Australia Seeks to ‘Manage’ the Poor While Making Them Poorer

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/09/22-0


These terrace apartments in Sydney, Australia--known as 'The Block'--are the home to many impoverished Aborigines, who now face the indignity of an Income Management program. (Torsten Blackwood/AFP)

When Mitt Romney derides the legions of Americans who are supposedly utterly dependent on government and are ruining the country's entrepreneurial spirit, we should remember that while this disdain for the poor may have a uniquely American inflection, the greed-is-good ethos flourishes in other rich nations. In the land down under, we see a mirror image of the political establishment's frontal assault on poor communities, with welfare policy acting as a cudgel for blaming the epidemic of poverty on the poor themselves.

The Australian government has been tightening its grip on welfare benefits through the Income Management program, which essentially dictates how the poor should spend their benefits. Participants may have about 50 to 70 percent their money placed under state control, reserved for essential items like food.

Like welfare reform in the United States, this is retrofitted paternalism: participants must spend the "quarantined" money using a “Basics Card” at government-approved outlets. The rationale is that too many poor people would squander money on gambling, drinking, pornography and other unproductive things when given a chance.

The program was first piloted in destitute aboriginal communities that had become notorious for cases of family crisis and child abuse. Income Management is now spreading to several new areas, according to the Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS), with enrollment based on “referral from child protection authorities” and referrals from social workers “on the grounds of ‘vulnerability.’ " The targeting of these already stigmatized groups--indigenous people, parents in troubled homes, and others deemed financially incompetent--reflects the myth that poverty is cultural and not the result of oppressive structures.