The Australian psyche is replete with chilling contradictions. Its selective historic memory, its fraying veneer of justice, landscapes quenched by the broken bargain of a fair go and the triumph of avarice.
There are many others, not least the haunting parallel etched in the dirge of despair experienced by many robodebt victims and the tale of the starving swagman camped by the billabong we so admire in our unofficial Australian anthem “Waltzing Matilda”.
Both in their own way paint a decidedly bleak portrait of people who, for want of a better phrase, were down on their luck, their needs inseparable from the circumstances in which they find themselves. Individuals who, when confronted with the full might of the state on the one hand and the powerlessness of their condition on the other, were overcome with terminal anguish.
And yet in Banjo Paterson’s swagman we ultimately assign not hopelessness but the sentimental dignity of the underdog, hearing in his cri de cœur — “You’ll never catch me alive” — the irreverential spirit of egalitarianism to which our national narrative identifies.
In the typical robodebt victim, by contrast, we see and hear nothing of the kind, preferring to confine most of our frustrations with the scandal to its bureaucratic failures, not its inhumanity. Rather than being something which speaks to the shattered myth of Australian egalitarianism, the scheme’s calculated assault on the disadvantaged is, from this vantage point, instead reduced to yet another embarrassing aberration of the Coalition era.
“Why is [robodebt] not a bigger scandal, even now?” wrote columnist and academic Waleed Aly in The Sydney Morning Herald last week: “Robodebt is less scandalous than it should be, because its underlying logic is not alien to us. It offends in degree more than essence.”
Any long gaze in the mirror, in other words, reflects a nation that is predisposed to despise most welfare recipients, preferring to see their condition in life as somehow born of choice rather than unfairness, misfortune or the lottery of birth. It’s for this reason it’s neither the “welfare crackdown” itself nor its targets which now inspires some to retrospectively stare at their shoes; it’s purely the unlawful manner in which it was executed.
All of which suggests a thorny question: how did we, as a nation, arrive at a juncture where the underlying failure of robodebt is considered more official — in the sense of bureaucratic incompetence, lies and malfeasance — rather than morally reprehensible?
One view, given expression by former deputy secretary of the Social Services Department Serena Wilson, is that it’s something which owes entirely to the smallness of politics exemplified by the former Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government.
“[The former government] had a strong view of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor,” she said in a supplementary written submission to the royal commission a few weeks ago.
“At times, social security was regarded as a drag on the budget and the economy. Other than for age pensioners and carers, it was rarely accepted as an entitlement for people who could not otherwise support themselves and needed assistance to address challenges and barriers to employment.”
There are, however, at least two problems with using Wilson’s perspective as an explanation, the first being that it overlooks the reality that it has long been — and remains — a matter of bipartisan consensus to force the unemployed to subsist below the poverty line in a life devoid of dignity. Far from being the measured minimum required to buy plausible deniability of government indifference, the JobSeeker payment — at just $50 a day for a single person — is bipartisan indifference.
The other point is it pays no heed to the ingrained inequities fostered by our distorted tax system, which, much like the tax system that prevails in America, is one unarguably predicated on welfare for the rich.
In recent decades, governments have deliberately tied their electoral success to tax policies that discriminate in favour of high-income earners through a raft of property, superannuation and housing concessions. From franking credits, which cost taxpayers $17 billion a year, to negative gearing and capital gains discounts, forecast to exceed $157 billion over the next decade, complex tax rules for trusts and superannuation perks, the latter of which drains the public purse by some $51 billion a year, the weight of welfare for the rich is immense.
Indeed, it’s a tax system that perversely allows an executive earning $100,000 to pay no tax or just a fraction of the tax rate of a gardener moving from JobSeeker to a $31,000 job and, among other things, one that sees a person with $1.6 million in their super account validly receive an average tax break of $60,000 — nearly three times the value of a single pension. Such inequities are in turn compounded by the destruction of our progressive income tax system, as foreshadowed by the legislated stage three tax cuts, which also favours high-income earners to a tune of more than $250 billion over 10 years.
Raising JobSeeker to $88 a day in line with the Henderson poverty line, by contrast, carries an estimated price tag of about $12 billion per year, with that cost falling annually as recipients gain employment.
Yet anyone with the temerity to say as much or point out the need for reform quickly stands accused of fomenting class war or the politics of class envy — as the unedifying hysteria around the very modest changes flagged to superannuation and franking credits in recent weeks bears out.
In truth, it’s impossible to deny that handouts to the wealthy — even in the best of times — are economically wasteful and ethically dubious. This is especially so in circumstances when the 3 million and counting Australians living below the poverty line are told to tighten their belts because, so the government claims, there’s nothing left to support them.
It’s in this way that the government’s decision to maintain the status quo is tantamount to the path of least resistance — the coward’s way — without even a veneer of morality left.
The ideas and imagery of Australia, in other words, face existential challenges. We’re a country where an unshakeable sense of entitlement pervades the rich, where seemingly every manifestation of fairness is under assault, and where the yawning chasm between the wealthy and the poor is shrugged off as the natural order of things.
None of this denies the force carried by “Waltzing Matilda” in modern Australia. It merely shows the allegiance of most Australians, and the government, lies not with the broke swagman but, unapologetically, with the wealthy squatter instead.
