David Penberthy: Tough luck if you don’t like it, dole bludgers are real
This week, Sunrise presenter Natalie Barr was brutally shamed after using the term ‘dole bludger’ on air. But whether Australia’s sensitive souls want to accept it or not is moot — dole bludgers are alive and well, writes David Penberthy.
The term dole bludger is a harsh and brutal one.
It is a uniquely Australian form of words demonising those who can work, but choose not to.
It is often used indiscriminately and unfairly to make generalised slurs against anyone who draws some kind of unemployment benefit, even though they might dearly love to find a job, and might be trying to do so.
But the term dole bludger is also used, 100 per cent correctly, to describe the sizeable number of Australians who truly deserve this unpleasant title for the simple reason that they couldn’t work in an iron lung.
The perfectly decent Channel 7 presenter Natalie Barr made the fatal journalistic error recently of confusing ideological denunciations from trendies on Twitter with the mainstream sentiments of suburban viewers who watch her on the hugely popular Sunrise show.
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Barr, no doubt because she’s a nice person who lacks the appetite for an all-in social media brawl with every bleeding heart in Australia, folded the tent very quickly when she was upbraided over Seven’s use of the term “dole bludger” in a story on welfare fraud.
“DOLE BLUDGERS SHAMED: 78 per cent of Newstart recipients have had their payments suspended”, read the headline on the screen, a grab of which was posted on Seven’s official Twitter account, with poor old Barr’s head right next to it.
As a result, Barr herself became the focus of the angry mob, which was whipped up at first via some public tut-tutting from the ABC’s Juanita Phillips.
“These days I often find myself asking ‘Is this who we’ve really become?” Then I read something like the @sunrise7 tweet and realise: yes. Yes it is.” Phillips wrote.
Pretty quickly Natalie Barr was having a full-blown attack of the vapours, and issued her own apology on-air and also on Twitter.
“We made a mistake today Juanita. We’re sorry for it. I’ve apologised. It shouldn’t have happened, Nat.”
It was a graceful climb-down, and one which would consign the term “dole bludger” to the dust bin of history.
Anyway, here’s an interesting story that ran in The Australian this week under the headline “Samoans replace Cowra’s job snobs.”
“Some mornings Peter Brown is so desperate to find workers for his NSW regional abattoir that he’ll drive around town at 6am looking for casual employees.”
Mr Brown, general manager of Cowra Meat Processors, said he advertised for local workers but most didn’t want to do more than two days a week so as to maintain their dole benefits. The company he runs is the biggest employer in Cowra, in the state’s Central West, with 180 to 200 workers, but he is constantly under pressure for staff and sometimes works on the floor himself to make up numbers.
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“We had a good base of locals, older blokes,” Mr Brown told The Australian.
“But over time they got older and retired, and when relying on younger blokes, you can’t fill the jobs for this sort of work.”
For Mr Brown, the answer lies thousands of kilometres away in the South Pacific.
He recently brought in his first seven workers from Samoa under the federal government’s Pacific Labour Scheme, in which they can work for three years and are then expected to return with a view to taking their skills with them.
Mr Brown said his seven Samoan men, who earn the same award wages as his Australian employees, were excellent, reliable workers, clean living, God-fearing, and all play rugby union for a local side.”
Now, what’s the term you would use to describe these unemployed locals who would rather keep the dole than get their hands dirty like these hardworking Samoan men? Maybe there is a nice inoffensive descriptor we can coin to describe them.
Occupationally challenged?
Workplace selective?
Lifestyle focused?
The best term we’ve got already exists.
It is dole bludgers.
There are plenty of places in Australian where youth unemployment is way above the national average for a couple of reasons, one being the limited availability of jobs, the second being that a lot of young people simply turn their noses up at the idea of what work is on offer, especially if it’s hard work.
In my hometown of Adelaide, much of the heavy-lifting in the annual grape harvest is done by overseas backpackers, in both the Barossa Valley and McLaren Vale, right on the doorstep of the highest concentrations of unemployed young white Australians in the poorer northern and southern suburbs.
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The backdrop to the debate Natalie Barr innocently waltzed into is, of course, the discussion around whether the Newstart allowance should be increased.
Despite all I have written above, I am of the view that Newstart is no longer enough to live on, not enough to find a job on, and that it’s been so long since it went up that it should definitely be increased.
My view is informed by being a South Australian, and seeing how many decent mature-aged workers have been forced out of the old manufacturing economy, especially the car industry, leaving them with no choice but to draw benefits as they try to find work in the struggling new economy.
The trouble is, an indiscriminate across the board increase in Newstart would be a free payday for every bludger in Cowra, or anywhere else, who lives in fear of doing any paid work when there’s bongs to be smoked and balls to be scratched.
Raise Newstart, sure. But don’t raise it for the shirkers who abhor hard work, who refuse to move from their preferred coastal or rural setting to a place where there’s more jobs. And we should drop all the left-right nonsense around this discussion, too.
The logical reality of the progressive position on every dole recipient — bludgers included — is that low-income blue-collar workers should be enlisted through the tax system to prop up the lifestyles of those who don’t want to work at all.
That doesn’t seem very socialist to me.