Christian Porter’s aim is to empower through dignity of work

Illustration: Sturt Krygsman

We are facing a “growing employment crisis”, or so they tell us, in which “millions are condemned to life below the poverty line through no fault of their own”.

That’s the world according to the welfare peddlers who, not for the first time, are struggling to tell the truth. The number of Australian registered as unemployed last month was 713,000 and falling. How many of them are blameless for their own predicament? Who can say?

Hyperbole, victimology and B-grade prose is what we’ve come to expect from the welfare sector. Far more troubling is its refusal to ­acknowledge the damage its poisonous product is doing to the vulnerable people it is allegedly supposed to help.

To put it in a language the Left may understand, the science is in on this one. Welfare is the new ­tobacco; it can have short-term therapeutic benefits (much underestimated, incidentally, in the case of cigarettes) but its long-term ­effects are pernicious.

It eats away at self-esteem, damages physical and spiritual health, and becomes an addiction that some find ­impossible to kick. Welfare’s secondary effects ­damage the educational prospects of children and boosts the likelihood that they will become recipients themselves.

The first duty of any provider of welfare therefore should be to wean their customers off it. So it comes as a shock to discover that the Australian Council of ­Social Service — the peak body for ­do-gooders — wants to make this poisonous substance easier to obtain.

In a joint communique with the ACTU and a bunch of other self-interested groups, including the oxymoronically named Australian Unemployed Workers Union, ACOSS criticises the government’s “punitive” policy, claiming it has “led to the criminalisation of poor Australians”.

Abolish work for the dole, they demand. Increase the jobless benefit! Abolish mandatory ­income management! Loosen eligibility requirements for Disability Support Pension!

Their naivety might have been forgivable in the days when welfare was commonly seen as ­benign. Today it seems as reckless as screening a TV ad featuring a bloke on a horse inviting you to join him in Marlboro country.

Last week, in one of the most important National Press Club addresses for some time, Social Services Minister Christian Porter questioned the morality of ever more generous handouts.

“There is nothing morally ­superior about welfare structures that are passively allocating money in a way that corrodes the recipient’s chances of experiencing the meaning, the engagement and the purpose that work brings into our lives,” he said.

The speech repudiated any ­notion that the Turnbull government lacks ambition. Porter has set the government the task of ­reversing 50 years or more of ­accumulated policy mistakes. It is a task so big that it will not be achieved in one term of parliament; indeed, it would be pushing it to finish it in five.

Should he succeed, however, Porter’s legacy — and that of Scott Morrison, his predecessor in Tony Abbott’s government — will be the most significant social and economic reform of his generation. But let’s not get ahead ourselves. Porter, as he indicated in his speech, must first win a culture war fought on two fronts.

On his left flank are the ideological defenders of welfarism and a Labor Party in the pocket of Big Welfare. Its unionised workforce contributed millions of dollars to Labor’s election campaign and provided an army of ground campaigners wearing T-shirts bearing a variety of glib slogans protesting the meanness of the Coalition.

On his right is an ideological force that believes it can fix ­poverty and the budget in one fell swoop by taking welfare off the table. They fall back on selective quotes from Milton Friedman to buttress their small government assumptions. Porter’s ­proposals may look good in practice but how will they work in theory?

The fault-line in this dogmatic dispute runs deep in the Liberal Party which, in unguarded ­moments, still thinks of itself as divided between wets and dries.

Like the Whigs and Tories of an earlier age, the imported ­nomenclature trips awkwardly off the Australian political tongue. Was Malcolm Fraser more “dry” as prime minister than the opposition leader Bill Hayden? Discuss.

Fortunately for the country, the free market, supply-side economic principles advocated by Friedman triumphed with bipartisan support. The benefits — as much social as economic — ­deliv­ered 30 years of shared ­prosperity.

Economic freedom, it turns out, is the most effective poverty prevention scheme yet devised.

Porter, however, has no intention of revisiting the sterile ­debates of the 1980s about the reasonable dimensions of government. The Liberal Party’s purpose on earth extends beyond the task of cleaning up the fiscal disasters of its opponents. The party’s aim, according to its founder, Robert Men­zies, is the growth of prosperity and justice, both measures of the quality of human existence rather than the state of the nat­ional account figures.

Porter’s rhetoric is carefully calculated, mindful that trust can be needlessly lost in a sector dominated by the sensitive Left. ­Abbott’s revival of Menzies’ distinction between “lifters and leaners”, for example, proved enough to invoke a panic attack.

Porter’s reforms will be driven not by cost but by value. Feel-good programs are out; the simple ­measure for Porter is the extent to which lives are improved by ­increasing self-reliance across time. It is an approach that can be ­applied beyond the welfare portfolio, reinvigorating the tired ­debate between the proponents of big government on one side of the dispatch box and its detractors on the other.

It’s not the size of government that matters but the pernicious tendency of bureaucracy to suppress individual freedom.

Yes, the cost of the welfare budget is overwhelming, the equivalent of 80c in every dollar raised in income tax. The greatest moral imperative, however, is to remove the pernicious effects of a system that strips dignity, discourages and disempowers, a system that robs citizens of what Menzies defined as an essential freedom: “the freedom to seek and obtain greater reward for doing more”.

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.