KCP - Catholic Diocese of Broome

A recent proposal from the Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs to compulsorily sequester a portion of welfare payments to eligible parents for use in meeting bills for children’s education and other needs has many welfare bodies scratching their heads. I find it rather ironic that a Government so opposed to so called ‘passive welfare’ and committed to ‘mutual obligation’ through ‘shared responsibility agreements’ is now retreating to a welfare dependency model where the Government will decide without consultation what things welfare entitlements will be spent on. I have not seen (at the time of writing this article) any practical framework to suggest how this will actually work.

The proposal raises several issues and incorporates several assumptions that need to be challenged; and many have been by various welfare bodies around Australia:
• What factual basis is there in the assumption that not havingenough money to care properly for children is due to poor management from parents?
• What does the Government propose to do about the neglected children of middle and high income earners? Will the same policy apply?
• What evidence is there that welfare recipients cannot manage to budget for themselves and their children? Maybe there is simply not enough assistance for people who find themselves in this situation?
• What proportion of welfare recipients is actually neglecting children?
• How will the Government identify them?
• Will this ‘deduction’ apply to all welfare recipients? If not, does this not seem to be a rather discriminatory application of the regulations?
• What proportion of welfare entitlements will actually be ‘left over’ after the Government takes out a portion for food, clothing and education for dependent children? How will the level of deduction actually be arrived at? Will it be the same no matter where you live?

The whole idea seems to be idealogically driven and smacks of a ‘punishing the victim’ outlook towards those unfortunate and desperate enough to be in need of and entitled to society’s assistance in the first place. There are undoubtedly children who are neglected, from all sectors and strata of our society. There ought to be, and are, other means of dealing with this problem. This further proposal from the Minister does not appear to me to be a just and reasonable way to deal with these issues. Perhaps we need to apply more of our common wealth, sitting idle in our Treasury accounts as massive surpluses, to addressing the reasons why people, even some of those who are employed, find themselves unable to manage to attain a reasonable standard of living for themselves and their families in a modern and thriving economy such as ours.

When proposals like this and the so-called Smart Card are raised seemingly out of the blue, one could be forgiven for wondering what matters of real significance are going on in the background from which the Government wants our attention distracted.