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Issue No. 130 | 05 April 2002 |
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Lights Out on The Hill
Interview: Change Agent Industrial: Balancing the Books Unions: Breaking Out Politics: Pissing on the Light on the Hill History: Of Death and Taxes International: Now That's a Strike! Satire: Mugabe Voted Miss Zimbabwe: Denies Election Rigged Poetry: Flick Go The Branches Review: Red, Red Clydeside
The Soapbox Sport Week in Review Postcard
 Puplick's SermonChikka's LegacySocialists in the UKOrganising GloballyGrape DisappointmentUnion Resignations : Crisis or Opportunity?
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The Soapbox What's Wrong With the Liberals
********* Yesterday I witnessed a manifestation of the death of liberalism in our country. I visited the Villawood Detention Centre here in Sydney. It is bleak, Dickensian in its tone, and the air is filled with a palpable sense of injustice. Many of those I spoke to - refugees from the Middle East - are articulate and intelligent. They have been waiting to have their cases resolved by the overtly political system that passes for legal process for over two years in some cases. Their stories are a testament to the indomnitability of the human spirit. One of those people who went to Villawood with me is a mother of seven - a brave woman who cares particularly about the plight of the children who live their daily lives behind barbed wire. She has been put on the 'banned from entry' list at the Centre - it is alleged, with no evidence apparently to support the assertion - that she once took a camera into a Detention Centre in Port Headland. Whilst I spend time with refugees in the visiting area - a paddock with a few desultory trees and the ever-present razor wire fence - officers of the company that runs this prison - ACM - stare at me with suspicious eyes. No doubt my presence is reported to the Department of Immigration official who works at the Centre. My experience, and the experience of many others who have visited these 'hell-holes', confirms that Australia is losing its liberal soul. If it ever genuinely had one - that is. The failure of genuine liberals to stand up to the creeping Victorian conservatism that is part and parcel of policy development means that Australia, in my view, is a more brutal place today than it was twenty years ago. This evening, I want to outline how this is so but to propose that the liberal project - one that began in the 18th century and which has been the only genuine civilizing force in the world - is still with us but in desperate need of resuscitation. A Hardening of the Heart Let me first make the point that the social conservatism that pervades social policy today is not something upon which the non-labor side of politics has a monopoly. New Labor in Britain and Clinton's Democrats, and in this country, the utterances of Labor thinker Mark Latham, bear witness to this fact. In two areas, welfare policy and employment policy, - the social safety net that was once the great accomplishment of the liberal ideal, is in danger of being ripped wide open. Into the hole created by that ripping will fall millions of disadvantaged people. Let me take first the welfare reforms begun by the Labor government of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, but vastly accelerated by John Howard's government. These are reforms built on the notion of 'mutual obligation.' It is a term much loved by Britain's Tony Blair and it has within it a 19th century religious undertone that divides the poor into the 'deserving' and the 'non-deserving.' Mark Latham, in a recent speech, used a phrase that sums up what this concept of 'mutual obligation' is about - "the shared expectation that people are responsible for their own behaviour." Whilst no-one would deny that to live in society an individual must act responsibly and in a way that maximises community well-being and social and economic prosperity, account must be taken of an individual's emotional, social and economic circumstances in meeting that responsibility. This is why the criminal sentencing process that our courts have developed imposes a range of penalties on wrongdoers and tries to ensure that the punishment fits the crime. To have it any other way would lead to manifest injustice and a more inhumane society - despite what ill-informed 'law and order merchants' might argue. The extent to which the doctrine of 'mutual obligation' is illiberal in the sense of it imposing penalties on individuals with little regard to their own unique situation was recently illustrated by the release of the Pearce Review on social security penalties. I should note, as an aside, that the members of this Review, Professor Dennis Pearce, Heather Ridout and Professor Julian Disney, are certainly not the type that one would find at an S11 type protest! They are essentially fair-minded Australians who didn't like what they found. And what they found was a welfare system that imposes 'penalties' of up to $1450 on individuals who breach the conditions of their social security support. They found that it 'is astounding that the system designed to support Australians in need could trample over the rights of the most vulnerable in our society.' The Minister responsible for this area - Senator Vanstone, a highly intelligent and thinking Liberal, on this occasion sounded a little too glib in response to this Review. I heard her on the ABC's 7.30 Report note that the job of job seekers is to get up each day and look for work. That means that if they have an appointment with Centrelink or a job network provider they must be there at the appointed hour. Fair enough on first blush Senator. But what if you are job seeker or other welfare recipient who is schizophrenic or suffering from the malignant sadness that affects too many in Western society - depression. Those with such illnesses find it just as hard to get out of bed or the house each day, as does someone with a bad case of the flu. In other words, is the concept of 'mutual obligation' respectful enough of an individual's own circumstances. Are their fundamental human rights being accounted for adequately in a system that seems to more about stick than carrot? Have we, in reacting to what was seen as the failure of the post-war welfare state, moved too far in the direction of self-reliance? In relation to the last question, the answer seems to be yes. And this is illustrated by the second example I want to talk about tonight - the Howard government's bold social experiment in labor market reform. The privatisation of the job-seekers market. The creation of government run employment networks and the creation of training programmes to skill those who needed skilling was a much-lauded reform of the post-war era. The last manifestation of such a philosophy was the Keating Government's 1994 'Working Nation.' The Howard government has taken this area of policy in a radically different direction. It abolished 'Working Nation' and replaced it with a program whose name is designed to make middle Australia feel as though at last those lazy dole-bludgers are being kicked in the butt - "Work for the Dole." And it has privatised the Commonwealth Employment Service so that now job-seekers must sign on with a private sector job provider who understandable wants to make a profit out of running such a business. Taking firstly, the 'Work for the Dole' program. If one accepts that the role of a government acting according to liberal principles is to enhance the education and social and material well-being of an individual, how does this Program fare? It is certainly a Program that provides an individual with capacity to develop working skills such as participating in a team environment, and it enhances a sense of responsibility to one's employer and fellow workers. But where it falls down is in enhancing the educational capacity of individuals. 