Internal Exile
Speech at Politics in the Pub Sydney, 3rd April 2009
Dr John Falzon Chief Executive Officer St Vincent de Paul Society National Council johnf@svdpnatcl.org.au
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I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners and custodians of this land, the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation. I salute the courage of this People past, present and future as they continue to struggle against the poisonous fruits of colonisation and internal exile. The German poet Bertolt Brecht lived through Hitler’s rise to power. He usually referred to Hitler in code as “the housepainter”. Brecht, of course, was driven into exile and continued to write powerfully from that lonely position. One of the poems he wrote in this period was called “Bad time for poetry”: “Inside me contend Delight at the apple tree in blossom And horror at the housepainter’s speeches. But only the second Drives me to my desk.” I have been asked to speak tonight on poverty and inequality in Australia. Why then, you might ask, am I quoting a poem written at a time when fascism was on the rise. I have three reasons. Firstly, because, even though I would not analyse the current conditions as being akin to that period, I will say that we are confronting across the globe a powerful force that is hell-bent on the destruction of the poor and marginalised. The current economic crisis is not the cause of this. The cause of this is the dominance of a system that puts people last. Secondly, because the condition of exile is a strong description of what it is like for people who are left out or pushed out in Australia and the world today. Sometimes this manifests itself in the global patterns of forced migration. It is also evident, albeit, less obviously, in what I call the “internal exile” that people are forced into; people who are unemployed, people with mental illnesses, people who are pushed into homelessness, people who are left in areas of concentrated disadvantage with few or inadequate services only to be blamed for their own marginalisation. I will return to this theme in greater detail. Thirdly, because, and I know that this will resonate with you who have come here tonight, it is precisely the concrete analysis of concrete conditions, without embellishment and without denial or neglect that drives us to action. Ours is not an aloof academic interest in poverty and exclusion. Brecht was driven to his desk. All of us here are driven to our feet to stand in solidarity with our marginalised sisters and brothers. We might specifically be driven to our desks or to the meeting table or even to the streets. But never are we driven to our knees! Economic insecurity did not begin late last year. Of course, there was always, during the time of economic growth, an unspoken assumption that most of the people who were really doing it tough had somehow brought this on themselves. How easy it was to imagine that they did not belong to our world, that their world was different. As if they were from another planet. Let me share with you a few things about this planet, our planet and economic insecurity.
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For one thing it’s worth noting that we’ve got most things upside down. According to the ILO, for example, we learn that women do ⅔ of the world’s work, receive 5% of the world’s income and own 1% of the world’s assets. Economic insecurity, far from being manufactured at the household level, whether in highly industrialized Australia or Sub-Saharan Africa, is a constant for those who are essentially disempowered economically. This disempowerment is as much a product of history as it is of economic and social structures. The economic insecurity of your average low-income Australian household, for example, is characterized especially by such realities as a housing market that cannot provide housing to the people, and a labour market that cannot provide income security, especially if you are a woman, if you are a sole parent with young children, if you have been denied access to reasonable educational opportunities, if you suffer from physical or mental health difficulties, if you have a disability, if you are Indigenous, if you are a refugee, if you have been made redundant and you do not have the requisite skills-set to make a transition to another line of work, especially if you over 40, and so the list goes on. I remember some years ago learning a difficult but beautiful lesson about life. I was working as a researcher with a civil society organisation here in Sydney. There I was invited to attend a meeting of recovering drug addicts who were also parents. They were working on a book together. This was a way of telling their stories. I am a firm believer in the healing power of stories, the transformative power of stories. Well, their stories certainly transformed me. They described the ways in which they had taken drugs in front of their young children, the pain they had inflicted on their children and themselves, their stories of making enough money to survive, feeding their children and supporting their habits. Some of these parents described the difficulties of balancing family and work while working in the sex industry or in other areas of the fringe economy. The words that have remained with me in the strongest way, however, are the words of a young Aboriginal woman, describing her experiences of incarceration. She told me, quietly but firmly: “The cells are a sad place, brother. You don’t get to sleep in the cells.” The thing that struck me between the eyes from this woman’s deeply poetic utterance was contained in one word. It was the word, “brother”. She bestowed this title on me through no merit of my own. I did nothing to prove any real kinship with her. Nor could I possibly claim to know what her experiences were like. It is true that I listened to her with an open heart but how could I count this as being anything particularly special or unique? And yet she addressed me as her brother. When she did this she did something very powerful. She took me into the cells with her. She showed me how sad they were. She took me into her internal exile. She could no longer be someone whose life is alien to mine. She belonged to the same world as me. I belonged to her world, the world of the jail cells, the world where her sadness was the sadness of the world.
