It would've been the end of 1976, the weather was warm enough for me to be wearing a summer nightie, and my mum hadn't cut my hair off yet. That came in the great nit plague of 1977. I was chewing on the bobbles attached to the elastic holding my plaits, and sitting next to speaker, attached by thin wires to the turntable playing Abba. I loved watching that record go round and round, and near the speaker, the arguing from the kitchen lost some of its power to seep into every crack of the house like a poisonous fog. That argument was the first time I heard the term "dole bludger". My dad and Brother 2 were going at it again. They were too alike to coexist peaceably.
"Lazy, good for nothing! You'll never be anything but a dole bludger", roared Dad contemptuously. He had a debilitating stutter, but when he roared there were was no tripping over pesky consonants, no laborious delay in getting his words out. Then he could spit them like darts with a marksmans accuracy. It was 1976. I was 6 that year, brother 2 turned 16 in the December and would've still been recovering from breaking his leg when he was hit by a car getting off the school bus one afternoon about eighteen months earlier. Months in traction. They put him in the adult ward because he was a strapping young man, with guys just back from Vietnam, who'd seen things and suffered things. He was just starting out in the world, and his own family had already written him off. He was going to be a lazy, good-for-nothing dole bludger his whole life, they'd tell anyone who asked after him, and they had raised him better than that. My dad had that Protestant work ethic down pat. They were good, church going, middle class white folk. They never swore, smoked or drank alcohol. Dad paid his taxes and took the family to a nice motel with a swimming pool every summer holidays.
I remember it so well, because the tension had me staring at that record, going round and round, while dad roared and Brother 2 lacked the preservation skills to say and do what was necessary to end it, until bedtime, and when I got up the following morning, Brother 2 was gone. He never lived at home for any period of length again. Dad had left, presumably for work, where else would he be with his good Protestant work ethic? And mum was sitting at the table, very still and strange to even my child's eyes. If you're easily triggered by tales of violence, you may want to skip the next paragraph.
I got myself ready for school, putting on my sneakers. Red, with white smiley faces on the toes. I'd been wearing them for weeks. I loved them. The smiley faces. My mum saw them, and she saw red. With no smiley faces. She waved a note at me, screeching about uniform, and where were my shoes? I didn't know where my school shoes were. I was six. My school shoes were hard leather that hurt my feet and they were black and dull. Not like my red, smiley sneakers. Long and horrible story short, her anger devolved my kind mother into someone I only ever glimpsed on one other occasion. She yelled the same things at me that dad had yelled at Brother 2, without the term bludger. And then she put her hands around my throat and choked and shook me. I'm a fast learner. You don't want to be a lazy good for nothing with the wrong shoes. I didn't wear sneakers again til last year. I get what happened now. Adult me can recognise the pressure she was under. Husband vs son- she was the loser either way. Child me went to school and didn't tell anyone. Who would help a lazy child with the wrong shoes?
Brother 2, forever known as a dole bludger, held many jobs, had many adventures and travelled the world. Trotted over more of the globe than any of his siblings. His status as dole bludger never changed. Not matter what job he had, he was too lazy to work. They'd see what he was really like soon, we'd tell ourselves, and then he'd be unemployed again, and then we could say we were right all along. He was always a lazy, good for nothing dole bludger who would never amount to anything due to basic flaws in his character that he must've chosen, because they can't have been genetic or environmental, because we were good, church going, middle class white people, and he was raised better than that. He is on Disability Support Pension now. Injured his back carrying a fridge down a flight of stairs. Lives with constant pain, though it improved after surgery. Brother 1 snorted that it was terribly convenient, Brother 3 declared it to be typical Brother 2 behaviour and older Sister sighed and told us wisely that we all knew the ways of Brother 2. He was a bludger. Always was. Always will be. Only took us forty years of telling him that, forty years of prejudice, of belittling, demeaning abuse, and we made it come true.
By the time I was a teen, you could see an episode of A Country Practise, guest starring a very young Nicole Kidman as a young unemployed girl suffering malnutrition while living with a group of similarly unemployed young people. They're all shown the error of their ways by Dr Terrence Eliot. The episode was called Repairing The Damage. It was 1984, and unemployed youngster who just had to try harder and they'd be wildly successful (just like Nicole Kidman) was an established trope on Australian television screens.
While this was unfolding on our televisions, in our newspapers, and in our homes, sociologists were busy collecting data on the negative outcomes of the unemployed, and their predominantly female counterpart seen to be worthy of even more wrath, the single parent. Mike Willesee, and later his brother Terry Willesee, Derryn Hinch, Ray Martin, Tracey Grimshaw and their radio counterparts, John Laws, Mike Carlton etc etc all made a healthy living, and a percentage of that has been made sledging the dole bludger. It's the shock jocks and talking heads equivalent of a house speciality.
