Compassionate conservatism for welfare 'bludgers'

Third, despite the existence of services such as Job Services Australia and the Disability Employment Assistance Services, it is far from clear that there is an adequate level of support available to help people with disabilities find jobs and mentor them while in employment. A HREOC National Inquiry into Employment and Disability in 2006 noted that, although “most people with disability want to work if they have the capacity to do so … we cannot expect high participation rates if people with disability have work-related expenses that are higher than their potential wages or they cannot access the supports they need”. A “tightening” of the criteria for access to the disability pension would increase the existing need for serious investment in encouragement of flexible workplaces and programs to help people find and stay in employment.

More broadly, there are problems with the prevalent view, integral to Abbott’s rhetoric, that employment necessarily imbues people with self-esteem and a sense of purpose and enables them to lead meaningful lives. Such a claim might hold true for skilled workers, including educated professionals such as politicians. For those at the other end of the Australian job market, the prospects are less alluring. The writer Anne Manne, a trenchant critic of “the Get to Work neo-liberal program”, cited her own experiences of “dismal jobs”, including a stint as a jillaroo, in her 2008 Quarterly Essay “Love and Money: the Family and the Free Market”. Manne challenged the view that paid work was inherently fulfilling, noting “when my university teachers talked of the liberation of work, they did not mean domestic help in rural New South Wales”, but rather - like Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique - “prestige work”.

Self-evidently, prestige work is not available to all. Many workplaces are not flexible enough to cater for the needs of people with disabilities. Further, there will always be jobs that no one wants to do; such roles are filled by the people relegated to being the “leftovers” of the modern economy. In her 2005 Griffith Review essay “Decades of Panic”, law professor Rosemary Hunter traced shifts within the Australian labour market and their effects on family disputes, noting that the 1990s had seen a “rise of precarious, low-quality employment”. Hunter suggested that “Australia’s current low unemployment rate … does not signal economic prosperity, but rather the rise of the working poor, and the phenomenon of labour market churning, whereby people move constantly between unemployment and poorly-paid, casual and part-time jobs, which they must accept as a condition of continued support when they are again unemployed”. The superiority of such a life over one on the disability pension is not immediately obvious.

Currently, families make up the shortfall in support for people with disabilities: this kind of informal care is characterised by feminist economist Nancy Folbre as the “invisible heart” that combines with the “invisible hand” of the market to render our society functional. Reliance on the family, however, is not sustainable. It’s time for a real debate about how people on government benefits can be supported in leading meaningful lives, including assistance securing employment where appropriate. The seductive language of dignity, choice and productivity employed by Abbott is unlikely to assist such a debate.