely to be born with low birthweight and 1.7 times as likely to have a disability or a restrictive long-term health condition[xix].
Research by Francis Markham and Jon Altman has found that between one-third and half of the life expectancy gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous in the Northern Territory is due to poverty[xx].
These horrible outcomes are not because of individual failures like the government often leads us to believe; it’s because of various “structural” issues, least of which is that there aren’t enough jobs for everyone and not everyone is able to work.
Dealing with poor health outcomes is compounded by being subjected to the stress of punitive conditionality and having to survive stigma and shame of programs designed to deter access rather than support people in poverty.
All of these welfare conditions of lethality[xxi] contribute towards what Lauren Berlant calls a “slow death”. By this they refers to the “physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people”[xxii].
Slow death is often overlooked by both policy and the public because death comes gradually, often through a variety of factors. The cause of death on the death certificate only captures the final life taking condition such as pneumonia, cancer or suicide. There is no space to list “ongoing stigmatisation of being poor, coupled with punitive conditionality designed to make conditions of welfare so horrid that you are compelled to find a job that doesn’t exist”.
This is a worrying trend because the social security system was set up to help people avoid distress and death, not create it.
Originally written 2019-2020 (some updates included)
[i] Emma Reynolds, "Family Who Lost Son after Centrelink Debt Harassment Hit Back," ABC News, 2017-03-07 2017.
[ii] Gemma Bath, "How Centrelink Debt Notices Are Affecting Australian Women.," Mamamia, 2019-02-21T19:09:08+01:00 2019.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Luke Henriques-Gomes, "Robodebt Scheme Costs Government Almost as Much as It Recovers," The Guardian, 2019-02-21 2019.
[v] "Government Was Warned Robodebt Scheme Was Unlawful – but Won't Say When," ibid.February 6, 2020, no. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/feb/06/government-warned-robodebt-scheme-unlawful-but-wont-say-when (2020).
[vi] Roger Wilkins and Mark Wooden, "What 17 Years of Data Tells Us About Australia," Pursuit, 2 August 2017.
[vii] Kasy Chambers, "Australia Takes from the Poor to Give to the Rich," Sydney Morning Herald, 2018-04-09 2018.
[viii] Fowkes, Impact on Social Security Penalties of Increased Remote Work for the Dole Requirements.
[ix] Cassandra Goldie, "Acoss: Full Employment Is a Fiction That Doesn't Help Policy," Financial Review, 2018-11-14 2018.
[x] ACOSS (2020), 1 job for every 13 looking – ACOSS calls on Government to have people’s backs through tough times, ACOSS Media release, Australian Council of Social Service, https://www.acoss.org.au/media-releases/?media_release=1-job-for-every-13-looking-acoss-calls-on-government-to-have-peoples-backs-through-tough-times
[xi] David Richardson, "Adequacy of Newstart Submission to the Standing Committee on Community Affairs ", ed. The Australia Institute (2019).
[xii] In 2019 I conducted interviews with women on ParentsNext in Victoria. The research was asking women about their experiences of the program.
[xiii] Peter Dwyer and et.al, "Final Findings: Welcond Project," Welfare Conditionality: Sanctions, Support and Behaviour Change, http://www.welfareconditionality.ac.uk/publications/final-findings-welcond-project/.
[xiv] Kurmelovs, "The Nightmare of Australia's Welfare System: 'At the Push of a Button, My Working Life Was Erased'."
[xv] Wilkins and Wooden, "What 17 Years of Data Tells Us About Australia."
[xvi] Henriques-Gomes, "Households on Newstart Have Suffered 'Dramatic' Rise in Poverty over 25 Years."
[xvii] Alex Collie, Luke Sheehan, and Ashley Mcallister, "The Health of Disability Support Pension and Newstart Allowance Recipients," (DSP Study, 2019).
[xviii] Australia Institute of Health and Welfare, "Australia's Health 2018: In Brief," (AIHW, 2018).
[xix] Ibid.
[xx] Markham and Altman, "Adequacy of Newstart and Related Payments and Alternative Mechanisms to Determine the Level of Income Support Payments in Australia "; Kirsten Lawson, "Newstart Is 'Killing Indigenous People': Researchers," Canberra Times, 2019-10-09 2019.
[xxi] Elizabeth Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
[xxii] Lauren Berlant, "Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)," Critical Inquiry 33, no. 4 (2007): 754-80.