Welfare, US-style: put the boot in the poor http://www.theage.com.au/news/20000910/A56177-2000Sep9.html By LIZ PORTER Sunday 10 September 2000 Americans visiting Australia are forever remarking on how much at home they feel here. And why shouldn't they? We watch their TV shows, we sing their music, we imitate their accents and we pepper our conversation with TV-learned phrases like "Excuse me?" (where we used to say "I beg your pardon"). Meanwhile, we wear our baseball caps back-to-front and our sportspeople "high five" each other at the slightest suggestion of an on-field triumph. "And why not?" some might say. After all, the Americans are pretty good at self-congratulation and high fives are efficient and demonstrative. Moreover, Americans make great TV sitcoms. Why are we aiming to emulate the Scrooge-like way in which the United States funds its welfare policy? We surely cannot believe that the world capital of inequality has anything to teach us about the way we should treat our welfare recipients. Yet the whole of this year's debate about the direction of Australian social-welfare policy has taken place in an American context. Our new welfare policy, as framed in the recently released McClure report, has the fingerprints of one US "expert" all over it. He is New York University's Lawrence Mead, whose July visit to Australia was co-funded by the Federal Government. Professor Mead is best known for having been a major influence on the 1996 US welfare reforms that limit an individual's right to welfare to a lifetime total of five years; and which impose work rules on single parents once their children reach a certain age. The conservative academic is also the author of The New Paternalism: Supervisory Approaches to Poverty, in which he describes his policies as an effort "to control the lifestyle of the poor" and to favor "order rather than justice". Needless to say, Professor Mead, when he was here, praised the McClure report. And he got many column centimetres of newspaper space in which he expressed his arguments for compulsory work in exchange for benefits. A senior Federal Government public servant had previously travelled to New York to visit Mead and bring back the welfare-cutting gospel to the Ministries of Employment Services and Workplace Relations. Then, with the Mead visit to a Sydney conference, we all got to hear the flinty-hearted American view at firsthand. And that was it for the welfare debate as far as the general public was concerned. I know I'm not the only Australian voter who would have welcomed a wide-ranging national discussion on welfare, one that might rise above "blame the victim" demonisation of single mothers and other alleged long-term "welfare dependent" people. Imagine, for example, a debate that actually examined the policies of leading welfare states such as Norway, Denmark and Sweden, countries that pay their unemployed a dignified pension while striving for high rates of employment. A debate that would ask questions about the social function of taxation. A debate with a genuine worldwide perspective. How many Australians know, for example, that in Norway dole payments are 66 per cent of an average worker's income, while in Sweden they are 72 per cent? (In Australia, they are 33 per cent). Of course, these countries pay higher taxes and their social conditions are different from ours. But so are America's. And there are still many lessons for Australia in Scandinavian economies. There is an abundance of material making comparisons of various welfare states, much of it written by the reigning world expert on the subject, Gosta Esping-Andersen, now professor of political science at the University of Trento. Esping-Andersen, a former Harvard professor and author of The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990) and Social Foundations of Post-industrial Economies (1999) has a huge international reputation, although in Australia his fame doesn't seem to extend past university social-research departments. Esping-Andersen questions the oft-made argument that the welfare state is no longer workable because of insufficient money to fund it, pointing out that the GNP of rich countries has risen 45 per cent since the mid '70s. He warns of the "disturbing rise (in the US) in jobs that pay below poverty wages" and points out that the level of many social benefits has followed suit, producing unprecedented levels of poverty. Moreover, he emphasises the historical role of the welfare state as "a political project of nation-building" and an exercise in the fostering of social integration. And, most significantly, in these hard-hearted economic rationalist times, he maintains a moral perspective, reminding his readers that "the only credible rationale behind economic efficiency is that it will produce welfare". Australians deserve to hear more complex views on welfare than Senator Jocelyn Newman's divisive rhetoric about "welfare dependency". Esping-Andersen's work seems to be the perfect place to start. [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Archived at http://www.cat.org.au/lists/leftlink/ Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
