http://vinnies.org.au/files/pdfs/National/SocialJustice/20080409-SJ_Inclusion-viewfrombelow

Inclusion: The view from below

Address to the 2008 ACOSS Conference Melbourne, 9th April 2008

Dr John Falzon Chief Executive Officer, St Vincent de Paul Society National Council of Australia johnf@svdpnatcl.org.au

Dr John Falzon

ACOSS Conference 9th April 2008

Last Friday was the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis. As Anne Davies reminded us in her excellent piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, Dr King was in Memphis to organise striking garbage workers.

He was also, however, focussing strategically on a big picture agenda, of which the garbage workers’ strike was a powerful example. That agenda was the persistence of poverty and its role as an oppressor of African Americans.

There are, I believe a number of salutary lessons for us to take from that moment of history in relation to this moment of history.

Firstly, King did not see a contradiction between the vision of a civil rights movement and the pressing needs of an industrial campaign. He saw the concrete relationships between areas of contiguity.

Secondly, King saw the macro in the heart of the micro and did not allow the macro to become a mere abstraction at the expense of the practical realities faced by people on the ground. He saw the issue of poverty as it was manifested in the lives of the garbage workers and their families. He saw these workers as being the human face of structural exclusion in his country.

Thirdly, he was not content with minimalist programmes that did a little window dressing. He was certainly not content with charity as an answer to the structural causes of poverty and oppression. It is no surprise that he incurred the wrath of certain ruling interests in US society when, for example, he said that: ‘the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people. And one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.’

It was the German poet, Bertolt Brecht, who penned the lines: ‘Rich man and his poorer brother Stood and looked at one another Till the poor man softly swore: ‘You’d not be rich if I weren’t poor.”’

This brutally simple thesis well describes the slide into greater inequality that provides the bedrock for exclusion.

ABS Australian Social Trends data 4102.0 demonstrated that in 2003–04 the mean weekly equivalised disposable household income for low economic

Dr John Falzon

ACOSS Conference 9th April 2008

resources households was $262, while for the same period, the mean weekly equivalised household expenditure on goods and services for low economic resources households was $309.

We have a massive problem, not only with the distribution of income and assets but also with the disproportionate impact of costs on low economic resources households. This is a problem that begs the question not of the capacity deficit of individuals but rather the structural deficits in the market and the lack of government-imposed regulatory frameworks to enable market participation by these households.

We have heard that social exclusion is the manifestation of a complex of conditions both personal and structural.

I would like to put it to you, however, that inequality is the chief condition for exclusion in a society such as ours.

Of course Brecht’s little ditty does not go anywhere near the issues of gender, race or disability.

It does, however, encompass the fundamental experience of an imbalance in power relations, here expressed in terms of money.

No matter how much we try to avoid this reality it inevitably comes back to bite us. In a society that places such a singular focus on money as the measure of all value the experience of marginalisation is also an experience of de-valuation, of being alienated from the great god who rules the heart of our society: money.

It need not be so.

We live in a society in which the value of a human being is measured by their financial ability to buy inclusion: house, car, private health, private education, support, even connectedness.

We can, however, choose domestic policy settings that would radically reverse the slide into greater inequality, thereby removing many of the pre-conditions for exclusion in general.

At present, in financial terms, we are a highly unequal society.

The gap is growing, however, not just in our bank balances, our access to housing or to education and health. There is a growing gap in our desires.

The gap can best be summed up as being between the structures that lock people out and the strategies that welcome people in.

Dr John Falzon

ACOSS Conference 9th April 2008

In other words: the clash between structures of exclusion and strategies for genuine inclusion.

I say “genuine” inclusion because it is easy to engage in a false campaign to include people only to control, coerce and exploit them. We will not accept the premise that dignity can be taken with one hand and inclusion supposedly given with the other.

Inclusion does not come from above. It is decided from below. But the legislative and economic frameworks make all the difference as to whether the choices will be there for people to take.

Social policy is whole cloth. It is naïve at best and deceitful at worst to maintain that piecemeal programmes, no matter how good in themselves, are any substitute for an over-arching strategy for genuine inclusion and empowerment.

It is also completely unconscionable for anyone to suggest that people who are on the margins of society, are to blame for their own exclusion, that somehow their choices set them apart.

The truth of the matter is that their choices, in effect, are massively constrained.

There’s not a lot of freedom in being able to choose between a rock and a hard place.

What sets them apart is the inequality of resources allocated to them by our society.

As the Canadian economist John Kenneth Galbraith put it: “They are degraded, for in the literal sense, they live outside the grades or categories which the community regards as acceptable.”

Some see a person experiencing homelessness and marginalisation and say to themselves: the system is not working.

Others, in my opinion, more astute, think to themselves: here is proof that the system is working. It is working because the forging of inequality is at its heart.

