|
April 27, 2009
Lindy Edwards, a Research Fellow in the Research School of the Social Science at AN, argues in Reinventing social democracy vital for progress in The Age that three factors lining up to suggest that social democracy will soon face a crisis of its own. It is crunchtime for social democracy.
In spelling these out she refers to Professor Bob Gregory recent presentation at the Australian National University a few weeks ago in which he argued that this recession is likely to be the one that breaks the welfare state. Gregory's argument is this:
The problem is that in each recession since the 1970s, a cohort of people has been thrown into unemployment in the first year of the recession. Most of those people have never got back to full-time work again. They have moved off the dole and on to other forms of welfare, but they have continued to rely on government benefits for their primary source of income. The result is that the primary source of income for about 20 per cent of working-age Australians is a government benefit. The number of working-aged men in full-time jobs has dropped from about 88 per cent in the early 1970s to about 66 per cent in the mid-2000s.
Gregory's argument is that if this recession is only on par with the 1990 recession in the number of people it throws out of work, it will be enough to make the welfare system unsustainable. A workforce of only 10 million people will be supporting between 3.5 million and 4.5 million people on benefits.
The reason? Each recession wipes out a string of unskilled jobs and they never come back. The commonly cited reason for the unemployment problem is the shift from a manufacturing industrial economy to a high-tech service economy. So though neo-liberalism might have exploded the traditional model of social democracy is also heading for a crisis of its own.
|
The Australian continues to demonize those who are critical of neo-liberalism. Thus David Burchell in his latest op-ed---Facts undermine the case for the market as villain says:
These are the market-haters who talk in terms of the dark satanic forces of the market.
Another attempt to reve up the culture wars to further the Conservative movement.