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June 21, 2007
The Cape York Welfare Reform Project advocated by The Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership aims to develop reformed incentives and appropriate enabling supports at the community level which catalyse the restoration of social norms in the Welfare Reform communities and ultimately in the whole Cape York region. The future that the Institute envisages is one in which the people of Cape York Peninsula internalise a set of revitalised social norms, which mandate personal responsibility for work, education and the welfare of children, so that they become free from dependence on passive welfare and so that child neglect and abuse cease.
Mark Bahnisch at Larvarus Prodeo was very critical of Pearson's approach to welfare reform a couple of years ago. He wrote:
Most thinking on Indigenous disadvantage recognises the supply side issues with regard to economic opportunity and jobs in remote communities. Pearson seemingly can’t see this - the fact that many long term unemployed people lack marketable skills and that properly resourced training and labour market programmes, as well as incentives to employers who are often suspicious of candidates who are long-term unemployed, are a much better way of assisting people into the labour market than ranting about dependency and proposing punitive and grossly illiberal “solutions”.
Bahnisch is right on the employment issue. However, he continues to see Pearson's approach to the Cape York agenda as a mixture of tired Third Way rhetoric and populist authoritarianism that’s become his stock in trade. He sees Pearson's approach as sitting nicely with, the Minister of Indigenous Affairs' (Mal Brough) over-emphasis on authoritarianism and the criminal justice system.
Bahnisch is critical of Pearson's downplaying of education in favour of attacking behaviour through building social norms. But it is more complex than this as you need to repair the damage to people so that they are capability to enter entering the labour market and accept the work ethic as their own. First the work ethic then the qualifications through education.
Update: 23 June
Pearson argues in response to the Wild and Anderson Report, which revealed rampant and often unreported abuse, with children as young as three exposed to pornography and systemic alcohol fuelled abuse, that:
You can't just educate people that a twelve-year-old is not a prospective sexual partner. That's not a question of education that's a question of moral norms. It's not as if there's not enough awareness. So in some profound respects I suppose we part ways with the blueprint in the Northern Territory we believe that social cultural and moral norms have got to be rebuilt it's not just a matter of awareness people have got to be held to certain standards of respect, for their children, for other members of the community.
Is it an either or situation? We need to protect the kids from sexual abuse if they are to be able to go on and become educated.Child protection is not like poverty or educational underachievement or general socioeconomic disadvantage. We can’t rehabilitate people from alcohol or drug dependence immediately. We can’t fix the poor education immediately. We can’t fix up the poor health immediately. But it is possible to stop the suffering straight away.
Pearson says of the Howard Government's intervention plan:
I believe the Government’s proposal will make a difference in the short term. If one accepts that the proposed measures will save women and children this year, then the bottom line is this: rejecting the Government’s emergency measures equates with giving priority to some other issue before rescuing the children. Even where extremely concerted responses have been implemented, such as the new child safety regime in Queensland, which has made significant improvements to the child protection system, we are a long way from stopping the abuse. All we have now is a new system to respond to abuse. We don’t have a system to prevent the abuse. There are still about 80 child welfare notifications a month across the communities of Cape York.
We are still talking about a system that deals with abuse and neglect after it has become a problem. We are not talking about a system that prevents the abuse or neglect before it becomes a problem.
So the welfare reform measures for a family responsibilities commission to exercise powers over welfare payments have the aim of the aim of the family responsibilities commission intervening early, to hold adults to account for their behaviour and to ensure that the welfare of children is the utmost priority. It is about complementing the Queensland Government’s existing child safety response system with an effective and practical prevention system.
Bahnisch is on more solid ground when he addresses the issue of finding work, due to the actual lack of any economic opportunities in those communities not blessed with minerals under the ground:
It strikes me that the inevitable result of Pearson’s agenda of “engagement with the real economy” will be both an increased individualisation of Indigenous people as “responsibilities” trump collective rights and also a sense of collective being; and a concomitant new disposession of Indigenous people to the cities and to mining towns. No doubt as with purposeless labour market programs such as Work for the Dole, employers will welcome the cheap labour of those prepared to accept their “mutual obligation”.
I presume that in the longer term there will be a shift from community to cheap low skilled abour in the nearest regional town and then moving back to the community again for family obligations. An orbiting existence. Is this what Pearson has in mind?
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