http://www.theage.com.au/news/20000827/A29338-2000Aug26.html Let's just call them leeches and be done with it By RAY CASSIN Sunday 27 August 2000 Do you remember when the public support of the disadvantaged, now ubiquitously dubbed "welfare", was called something else? It is not so long ago that the preferred term in Australia was "social security", and before that "social services". Is this because the prevailing political rhetoric has acquired some robust new quality that encourages governments to shun euphemisms in describing what they do? If it is, politicians and their advisers have suddenly begun acting completely out of character in their public utterances. A more suspicious but, I think, far more persuasive explanation for the new popularity of the Americanism "welfare" in our politics is that it is a natural accompaniment to another notion, also of American provenance, that is now much talked about: welfare dependency. Welfare dependency is a useful term for those whose political agenda is to cut the amount paid to the poor from the public purse, because we know what welfare dependency is supposed to mean. Or at least, we recognise the images it conjures up. The welfare-dependent - in which category we are now encouraged to include not only those old targets, single mothers and the long-term unemployed, but many disabled people too - are not only poor but demoralised. They are not the industrious working poor, who are supposedly too proud to live on revenues collected from their fellow citizens. They are drones, locked into a life of consuming and giving nothing back in return. For their sake and everyone else's, the agenda-setters argue, we must wean them off their dependency. We must remind them that society is based on acceptance of mutual obligations. For those pushing this agenda, "welfare" is obviously a much more amenable concept than "social security". Welfare is something that its recipients are "on", in the same way that those paradigms of dependency, the alcoholic and the heroin user, are said to be "on" alcohol or heroin. "Social security" and, even less, "social services" do not, however, have the same connotations. You can be "on" social security, in the literal sense of receiving benefits, but this usage does not carry the pejorative flavor of being "on" welfare. The reason is not mysterious: we do not talk about social-security dependency, or social-services dependency, because "social security" and "social services" are bound up with an older notion of entitlement, and an understanding of mutual obligation that goes beyond tit-for-tat reciprocity. If you speak of social security or social services, you are not hinting at beneficiaries who may be getting something for nothing, and are in danger of getting used to it. You are referring to payments made to people who, through no fault of their own, are unable to participate sufficiently in paid employment to provide for their needs. The ideal of mutual obligation underpinning a system of social security is not one of reciprocity, but of an obligation borne by all of us to contribute to the support of people who would otherwise be destitute. This ideal has not entirely vanished from the rhetoric of welfare "reformers", but it now characteristically appears in the guise of that thinnest of possible supports, the "safety net". A safety net, it will be noted, is full of holes and frays if it is not constantly maintained; and those who fall into it the wrong way sometimes crash through, anyway. Social services, that now almost forgotten plural term, calls to mind another element absent from the vocabulary of contemporary welfare reform: the recognition that there are different forms of disadvantage, requiring different remedies. The idea of a one-size-fits-all payment, as prescribed in the McClure report, tends to subsume different kinds of real disadvantage under one notional disadvantage: that of being "on" welfare, and hence of being in danger of becoming dependent. Those who use the jargon of mutual obligation too often fail to distinguish mutual obligation in the narrow sense of reciprocity from the wider sense in which the term is simply a recognition of human interdependence. Reciprocity is a relationship between buyers and sellers, that is, if you give me something I must give you something of appropriate value in return, and it is far from obvious that this properly describes the relationship between taxpayers and welfare "clients". When such effort goes into purging our moral vocabulary of non-market notions, we should not be surprised if it begins to blunt sensibilities in fields other than welfare, too. Last Wednesday, when the acting chief executive of the Australian Bankers Association, Jeff Oughton, was asked at a parliamentary inquiry whether he believed banks had social obligations, he said "No". Oh brave new world, that has such people in it. Ray Cassin is chief leader writer of The Age and The Sunday Age. [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/index.html Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
