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September 29, 2006
Noel Pearson, the Executive Director, Cape York Partnerships, has argued that passive welfare is one of the two issues of the most strategic importance to the wellbeing and future of indigenous people generally. He has been a vigorous opponent of policies aimed at continued passive welfare delivery because the activity and service delivery of the Welfare State has caused and compounded Aboriginal passivity. He says that passive welfare has deprived indigenous people of their right to take responsibility, and that they have paid huge social costs as a people for these policies. In this 2002 SEN Conference Dinner speech he says that his critique of welfare does not involve repudiation of the welfare state:
I should take the opportunity here tonight to highlight some points I have also made about the context in which I have proceeded with my critique of welfare. I have not repudiated the Welfare State and indeed I believe it is a great civilising achievement. My own education I owe to the policies of Prime Minister EG Whitlam, as no doubt do many others who have come from the wrong side of the tracks. Rather than seeking to contribute to the dismantling of welfare provisioning by government to ensure universal access and opportunity, I urge its reform. When the Welfare State operates to keep people in perpetual dependency and engages in relationships with marginalised peoples that compound their passivity---- reform cannot be put off. Aboriginal people cannot remain in the largest proportions at the bottom end of the Australian Welfare State, riddled with social problems and not enjoying a fair place in the economy of their home country. So I urge and pursue social entrepreneurship with a clear eye to reforming welfare and making it stronger---- ensuring that it enables social recovery and uplift, rather than impeding it.
Pearson then distinquished between classical welfare of the welfare state and passive welfare.
The former consists in universally accessible health care and compulsory education. Pearson says:
In most modern industrialised countries the state has assumed an overall responsibility for these domains, even if there is a mixture of state and private enterprise in these sectors of the economy. In the Welfare State the working taxpayers - the “mainstream” - collectively finance facilities aimed at their own wellbeing, development and security. Classical welfare is not just a matter of the more affluent classes supporting the poor and marginalised. Welfare in the wider sense does redistribute resources from richer to poorer citizens, but it also redistributes the resources of the individual over her or his own life cycle. The citizen is assisted during childhood, then works and pays tax, and is finally taken care of during retirement. Her taxes also insure her against disaster like serious illness.
Passive welfare, on the other hand, is welfare in the narrow sense of assistance to needy citizens who may never repay via their taxes what they have received, and of whom nothing further will be required or expected.
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