Muddled welfare debate

According to Human Services Minister Alan Tudge, more than 400,000 unemployed people receiving Newstart Allowance are not subject to any work-related mutual obligations to be actively looking for a job. And, besides, only 4% of those who breach their obligations receive a penalty.

Tudge argued this showed that the problem of long-term unemployment was due to the “poverty of low expectations” engrained in the welfare system.

The other — less PC explanation — is that the welfare system is actually too generous.

The unemployed can live relatively well on the dole in combination with the multitude of supplementary benefits available; it is not worth getting a job which in all likelihood will only marginally increase their income relative to the effort involved.

A welfare system that lets loafers stay on the dole is deeply immoral: it’s especially unfair to those who do the right thing and work in low-paid occupations.

Yet the debate about the welfare system is often muddled because we fail to make moral judgements about who is and isn’t deserving.

The former head of the Abbott Government’s Commission of Audit, businessman Tony Shepherd, recently argued the problem is bigger than “surfing dole bludgers”; the “inconvenient truth” is that Australia is a “nation of mendicants” because “half the population gets some form of Commonwealth handout.”

Yet it is absurd to draw moral equivalence between loafers and working families receiving family tax benefits.

In the first place, horizontal equity is as real as vertical equity, and there are good social reasons for families with dependent children to have higher household incomes than the childless (such as myself).

In the second place, labelling family payments as welfare dependence akin to dole-bludging is NOT the way to sell the message of budget repair.

Telling people who are struggling to pay off mortgages, afford child care, and juggle work and family in our congested major cities that they are not entitled to a portion of their taxes back to help raise their kids will win few converts to the cause of smaller government in middle Australia.