We are all in danger, we cannot depend on a fractured society or a fragmented economy to deliver collective healing and health.
We are all in danger.
But some of us are in more danger than others: physically, mentally, socially, economically. Not only from the virus itself but from some of the social and political responses to it.
From First Nations people experiencing homelessness being issued with move-on notices to asylum seekers in detention, from frontline health workers to frontline retail workers, from casuals and contractors to visa holders, Covid-19, while imposing a common danger upon all of us, heightens the pre-existing contrasts in society, forcing us to focus on the glaring structural inequalities upon which our economy is built.
The danger we are all in, and the unequal distribution of this danger, means that the ideological fixation on “going it alone” has been blown out of the water. The common danger, and the hyper-danger for some of us within it, poses a singular social question, a social question so all-encompassing that it resonates with the plethora of personal questions each of us has.
How do we protect ourselves as a society? We cannot depend on a
fractured society or a fragmented economy to deliver collective healing
and health. Or jobs. Or sustainability. Or social morale.But some of us are in more danger than others: physically, mentally, socially, economically. Not only from the virus itself but from some of the social and political responses to it.
From First Nations people experiencing homelessness being issued with move-on notices to asylum seekers in detention, from frontline health workers to frontline retail workers, from casuals and contractors to visa holders, Covid-19, while imposing a common danger upon all of us, heightens the pre-existing contrasts in society, forcing us to focus on the glaring structural inequalities upon which our economy is built.
The danger we are all in, and the unequal distribution of this danger, means that the ideological fixation on “going it alone” has been blown out of the water. The common danger, and the hyper-danger for some of us within it, poses a singular social question, a social question so all-encompassing that it resonates with the plethora of personal questions each of us has.
We also know that the bushfire crisis, since it is a symptom of the climate emergency, has not gone away. It is, to use the prime minister’s favoured concept, in hibernation.
The Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz has recently written:
"... the first priority is to restore our balance: provide more funding for the public sector, especially for those parts of it that are designed to protect against the multitude of risks that a complex society faces, and to fund the advances in science and higher-quality education, on which our future prosperity depends … Even as we emerge from this crisis, we should be aware that some other crisis surely lurks around the corner. We can’t predict what the next one will look like – other than it will look different from the last."
Alongside strengthening the social security system and expanding the wage subsidy to include casuals and visa holders the commonwealth government needs to expand the public sector.
Not only to create jobs but to protect the community. We need, as a massive structural augmentation, a significantly enhanced and expanded public sector. I’m not just talking about an expansion of infrastructure and staffing levels; we need to re-imagine the public sphere, expanding our view of its role in building a common future based on the common good, a view that has been displaced by the false construct of austerity coupled with the ideology of “the market knows (and does everything) best”.
I write this at a time when the government has shamefully allowed the austerity impulse to kick in vis a vis the public sector, imposing an economically irrational and socially harmful wage freeze on public sector workers.
It is not my intention to provide a comprehensive list of infrastructure projects. Because we need a robust, participatory and transparent process by which this is determined (as opposed to the sports rorts model!), rationally mapped out on the basis of current and projected social and economic need.
This is work that must begin now. The first priority should be the provision of a significant social and economic infrastructure investment to First Nations communities, the shape of which, and this cannot be emphasised too strongly, should be determined by those communities. As Lorena Allam points out: “Crowding in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities occurs at around three times the rate of the non-Indigenous population, with over 115,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander households living in overcrowded homes nationwide.”
We need a massive injection of public resources into the construction of public housing. The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute has estimated that, facing a shortfall of 433,000 social housing dwellings, we need to triple our stock of social housing by 2036. If we fail to meet this housing need we are looking down the barrel of a worsening homelessness and housing stress crisis.
Bad for the economy. Disastrous for people’s lives.
Other obvious and urgent areas of expansion include Services Australia (building on the government’s recently announced boost to Centrelink staff, whilst cognisant of the staffing cuts since 2013 and the ridiculous capping of the APS to 2006-07 staffing levels or below) and the public health system (physical infrastructure and staffing levels, including community health and aged and community care).
Also, the progressive replacement of the jobactive network with a fit-for-purpose commonwealth employment service, a good opportunity to scrape such barnacles as the hyper-exploitative PaTH, the dead-end work-for-the-dole, the inherently racist Community Development Program and the punitive ParentsNext.
The centrepiece of reconstruction should be a social guarantee, with full employment at its heart. The Curtin government’s 1945 white paper on full employment saw an expanded public sector as a means not only of creating jobs but of building social and economic infrastructure.
The times demand a 21st century vision akin to this. A vision that recognises and properly remunerates the heavily gendered work of caring, that values the role of arts workers in the public sphere, that treats broadband as essential infrastructure (and, given that it is right now the only highway we get anywhere on, removes the bloody tolls and ditches the digital divide!).
We should address the obscene levels of casualisation and precarity, invest in community infrastructure, social services, disability services. We should have a vision with an actual industry policy that embraces the opportunities of a post-carbon economy, a vision that enables and encourages equitable access to higher education and that values and boosts research and innovation instead of lazily leaving it to a private sector that cannot be expected to fill the strategic role that government has so spectacularly abrogated.
Although, as the economist Mariana Mazzucato points out, this abrogation is exactly what has been expected of governments according to the neoliberal framework conjured up by narrow interests: “Since the 1980s, governments have been told to take a back seat and let business steer and create wealth, intervening only for the purpose of fixing problems when they arise.”
We have a right to expect more from government. We have a right to expect government to do what markets cannot, namely, achieve collectively what we cannot achieve alone: social and economic protection for all of us.
A social guarantee encompasses all that makes people feel human and valued as members of a society. It means no one missing out on the essentials of life: a place to live, a place to work (and decent income support for those who cannot), a place to learn, a place to heal. It means, for example, an overhaul of education funding so that public schools and the education workforce are properly invested in, rather than being allowed to languish in fulfilment of the ideological fantasy that giving more to already well-resourced private schools is somehow equitable. As for Tafe, successive governments have allowed this national treasure to be denuded in the false interests of competition. It is time to right this wrong.
The days of outsourcing the work of the public sector to labour hire companies and big consultancy firms must end.
The days of using our social security system to harm and harass people through vicious policies such as robodebt, instead of helping them, must end.
The days of running down the CSIRO and such research centres as the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre must end.
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu defines neoliberalism as “a program for destroying collective structures which may impede the pure market logic”.
It is this ideology that has been responsible for the piecemeal dismantling of the public sphere.
It is reality itself that now calls for an historic shift.
• Dr John Falzon is senior fellow, inequality and social justice at Per Capita. He is a sociologist, poet and social justice advocate and was national CEO of the St Vincent de Paul Society in Australia from 2006 to 2018
No comments:
Post a Comment