They put on their most serious and concerned faces and plead with the viewers to think of the children. Think of the children, or they'll grow up to be good for nothing, dole bludgers. Just like their parents. The reports all focused on and celebrated the negative.
The children they were asking us to think of weren't kept in hermetically sealed bubbles. They were right there in the lounge rooms, with the television screens and radios, and nowadays computer screens. With the newspaper headlines. They were in the schools, staffed by middle class professional people, who taught them about how poverty was the big evil in the world. The children learned they were disadvantaged, possibly by their parents poor decision making, by luck of the draw, by a change in circumstances, a hundred different reasons. They learned they were "at risk" in a way the children of the middle class were not.
They studied a million ways to improve the outcomes of those in poverty. The poor should study. They should get jobs. They should settle for less and work their way up. They should keep their legs shut and not keep popping out sprogs for the tax payer to support. Won't someone think of the children? The children who have been told since they learned to read that unemployment and poverty are bad. While they live with parents that struggle to find work in a floundering economy? Dole bludgers. Can't even keep those kids under control. The same kids who are being taught by those screens, those headlines, and subtly in school that their parents are lazy, good for nothing dole bludgers. If we want those on welfare to take responsibility for themselves, we have to take responsibility for our substantial part in their disadvantage.
Welfare recipients live below the poverty line. That is the most substantial contributor to their disadvantage. This is indisputable. Any flaws found in individuals dependent on welfare can also be found in waged, employed individuals, at every level of income. It's the lack of resources necessary to function at optimum levels that drives every aspect of their disadvantage. And yet studies point to everything from childhood abuse to education levels as being more relevant to outcomes than 40 years of welfare bashing in conjunction with living on less than half the average wage. 40 years. The term dole bludger entered our vernacular in 1976. The payment we call the dole hasn't increased in real terms since the 90s, but just lately, the propaganda has.
There's a reason for that. Welfare dependency data is released next week, along with the $96mill Try, Test, Learn fund. DSP recipients, carers and single parents are the most likely to experience extended periods of welfare dependency, and ftherefore most likely to experience entrenched disadvantage. If you are not on welfare, you do not feel their disadvantage. Their disadvantage is not causing you pain, suffering or financial hardship. It's causing them those things. You are not poor because they are welfare dependent. They are poor because they have no recourse other than below poverty line welfare payments. Any money troubles you have are not caused by the poor needing welfare.
I'm sorry, Australia, but we really have gotten this equation backwards. We affect the disadvantaged a lot more than they affect us. When the headline reads "dole bludger", or anything to do with welfare, the public violently vomits anger and threats all over social media. Those dependent on welfare see the same headline and they feel fear. Fear of further deprivation, fear of being cut off, fear of homelessness. Cold, stark fear, they're right to be fearful. There are more people depending on welfare payments to survive than there are jobs available, and that is no fault of the welfare dependent. They aren't making policy. They aren't even influencing policy. They are powerless.
The relationship between Australia and the welfare dependent is an abusive relationship, and the poor are the victims. We restrict their income, institute ever more punitive systems that don't get them off welfare and all the time, they're being told that they're useless, that no one wants them, that they lack education and skills, they're sluts, they're violent, they're on drugs, they're breeding like animals, that they're parasites who don't contribute and owe us, and we will decide when their slate is wiped clean. They shouldn't be drinking, smoking or having sex that could lead to more kids. They should get up at dawn and waste the time of business owners by knocking on their doors and asking if they have any work, experience or not, and they should do that until dark, when they should watch the news on a big, old fat screen tv and then fall into an exhausted, but miserable sleep on a mattress on the floor and then arise at dawn to repeat the useless process again. We don't even really care if they get a job or not, we just want them to do this to show they WANT a job, which is more important than actually having one in this relationship.
We've been doing this now for forty years. It's accepted that abuse, mistreatment and poor self esteem can greatly contribute to whether or not an individual lives a prosperous and happy life, or one flooded with disadvantage, but we won't take any responsibility for participating in forty years of abusive treatment of the most disadvantaged. We don't even recognise that it could be a factor. Australia doesn't care about the welfare of those who receive Centrelink benefits because we are so convinced that someone doesn't deserve it. For forty years we've aired messages dripping in prejudice, we've kept millions of Australians at below poverty line rates and called them every name under the sun while blaming them for the country's woes. And for forty years, its been achieving nothing but further disadvantage.
Australia, it's time for us to shut up about those relying on welfare, because we have all played our part. There needs to be an instant shut down of negative reporting of welfare statistics, mostly because it's the right thing to do, but also because we are never going to have reliable data about welfare dependency and outcomes unless we study the matter without the influence of prejudice and a media machine to drive it. If you want to do something about welfare dependence in Australia, shut up. We haven't actually tried that yet.
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