Why should workers be the only ones drug tested?

THOSE opposed to drug testing for welfare recipients generally don’t have neighbours with car chassis and shopping trolleys in their front yard, writes David Penberthy.

OVER my 25 years in journalism I spent a fair amount of time as a young reporter covering various murders, bashings and disappearances in the seamier parts of town, and a lot of time as a political reporter talking to voters in housing estates in the more put-upon parts of our major cities.

Having grown up in a suburb that was replete with public housing, it strikes me that the ambivalence of uni-educated small-l liberals about the question of welfare fraud is not shared by hardworking blue-collar people.

Working people have an intense resentment for those who survive courtesy of the taxpayer on what used to be called “sit-down” money. Understandably so.

Unlike the soft-handed professional class who, through superior wealth have the luxury of not having to live near yahoos with car chassis and shopping trolleys in their front yards, hardworking, lower-paid Aussies resent the fact that the intergenerational welfare-dependent family over the road earns almost as much as they do through child support, rent assistance, the dole and the disability support pension — despite no evidence any of them has ever looked for a job.

Those opposed to the drug testing of welfare recipients generally don’t live next door to houses with car bodies and old mattresses in the yard.

There is a certain type of house in Australia that you don’t even need to enter to know what the occupants do for a living. That is, they do nothing.

You know this because the first thing that hits you when the front door eventually opens is the sickly, stale smell of bong water wafting its way down the passage.

It’s a smell you recognise in an instant, especially if you happened to grow up in Adelaide in the heady days of the 1980s when the cultivation of 12 cannabis plants was hilariously regarded by the law as a modest quantity for personal use.

I have no issue with the old baby boomer who likes the odd toke while listening to Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn, but in its daily and constant form, there is no doubt that dope is the handmaiden of the idle. It strips you of enthusiasm and curiosity and energy and interest, making an entire day spent on the couch seem a compelling proposition.

I know that the welfare lobby disputes the existence of such a person as the pot-smoking dole bludger, claiming it to be a cliche or fabrication, but anyone who lives (and, more importantly, works) in the vicinity of these lazy, drug-addled folks would beg to differ.

Especially as their hard-earned tax dollars are underwriting the nonproductive existence of these bludgers.

Logan, south of Brisbane, has been chosen as one of the three trial locations for the Federal Government’s drug testing pilot. (Pic: Dave Hunt)

The Federal Government has announced plans to compel 5000 dole recipients at three different locations around Australia to take part in a pilot scheme where they will undergo drug tests in order to keep their benefits. Anyone who refuses to take part will be stripped of the dole. If you are caught smoking pot or taking amphetamines, you don’t get kicked off the dole.

Rather, you will be placed on a cashless welfare card, as per the trial in regional Western Australia and South Australia where, instead of being handed a cheque every fortnight so you can go and score, you will only be able to buy the essentials such as food that you should be spending your money on anyway.

Even if you are caught a second time, you won’t be automatically kicked off the dole, but may be sent into a drug-treatment program.

Predictably enough, the proposal has been howled down by the welfare lobby as a fascist assault on human dignity. I don’t understand this line of thinking at all. I thought one of the chief tenets of Marxism went to the need to create meaningful labour.

These days there is a stream of thinking on the Left that has substituted the dignity of work with the apparent dignity of welfare, even if that lifestyle involves using public money to get stoned to the bejesus every day while watching Dr Phil.

The greatest hypocrisy in all this is that there are now hundreds of thousands of Australians who face the prospect of being drug-tested and alcohol-tested already. We call those people “workers”.

It is now commonplace to be subjected to tests on a regular basis in the course of your job. One of my good mates has a small truck company and does deliveries all over town.

Whenever we have a session on the beer and bourbon, he is at pains to pull up stumps by 10pm, lest he fail a test the following morning when he is required to have a blood-alcohol level of zero.

There is every chance that, as you read this, you will be clocking on tomorrow for your job in manufacturing, or heading off on a small plane at sparrows to some remote town to work week-on, week-off in a mine, knowing that you run the risk of being swabbed for meth and heroin, booze and weed.

It is a great example of the divide between the lifters and the leaners, that the more blinkered welfare advocates baulk at the suggestion that the unemployed should ever be tested.

This means the only people in the land who run the risk of being checked for drugs are those who pay their taxes, are gainfully employed, and through their generosity underwrite the existence of those with no intention of working at all.