This is why we must never forget the findings of the 2004 Senate Inquiry into Poverty, especially its key recommendation to embrace a national anti-poverty strategy. The goal of social inclusion must be measured, not exclusively but especially, in terms of the objective of addressing the causes of poverty and inequality.

Neither can we forget the recent history of social policy in this country, which provided the context for the wholesale rejection of this recommendation along with the rest of the Senate report.

Dr John Falzon

ACOSS Conference 9th April 2008

In his address at the Westin Hotel in 2006 the then Prime Minister set out the five challenges facing the nation. The fifth challenge, as he saw it, was framed as being the greatest: “…that is to maintain our great national unity, our social cohesion and above all our egalitarian spirit. I am proud of what this Government has done to modernise our social welfare system and to support the weak and vulnerable in our society…. We need to find innovative ways to break the vicious cycles of poor parenting, low levels of education, unemployment and health problems that can afflict some individuals and communities. And we need to reinforce the virtuous cycles of caring families, strong learning environments, good jobs and healthy lifestyles that allow others to succeed in a competitive world. We need to find ways of restoring order to zones of chaos in some homes and communities, zones of chaos that can wreck young Australian lives.”

The “zones of chaos” metaphor is both powerful and provocative. It bespeaks the strategic assumption of a national or global order that is endangered by the exceptions to this order. I quote this to you today so that we may not forget that marginalised Australians continue to live with the fruits of this ideological reasoning. I would also put to you that, while most of us would agree with the thesis that there are postcodes of disadvantage and that this can indeed be empirically shown, we have good reason to be wary of putting all our social inclusion eggs in the spatial disadvantage basket.

I would also like to sound a critical note of warning regarding the less empirically-based thesis that disadvantaged communities are sorely lacking in social capital. It could also be argued that in many of these communities there is a very strong sense of social capital and less insularity than in many areas of relative affluence.

I am reminded of the comments of Professor Mark Peel, of Monash University, to the effect that it is capital rather than social capital that is sorely needed in communities of concentrated disadvantage, All the necessary ingredients for social inclusion are already here. What we need in order to make it a reality, however, is a massive, systematic redistribution of hope.

But to make hope concrete, rather than cheap, the people who have been denied hope need (and I thank my colleague Gavin Dufty for sharing with me the following formulation): access to services, equity in the way they are treated and adequacy of all that is essential to being able to live as participants in society, including adequate purchasing power and the means to make decisions about their future.

Now I am going to step into some dangerous territory.

Dr John Falzon

ACOSS Conference 9th April 2008

It is time for us as a sector to come to grips with some of the issues that have divided us so that we might together progress a more inclusive Inclusion agenda.

David Thompson very kindly invited me to speak last year at the Jobs Australia Conference in Adelaide on the role of nonprofits in a caring society. I put to that conference then and I put it to you now that it is time for us to be able to share an identity as hope-based organisations. It is time to discard what some see as the division between faith-based organisations and organisations that have their roots and their raison d’etre in more humanist traditions. I do not call on anyone to discard our traditions or stories. Far from it. I believe that we all need to be more faithful to our commitment to those we stand in solidarity with. This, I suggest, is the credo of key relevance to this gathering. What should unite us is the rejection of the dominant thesis that oppression and exclusion based on class, race, gender or disability is inevitable. We hold that this oppression and exclusion is not inevitable. We retain our strong sense that another kind of society is not only possible but absolutely necessary. In this sense we can claim to all be hope-based organisations.

Things became very tough for many of us under the last Federal Government.

Hatches were sometimes battened down. Many of us turned inwards in our struggle to survive, let alone stand in solidarity with marginalised people in our midst. Sometimes this led to an artificial reliance on the strength of individual organisations, an attachment to the organisation as a triumph of form over substance. For others their organisations were significantly weakened. Jobs were lost as funding was removed. Services closed down. Gags were imposed.

Competition replaced cooperation. Solutions were imposed from above, in some cases with no consultation, as in the case of the Northern Territory Intervention.

Our organisations, big and small, are important as we seek to shape a more just and compassionate Australian society. I wish to put to you, however, that we now need to reconceptualise ourselves as a movement for social change, for social transformation.

We should expect much from government. But we should also expect much from ourselves.

As Frantz Fanon, the great psychiatrist and theorist of the dehumanising effects of colonisation, put it so well: “What counts today, the question which is looming on the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity must reply to this question, or be shaken to pieces by it.�

If wealth is correctly understood here as access to appropriate housing, health, education, transport, employment, social security and wholeness I would simply

Dr John Falzon

ACOSS Conference 9th April 2008

add that, in order to achieve this, there must first be a massive redistribution of hope.

We believe that another kind of world is possible. We cannot help but listen to the whispers from the edges of society, the whispers of hope that give birth to both our anger and our courage.

Our creative mission is both personal and collective. The last word must therefore be the collective word to the wise from Lilla Watson and a group of Aboriginal activists in Queensland in the 1970s: “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.�

Dr John Falzon

ACOSS Conference 9th April 2008