Labor would rather service misery than solve it

Malcolm Turnbull and his mates are cuddling up to One Nation and attacking poor people, thundered senator Doug Cameron.

“They are shovelling $65 billion out to the big end of town and screwing ordinary working families in this country,” he told the Senate last week, indignation rising like steam

Not for the first time, it was hard to reconcile the senator’s hyperbolic rhetoric with the prudent and pragmatic legislation under debate.

Christian Porter’s welfare reform bill will make welfare simpler to claim, cheaper to administer and harder to rort. It simplifies a welfare system so complicated no one fully understands it, not the bureaucrats charged with administering it, the minister or, one presumes, the good senator ­himself.

It also insists that recipients ­adhere to obligations, such as staying off the funny fags, for example, or other psychoactive substances that would render them useless or dangerous employees.

Labor, blinded by sentimentality, reckons it is unreasonable to make junkies accountable for the illegal substances they consume, inhale or inject. We must listen to the experts, they tell us; drugs are not something one chooses to take or from which one can choose to abstain. They are, says Labor’s Sharon Claydon, “complex public health problems, and they require a public health policy response”.

Drug addiction is “a medical issue that needs to be tackled properly in a medical way”, agreed her colleague Amanda Rishworth.

Framing drug-taking as a disease over which the user — sorry, victim — has no control is an intellectual delusion common among progressives. Drug takers can’t be blamed; their condition is biologically, neurologically, genetically and environmentally determined. Like the punks in West Side Story seeking Officer Krupke’s forbearance, they are sociologically sick and psychologically disturbed.

Gee, Officer Krupke, we’re very upset;
We never had the love that every child oughta get.
We ain’t no delinquents,
We’re misunderstood.

Deep down inside us there is good!

Dole junkies have been added to the growing list of victims by progressive MPs who are forever on the lookout for new outlets for their compassion.

Drug use cannot be stopped “by punishing those who are caught up in this illness”, Anne Aly informed the house. It was a job, she said, for “the treatment sector”.

It is a measure of the growth in the availability of state-funded assistance for the drug-addled that we can talk of “the treatment sector” with a straight face. This quasi-medical, quasi-sociological, quasi-psychological industry barely existed a quarter of a century ago. Today it turns over hundreds of millions a year of our money.

The treatment sector, as one would expect, is opposed to drug tests and anything else that encourages drug users to kick their habit. Its business model requires customers to remain hopeless and helpless. Let’s not confuse these poor people by suggesting they could do something to help themselves. Fighting drug addiction is a job for the experts.

The treatment sector’s track record is woeful, of course. The proportion of Australians who admit to using psychoactive substances — about 15 per cent — is the same as it was a decade ago. The social impact of drug use has grown with the spread of methamphetamines.

Please don’t suggest that drug treatment strategy is failing, however. It is simply underfunded. More money is needed to relieve pressure on an already overstretched system, to make mollycoddling more widely available, introduce frontline victim ser­vices, and so it goes. We’ve heard it all before.

The success of some of the more diligent charities in relieving the distress of some addicts by providing food, accommodation and counselling should not lead us to imagine the problem is being solved.

The pathologisation of misfortune is widespread in the caring industry.

It leads to a philosophy, practice and business strategy focused on servicing misery rather than ending it. It delivers short-term comfort at the expense of long-term resilience, dignity and empowerment.

The susceptibility of successive governments to fall for the welfare industry’s spin has increased the country’s welfare budget by billions of dollars.

Too much of it has been channelled into servicing misery rather than ending it through rehabilitation and empowerment. A welfare habit, like a drug habit, is much harder to crack once we succumb to the argument that biology, genetics or society is to blame for personal misfortune.

The poor have been casually re-categorised as the vulnerable. Vulnerability, unlike poverty, is never self-created; it is never the result of making poor choices and cannot be corrected by making good ones; vulnerability is simply visited upon you.

Compassion for the vulnerable has played havoc with public finances. In 2007 when John Howard left office the state and federal welfare bill was equivalent to 29.3 per cent of tax collected; under the Rudd and Gillard governments it increased to 35 per cent, even before the introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

The Coalition’s ability to reduce the growth in welfare spending with little if any help from welfare professionals is nothing short of remarkable. Jobseeker support payments increased by 10.3 per cent in real terms between 2007-8 and 2013-14. The growth has been slowed to 1.3 per cent. Income support for carers increased by 10.9 per cent under Labor; the growth has been slowed by the Coalition to 3.9 per cent.

Most impressive of all is the reduction in the number of people on the Disability Support Pension, a welfare payment given to people assumed to be incapable of work. The number of DSP recipients has fallen by almost 10 per cent from 830,000 in June 2014 to 758,900 in June this year.

DSP payments increased by 6.9 per cent a year in real terms under Labor; under the Coalition they have been falling by an average of 2.3 per cent a year.

The soft-headed notion of compassion has become so embedded in civic conversation that the Turnbull government is nervous about trumpeting these achievements, fearing it may be accused of stealing from the poor.

The truth is the unconditional commitment to welfare under Labor robbed recipients of a resource much more important than money.

By outsourcing responsibility for their future to the treatment sector, it robs them of dignity and the power to control their lives for better or worse.

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.