Australia has decided it will trial cashless welfare, and will restrict some purchases to welfare recipients, starting with alcohol and gambling, and ending who knows where. They're calling it Healthy Welfare and promoting it as a measure to reduce domestic abuse and child abuse, when it is in fact, inherently unhealthy and likely to entrench abuse and dependency.
Let me explain how this will work- centrelink (Australia's customer liaison for welfare, and a range of other government services) will issue an eftpos card that will limit both the amount of cash a card holder can access, but also limit the products the card holder can purchase, all while branding a person with a mark of inferiority that they MUST use for every financial transaction. every single transaction. when you get a haircut, when you buy toilet paper, you have to show your healthy welfare card to the person operating the checkout to conduct the transaction, like your very own slave brand.
A version of this 'income management" has already been trialled in Australia's remote indigenous communities, in response to the trumped up, 2007 "Little Children are Sacred" report, which alleged widespread, entrenched child abuse and led to the introduction of the Basics Card, which limited cash, purchases AND could only be used in selected retailers, all in remote communities that already faced exploitative food costs due to distance and availability. This is significant, because having seen that the public will acquiesce to restricting the rights of some groups if they believe that group is guilty of violent acts against the vulnerable, the Australian government is now hoping to expand the group of people of those whose rights are restricted, by including the unemployed, people with disabilities, single parents and eventually all welfare recipients except the aged and veterans (and I wouldn't bank on that).
The officially touted rationale behind this is an idea that welfare recipients are on a frenzy of drug and alcohol fuelled violence and gambling, that impacts negatively on women and children, and creates a dependency cycle that is financed by the tax payer, who receives nothing, or next to nothing, for their efforts. This manages to be false, unsophisticated and very convenient. Its plain wrong.
Firstly, it is wrong because it presupposes domestic violence and child abuse are more prevalent and more costly and detrimental to society if it occurs amongst people who receive welfare. Secondly, its operating from the fallacy that welfare recipients are a homogeneous group. They are not. they are all distinct individuals who do not share flaws with all others in their income bracket. Thirdly, it presupposes that lack of access to certain substances and products and activities will solve problems as complex and diverse as violent, antisocial and addictive personality traits and that an addict, for example, will cease to be an addict if they get a job. Wrong, they'll just have more money to spend on the addiction. Its not the income source that's the problem, its the addiction. Similarly, a person who assaults an intimate partner or family member doesn't suddenly learn a new method of conflict resolution when they gain employment. It's not the income source that's the problem, its the violent behaviour.
And perhaps its biggest wrong is in the mistaken idea that its tax payers money, and where that must logically lead. No one is paying tax to pay for welfare, or roads, or education. they're paying tax because they are legally obliged to do so. Its the law. Its the participation fee for being on the winning team, for participating as an individual in a system that found a purpose for you. Yes, tax paid does go into government coffers and is used to pay for services and programs. That's what governments do. They fund things. They provide things in the form of various services, institutions and infrastructure. People pay tax because the law dictates that they do, no one says you have to like it, or be enthusiastic about it, in fact, feel free to shake your fist if you like. It won't change anything, but it might help.
The general tone in the Australian public at the moment is that tax payers shouldn't have to work hard to fund dole-bludgers (and can we please start spelling that right? Dole, with an E, bludger with a D and a G) and malingerers pretending to be disabled for the mythical welfare perks, like wheelchair ramps and accessibility. Whether this is due to convenience and media manipulation or mass persecution delusion is yet to be determined.
What any individual paid in taxes and feels they received in return has no relevance to whether
all individual adults in our society should have full autonomy and agency to make decisions that they feel/think are best for them, at any given point in time. What any past group of tax payers paid and what society and infrastructure was provided for them to live out their lives in has no relevance to whether any other group should have the exact same rights as any other person or group of people in today's society, regardless of income bracket and tax paid. Get it? The tax anyone paid is not relevant to anyone's rights as a human in our society.
Whether all Australians should have the same right to autonomy is relevant, because the Healthy Welfare proposals aim to strip that autonomy by depriving a sector of the community of cash and certain products. HealthyWelfare is essentially newspeak for "you haven't paid enough tax to get drunk enough to beat up your loved ones". Ok, it's also newspeak for a lot of other things,but that one is catchy. Insert whatever you like after the "you haven't paid enough tax to..." and you should be able to see that it's plain wrong. "You haven't paid enough taxes to give your children a free education". "You haven't paid enough tax to drive that kind of car, have that kind of phone, wear your hair like that". One persons taxes do not negate another persons autonomy. If they do, then it veers into ownership. "I PAID for this so I will dictate what YOUR necessities are and exercise dominion over you". Ownership of another person is slavery.
It proves difficult for some to equate a group they are accustomed to thinking of as lazy people who refuse to work, as slaves, because slaves are almost synonymous with hard work to our way of thinking. In truth, there are many kinds of slavery, but a person who is owned, by a person or by a group of some kind, who had their agency limited and diminished by someone who "paid" for them is not free. They may not fit your concept of enslaved, but they are owned.
Income Management is really income diminishment. Prior to the 2013 election that saw the Abbott led LNP coalition take power, there was debate about whether the basic rate of newstart, or job seekers allowance for a single person, was actually sufficient to meet the necessities of life in modern Australia. Now that debate is silent and a new debate over how people who receive welfare should spend that money has arisen. There's been no significant change in the benefit paid but the consensus has changed considerably, from one that recognises the hardship of living on less than half
the average worker, to one that seeks to restrict and add to that hardship, by letting the welfare recipient know they are now "owned" by the general public, a bit like a celebrity, but with none of the wealth, fame or perks. And without agency to make the same choices as other people in our society.
When one group is denied rights, essential human rights, it is not the just the domain of warm and fuzzy do gooders, its an affront to all who hold the concept of human rights dear, and that should be every one who enjoys the benefits of human rights. Tax payers, Australian tax payers most certainly, enjoy the benefits of human rights. There's still work to be done, but the Aussie tax payer is generally one of the luckiest people in the world. They even do get more rights than the welfare recipients, without introducing new impingements on the freedoms of others, simply by having more purchasing power. They have to right to choose from a larger range of options simply because they can afford to make a choice from a border range. Less money equals less choice. More money equals more choices and more opportunities to make decisions that will have long term benefit to an individuals quality of life.
And, if agency and autonomy are paid for in taxes, and lack of payment means lack of right to autonomy and agency, surely then those that pay more taxes should have more rights than those who pay less? In which case, which rights should be stripped from the working class, the middle class, the upper middle class? If the full complement of human rights is only applicable to those who have paid the most tax, at what income bracket will other (inviolable) rights kick in? Will lower income tax brackets have to sacrifice the right to marry, the right to practise religion? The right to education?
Or will it be the less articulated right of a person to not have their throat slashed by the hungry poor for the purpose of making a healthy, rich ragout? Because no thinking person can believe that basic human rights can be taken away from only some humans, without losing that right yourself. That's how universal rights work. They're for everyone, even people we dislike or disapprove of. Anyone supporting the diminishment of some people's human rights is supporting the diminishment of their own, because they are the same human rights.
You have the right to work, you have a duty to pay tax on earnings, and you also have a right to social security that doesn't diminish your human rights.
