[Comment Australia] Welfare stick won't beat down child poverty

From The Age

We need proper investment in jobs and services or we risk creating an angry underclass.

THE "best welfare", the fastest ticket out of poverty, is a job. This is the philosophy underpinning the Federal Government's contentious welfare-to-work legislation, the latest of its law changes to be rushed through Parliament, and it is hard to dispute as a matter of principle. Passive welfare corrodes self-esteem, discourages initiative and can entrench disadvantage. Welfare dependency is undoubtedly a major reason for why an estimated 500,000 Australian children continue to live in poverty, despite more than a decade of national prosperity. Increasing workforce participation among society's most marginalised groups — single mothers, the disabled, the long-term unemployed and older workers tossed prematurely into retirement — must be a critical component of any anti-poverty strategy. But as experience from overseas and recent research suggests, winning the war on poverty demands full-scale engagement on a number of fronts: health, education, early childhood services, housing, family support, child protection and labour market intervention. By limiting its legislative response to punitive welfare cutbacks, the Government is in danger of plunging poor Australians into even greater hardship, while a wider social and economic crisis continues to loom.

A large number of Australians risk being left behind in an increasingly globalised, information-based economy. When compared with 25 other OECD countries, nine have proportionally fewer children living in poverty than Australia. New research by the Brotherhood of St Laurence shows children from disadvantaged families continue to suffer more health problems and perform worse at school than their wealthier classmates. Children from poor households are more likely to leave school early, lack basic skills, struggle to find work and end up on welfare. Sydney University professor Tony Vinson sums up their grim predicament in describing "a biography of disadvantage that can start in the womb".

The Government intends to lift more than 100,000 people out of poverty and into work over the next four years by wielding a big stick. Under the new laws, sole parents would be shifted onto the dole and compelled to hunt for work when their children turn eight, and disability pensioners would be shifted onto the dole if capable of working 15 hours a week, as opposed to 30 hours under the old law. But even some moderates in the Government's ranks, such as former family services minister Judi Moylan who warned that the "disturbing" changes would hurt the most disadvantaged, are unconvinced by the strategy. Much is still unclear about how the legislation will operate, but any test of its efficacy surely revolves around two questions: first, whether these measures are likely to meet their goal in getting more people to work and second, if they do, will these jobs— almost certainly located in the casual, low-paid end of the market— ease families out of poverty? As to the first, The Age has already expressed some scepticism. As to the second, the experience of the United States, with its army of working poor, is a weighty counterpoint to the argument that work solves all ills.

The challenge is to help people find meaningful employment by boosting our skill pool to meet the demands of a flexible, more sophisticated job market. The challenge is also to help support struggling parents so they can raise healthy, stable and self-reliant children. In Britain, the Blair Government claims to have lifted 700,000 children out of poverty since 1999 by encouraging parents into work while also boosting the income of the poorest families and repairing depressed communities. The effort required considerable Government investment, but the British took the view that it was an investment worth making. "England's poor children aren't just someone else's children and someone else's problem," the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, said last year. "If we do not find it within ourselves to pay attention to them today, they may force us to pay attention to them as troubled adults tomorrow." For the sake of our economic and moral health, we should heed his words.