'Work for the Dole' is essentially a community work program - painting fences, creating walking tracks, planting trees. In this sense it is failing our young people because these tasks are hardly equipping one to work in a world where technology and value-adding are the name of the game. Sure, the Program is popular with voters - and I cynically surmised why a little earlier. But it is not an expenditure of taxpayers' money that is going to make us a cleverer Nation and more importantly, ensure that those who might have been failed by the education system are given at least an opportunity to share in the benefits of that cleverer Nation. As for the Job Network here the issue of a liberal response is clear - a liberal will want to ensure that, the human rights of the individual, which includes the right to work, will be paramount in any system that has been designed to meet that right. The Howard government's Job Network has recently been the subject of a Productivity Commission Inquiry. As in the case of the Pearce Review, again the participating organisation in this Inquiry is not a paid up member of the anti-capitalist society! The Productivity Commission's interim findings are of interest to a liberal who applies the principles mentioned earlier. Whilst the PC 's report indicates that the arrangements are an improvement on the previous government monopoly, there are disturbing trends emerging in relation to the most disadvantaged members of the job-seeking community. The report includes this comment about those job-seekers who, for a myriad of reasons, may be harder to place in a job. 'There is evidence that some job seekers receive little direct assistance after referral to Intensive Assistance...some [job] providers acknowledged they were unwilling to invest time or resources in job seekers who they felt would be unable to help achieve an outcome..." This is from the Government Department that oversees the Network! And there is this from Centrelink - 'there is anecdotal evidence that some vulnerable people are being breached...the impact of increased breaching levels has had a significant impact on the social and economic hardship experienced by disadvantaged jobseekers, according to the main welfare agencies." In short, this privatised system of welfare delivery is exhibiting signs of market failure. A liberal response to this would be for the government to step in to ensure that it meets its wider responsibility to the community (as opposed to the private job-seeker's profit motive) and creates an organisation that can help those people who are vulnerable to obtain meaningful employment. The Liberal Project Reborn In the examples I have cited tonight we have evidence of a philosophical approach to governing that panders to middle class insecurity, and is thus not universal in its concerns, and Victorian religiosity. It is not an approach to government that is consistent with the liberal project. The liberal ideal as espoused by its founders, Locke, Mill and Burke (a man mistaken for being a conservative but whose support for Irish Catholics in the 1780's marks him as a genuine liberal) and Kant, is one that believes that the humanity of the individual is an ideal that must cross all classes, religions, and systems of government. It is an approach that one finds in the English magazine, The Economist - to wit, its editorial this week on the need for democracy in the theocratic societies of the Middle East. In Australia the application of liberal principles would see a closing of the gap between rich and poor and a respect for the human rights of those who are currently the victims of a new found and corrosive orthodoxy of self-reliance. Corrosive of community in that it encourages dis-engagement from the continual fight to ensure justice for all is more than mantra. And corrosive in the sense that it does not foster understanding of the vulnerable and over-emphasises economic security and thus self-interest. Mark Latham seems to me to fall into this trap with his statement that 'politics on the fringe [the outer suburbs of Western Sydney] follows two golden rules: The Party that backs economic aspiration ahead of economic envy will most likely win; and The Party that has the longest list of excuses for people who do the wrong thing will most likely lose.' If we are to be a society that puts value in the notion of equality then this will require policies that have as their centre point a liberalism that encourages the community to value a sense of individuality, diversity and responsibility equally. This the liberalism that stems from Aristotle and is overlayed with Locke and it is the liberalism that will result in a much greater sense of community cohesion than the current narrowly-defined self-centred conservatism. Instead of trampling on an individual's humanity through locking them for years in detention centres when they have committed no crime, or crushing their self-esteem and stretched financial circumstances through the imposition of draconian fines and parking them at the need of the job-seekers' queue, we should formulate policies that provide individuals with an opportunity to be human. By this I mean, we must allow for human fragility and vulnerability. We must take the time and the care to make sure that we maximise the potential in all of us - this means spending time and resources on those who find it difficult to sustain work, or who require strong psychological support to get through each day. And it means allowing those who come to our shores seeking freedom the opportunity to share in our society quickly - particularly women and children. This is a liberalism that declares war on prejudice and poverty. It is a liberalism that encourages our Nation to embrace the world and not reject it through cuts in foreign aid, disengagement with our region or prison camps for vulnerable people who go through personal hell to experience that right that belongs to all humanity - freedom. It is a liberalism that alone can deliver socially equitable outcomes by ensuring that no one ideological obsession -be it privatisation or mutual obligation - should be applied to every policy initiative despite the fact that to do so is ripping apart social fabric. It is a liberalism that refuses to pander to powerful interest groups' insatiable demands for the community to pay more for the product of their inefficiencies - the South Australian car industry or the refusal of unions to even engage in dialogue about appropriate and sensible outsourcing or privatisation, spring to mind here. Above all, it is a liberalism that works - it is still, as Tibor Machan of Auburn University has put it, 'a promising answer to the common political problem human beings face, namely, how to live together without diminishing our individuality or the shared characteristics of the lives we forge with many others.' Thank you. Greg Barns is a former senior advisor to the Howard Government and Chair of the Australian Republican Movement. Greg was disendorsed as the Liberal Candidate for the Tasmanian State Seat of Dennison due to his vocal criticism of the Howard Government's policies on Refugees. This paper was presented to a forum organised by the NSW Fabian Society
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