The Minister for Workplace Relations, Tony Abbott, has stirred considerable debate over poverty in Australia with comments he made on the ABC’s Four Corners program on Monday night. Mr Abbott was responding to suggestions that more people in Australia are living in poverty and that there is now a new class of working poor.
Taken sentence by sentence, what Mr Abbott had to say had a ring of truth about it. But taken together his comments gave the unfortunate impression that the government cannot eradicate poverty and therefore should not try.
Essentially, Mr Abbott’s view of the world is one in which individuals in poverty are to blame for their poverty; that they are the authors of their own misfortune. It is a very Dickensian of view of the world. It is a pessimistic one and one that minimises the role of government.
Mr Abbott said, “We can’t abolish poverty because poverty in part is a function of individual behaviour. We can’t stop people drinking. We can’t stop it people gambling. We can’t stop people having substance problems. We can’t stop people from making mistakes that caused them to be less well off than they might otherwise be. We cannot remove risk from society without also removing freedom and that’s the last thing that any government should do.”
Mr Abbott thought that the role of government was to put policies in place that would allow people to earn more and keep more of what they earn.
It is certainly the case that some individuals contribute to their poverty by their own behaviour. However, many people in Australia are condemned to long-term poverty because they have not had good educational opportunities. For others, it is impossible to get out of poverty because everything they earn and more is consumed by merely feeding, clothing and housing their families. A lot of the difficulties faced by the working poor have been created by government policy, particularly policies that have encouraged more casual and part-time work. As to gambling, mentioned by Mr Abbott, governments, particularly state governments, have actively encouraged gambling and allowed it to be available in more forms because it provides a tax revenue base that does not generate too much voter hostility.
On education, the federal government has given greater emphasis to private schools rather than improving the quality of education in public schools. In health, this government has poured more resources into the private sector and people on middle and high incomes rather than in the public system. Poor health goes hand-in-hand with poverty.
Much debate has raged over whether Australian society is getting more unequal and whether a greater proportion of people are in poverty. Some of that debate is quite sterile because often the definition of poverty is not an absolute one but rather a line that rises as society in general gets more affluent. Someone on the poverty line in Australia would be seen as quite well off it in many other countries. However, many studies have shown that happiness and contentedness do not increase with absolute wealth but rather increase as a person’s relative position against others in society improves. Therefore it is important for governments to aim to improve equality within society if the aim of government is to improve the sense of well-being and fulfilment of members of society.
It is here that Mr Abbott falls foul of what many people expect governments to do. He argues that in absolute terms people in the lowest income deciles are getting better off and therefore all is well. However, if those people see others improving their position at a faster rate, then they see their relative position falling. When that happens they get a sense of unfairness and even helplessness. If governments do not at least attempt to address this they are failing in their task.