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December 21, 2003
There is a quick post by Chris on the enabling state over at Back Pages. In Australia the 'enabling state' stands for the policies associated with Mark Latham, the current leader to the federal Opposition ALP. Chris however connects them to President Bush. The inference of Chris' post for an Australian audience is, 'look how conservative these policies are.'
I want to come at this 'enabling state" by returning to the work of Noel Pearson. These ideas make sense in terms of the passive welfare experienced by Indigneous people in Australia.
I'm going to look at another speech Pearson made, the Ben Chifley Memorial Lecture called "The Light on the Hill", which he gave a couple of years ago. In it Pearson discusses the nature and the extent of the horrendous social problems of his people in Cape York Peninsula in relation to the social welfare traditions of the ALP. This paragraph gets the heart of the problem:
"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."
Pearson rightly says that the social democratic welfare state was a great and civilising achievement for Australian society: it produced many great benefits for the great majority of Australians. What then is the difference between the two forms of welfare? It was enabling for whites but not for blacks. Pearson says:
"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."
Passive wefare meant that indigenous people largely did 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. Rather passive welfare has been disastrous for indigenous people. Pearson gives a very succinct account:
"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....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."
Pearson's central concern is helping his own people in Cape York Peninsula, and he approaches this by askign the question:'Why has so little been done to prevent the disintegration of our Aboriginal communities?
His pathway is in terms of the reforming the welfare state by building on the commitment of the Australian people to welfare. This reform reworks the notion of enabling. Noel says:
"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."
Enabling means helping unemployed Australians back into work.
to be continued.
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