I don’t see how we can go past the general principle of non-interference in people’s lives. I’m just as much opposed to attempts to dictate to non-Indigenous welfare recipients what they can spend their money on. There was a Commonwealth government proposal a while back which would have had ATMs bring up a notice on the screen if welfare recipients had failed to keep a Centrelink appointment. The banks quite rightly refused to participate in the data-sharing which would have enabled this to proceed. I don’t think that we can have freedom for some to go about their business as they choose and not for others. I’m not saying that there should not be obligations attached to welfare, just that these ought not to be intrusive, stigmatising or directed partially at one segment of the community based on their race.

The way forward for Indigenous affairs is the creation of genuine economic opportunities. There’s not much point going to school – Black or White – if you feel (reasonably) that nothing lies at the end of the educational journey. The Queensland government has done some good stuff here – for instance negotiating agreements with mining companies to take on Indigenous staff and apprentices in remote areas, and providing the school and technical education infrastructure to ensure these staff are properly trained. This has also involved a whole of government approach with certain Departmental CEOs being responsible for partnerships with particular Indigenous communities to cut across the dysfunctions of bureaucratic infighting and buckpassing. That’s the way forward – and involving Indigenous people themselves in determining their economic future – not any species of paternalism, however well-intentioned.

Moreover, part of the measures of which you complain includes extending the “mutual obligation” system that already applies elsewehere to Aborignial communities as well. That involves removing current racially discriminatory aspects. Trouble is, there are few “work for the dole” or training schemes in remote areas. That’s why the CDEP program has evolved in remote communities, to take the place of urban “work for the dole” schemes. But a CDEP scheme requires a whole community vote to be impelemented, and many of them work very poorly i.e. they require token attendance at best to be eligible for the fortnightly payment. For instance, the Bagot community in Darwin has a CDEP program, but you’d never know it from the state of the grounds and buildings. Most participants do SFA. They’d be much better off being forced into general community “work for the dole” or skills training schemes.

We need to take a pragmatic rather than ideaologically-driven approach (either left or right ideology cf the debate about whole language versus phoics that we’re having on another thread). What works and what doesn’t?

I agree. The evaluations I’ve seen of “work for the dole” suggest it’s much worse than the abolished Keating government programs at generating both skills and employment outcomes. One suspects it has more to do with saving money and ideology than with generating either skills or employment outcomes.

But that doesn’t mean “mutual obligation” per se is a bad idea, just that the federal government isn’t fulfilling its side of the mutuality bargain either. This is yet another area where the federal ALP could have seized the policy agenda and advanced REAL “mutual obligation” policies that would have been both popular and successful in a policy sense. But they blew it here too.

Well that’s the rub really when there is a case of total market failure and the govt has to intervene. It aint the recipients’ money just as it aint the teenagers’ money around my place. If they don’t like my rules they can get a job, move out and please themselves how they spend their hard earned. In the meantime- This paternalistic bastard rules OK!

OTOH it might be possible to arrange a system of automatic compulsory periodical payments for rent made direct from welfare benefits or the recipient’s bank account. And usually welfare recipients have free bus/train travel, don’t they? And free medical care if they can find a doctor who bulk bills. Nevertheless, there would still be some things that would require cash, so you’d need to allow recipients some limited recourse to drawing some cash each fortnight.

Paternalistic? You bet. But who says taxpayer-funded income support should be a “no strings attached” right? I don’t reckon these sorts of restrictions should apply for the first 6 months of income support, because they would be unduly restrictive on short-term unemployed people who are really trying to get retrained and re-employed. And there’s a good case for exempting recipients over 50, because they have Buckley’s chance of getting another job anyway, and are much less likely to have young kids to support. But there’s a reasonable case for imposing tighter restrictions on long term welfare recipients within prime working age bandwidth (and especially if they have young kids to support).

I wonder how long it will take Paul Watson to respond with an anti-boomer diatribe?

I have no objection to self-determined limitations on particular consumption choices – where the community has agreed, nor do I have any objection to people like Noel Pearson persuading Indigenous Australians and policy makers that his proposals are the right way to go. The difficulty now is that ATSIC (dysfunctional as it was) has not been replaced by any body capable of representing Indigenous people generally in discussions with Government. It also seems as if some Indigenous leaders have had their views misrepresented in the Cabinet submissions and the Government can now pick and choose which “Leaders” to anoint as the voice of the Indigenous community in the absence of any representative body. So ipso facto any “solution” handed down from on high in Canberra is paternalistic. Therein lies the rub.

Incidentally, there’s a similar argument about the non-separability of rights and outcomes. According Indigenous people recognition also raises cultural esteem and that has knock-on effects which are “practical”. This is one of the reasons why a country like Canada – very comparable to us in lots of ways – has achieved far far better outcomes for Indigenous people than we have – we’re also way behind the US and NZ and seemingly stuck in a 20 year rut. So there’s need for rethinking in this area, but surely that has to be based on non-discriminatory policy and the will of Indigenous people themselves.

And it’s not just taxpayers’ money that’s at issue – if I do some work for the Government I can spend the remuneration however I choose. I suppose you’d say I’ve worked for it, but the same principle applies to people in receipt of parenting payments and various other forms of middle class welfare.

And incidentally, at least in Queensland, there is no concession on transport costs for unemployed people – and since the Government now requires people to look for a job within 90 minutes’ travelling time of their home, this can be a huge cost.

Unlike other commenters on this thread I suspect, I’ve lived on unemployment benefits at a number of stages in my life – the equivalent these days of $220 a week. Try feeding, clothing and housing yourself on that. And I used to go and have a beer at the local sometimes when on the dole and make absolutely no apology!

What is the source of this right? Certainly not the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (to which Australia is a signatory). The closest it comes is Article 9, which provides a right of “everyone to social security, including social insurance”. But it doesn’t include any additional right along the lines of “to spend however they see fit without interference or conditions or obligations of any type”.

If you have a look at the Beveridge Report, the Nugget Coombs White Paper and the other policy documents which founded the modern welfare state, you’ll see that there is a presumption that all citizens have equal rights to social benefits in case of adversity. This – and things like FDR’s “Economic Bill of Rights” – were the context for the reference in the ICESCR to which you refer.

Find me a specific legal provision which gives you and I the right to spend our salaries as we choose. It’s just a general aspect of life in a free society. You want to restrict it to people who’ve “worked for it” – so your argument appears identical in its logic to observa’s ruminations above.

I’m certainly being deliberately provocative, and some of the propositions I’m putting are troubling to me too. But they’re seriously advanced, at least in the sense that I think it’s a debate that needs to take place, and there shouldn’t be taboos on calling a spade a spade.

Leaving aside any provisions in ILO covenants that may have been enacted in Australian domestic law (not really my area), I guess there would be nothing to prevent a particular employer from paying his workers in coupons only redeemable at the company store for particular types of goods. In fact that used to happen in the bad old days. But I suspect an employer who offered such terms today wouldn’t get too many takers.

In a sense, the position of welfare recipients is no different. If taxpayers (the “employers”) decide to impose conditions on how the income support they’re offering can be spent, then potential recipients are free to decline the offer and find some other way to support themselves if they wish.

The real question is whether the restriction on welfare recipients’ liberty that such a system would involve is politically acceptable having regard to the magnitude of any current social harm it would remedy i.e. it’s a utilitarian calculation. In the case of many bush Aboriginal communities, I have no doubt that the practical benefits that would accrue would be immense, whereas the benefits in some other areas may be more dubious. OTO having worked with welfare families in Sydney for some years, the sorts of endemic irresponsibility we see in Aboriginal communities are equally common there; it’s just that those families aren’t quite so obviously concentrated in discrete communities, so the behaviour isn’t so blatantly obvious.

I think where we differ is that I don’t see social security benefits as being akin to the employment relationship.

I certainly think that social security policy needs a radical overhaul – training programmes need to have meaningful outcomes – and the evidence of churning and the structure of incentives in the privatised employment services market cries out for action. The biggest issue IMHO is the massive structural disincentives built into both the tax system and the rate at which benefits are reduced or cut-out for people to regain contact with the labour market.

I’m glad to see you acknowledge that these sorts of social pathologies are not restricted to Indigenous communities. It seems to me – not conceding your general point – that there would be practical obstacles in making the distinction that would be needed in order to target some welfare recipients. You suggest a time limit and an age limit. Both would be very broadbrush and would not capture for instance people who have been employed for a short time only to revert to effective long term unemployment. The way that eligibility for training is determined at the moment discourages a real effort to get people in that category back into regular work. It seems to me that your suggestions really imply some sort of distinction between deserving and undeserving poor. That’s in the system at the moment in a different way – and the complexity of the regulations and their discretionary application lead to innumerable tribunal appeals and ombudsmen complaints.

I personally like the concept of a guarenteed minimum income – pitched below the minimum wage – but above the current level of unemployment benefit. If this were consistent for all (disability pensioners, aged pensioners, unemployed people etc) one could abolish the entire Centrelink bureaucracy and free up funds for meaningful labour market programmes and save us all money.

Somewhat heretically, I personally am not in the slightest bit troubled if people don’t want to work – which is consistent with my notion of personal freedom. I do think that in the interests of equity and productivity, those that choose not to should only be entitled to an income that allows them to live in what Justice Higgins famously called “frugal comfort”. If someone wants to write poetry in return for benefits, that doesn’t bother me, but it also doesn’t bother me if they want to spend all day surfing. In practice, most people find work and/or self-responsibility meaningful without compulsion.

In response to your most recent comment, Ken, I don’t discount the number of families in the sort of circumstances you describe. Again, I don’t know that forcing people to be “responsible” works that well. One has to build in incentives as well as disincentives. It seems to me that the sort of problems you describe are exacerbated by the division of labour between family services, education and welfare bureaucracies. Although I suspect the solutions to child poverty and neglect are structural and long term rather than easily remediable by short term changes to welfare policy, I don’t pretend to have the answers. If ever there’s a situation crying out for a more coordinated approach between departments and State and Commonwealth governments, this is it. My analogy above with whole of government and regionalised approaches to Indigenous policy holds here, I think.

I don’t have a problem with the concept of a guaranteed minimum income that’s well below the minimum wage but provides a basic frugal living amount. What I do have a problem with is providing that sort of payment with no strings attached to people who have parental obligations, and paying it at a rate that assumes they’re going to spend it on supporting their kids, only to see them spend it on themselves while their kids go hungry and get sick. So maybe we should be talking about imposing the sort of regime I’m proposing only on recipients of family support payments and non-custodial parents on welfare benefits.

I don’t think that your “Nanny State”