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We do belong to the same world; the world of exile, the world of the margins, is actually here in the heart of everything that is happening. Our challenge is to make other things happen. Our struggle is to turn these things upside down, as Oscar Romero once put it. Our challenge is to assert a logic in which the marginalized take precedence over the powerful. I will always remember the advice given to me by a mentor many years ago regarding the struggle for social change. It was very simple advice. It went like this: “You’ve gotta work with what you’ve got.” This may sound like a weak, dispirited response to the hard edges of political reality. I have never taken it to be that. Rather, I read it as a very Australian crystallization of the observations made by Chilean sociologist, Marta Harnecker, who wrote: “The art of politics is: to create forces to be able do in the future what we cannot do today.” We have entered a period in which we, as a nation in the global context, are being given the opportunity to re-think what it means to be a society. We are being challenged to re-think what it means to build a society based on the common good. We are being challenged to think differently about the purpose of prosperity and the value of people. Nothing demeans people more than being left on the scrap-heap, neither included in the present nor empowered to take control of their future. Such is the reality of poverty and social exclusion. Such is the life of the internal exile. A time of crisis is also a time of change. The massive change is just as certain as the crisis. Rather than being overtaken by change, let’s be part of the change we dream of. Let us use this time to push not just for adjustments and bandaids but for a genuine re-positioning of the social instead of continuing to give primacy to the private. We are in the mess we are in because the strong sense of the social has been shafted in favour of a dogmatic attachment to the private. Moves to give greater dominance to for-profit companies in areas of essential service delivery such as job-finding for example, are certainly not the answer. As Sally McManus from the ASU rightly pointed out: "It would be bizarre if the federal Government actually created unemployment through its review of employment support services." The risk has been shifted onto the shoulders of ordinary people, whether they are currently inside or outside the labour market. We still have in Australia a system of protection for people in relation to both the housing market and the labour market. It has to be said, however, that the public housing system is extremely run down. The recent announcement of infrastructure spending on 20,000 new units of public and community housing was welcome indeed, but the reality is that across Australia we are faced with a waiting list in excess of 200,000. A recent report from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare shows that less than half of families in need were provided with public housing within three months of application, with some waiting two years or more.
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As for what used to be termed the “social security” system we now have a situation where the payments are generally considered inadequate, the compliance regimes are primarily punitive and the notion that charity should be relied on has become an accepted default. For the drug-using parents that I referred to earlier the only policy response that has recently been wheeled out and championed by both sides of politics is the completely inadequate tactic of threatening the parents with welfare quarantining. Similarly, payment suspension has been wheeled out as a catch-all tactic to deal with the parents of children who are not attending school. Both of these issues are extremely serious. Neither is well-served by such blunt policy tools. As Larissa Behrendt and Irene Fisher spelled out in The Sydney Morning Herald this week: “Since compulsory income management of welfare payments began in the region in late 2007, there have been documented instances when it affected people's capacity to buy food. This included diabetics, who with no local store access were unable to access food for weeks at a time. Their response to this situation was to sleep until food became available. “Income management has not reduced alcohol or drug consumption - indeed, alcohol restrictions on prescribed communities has merely shifted the problems to larger towns or bush camps. And it has not stopped "humbug" or the conversion of Basic Card purchases into cash for grog. There is also no evidence that it has increased the consumption of fresh food among Aboriginal families, which is vital to fighting anaemia. “...there are still striking similarities between the practical approaches of the former government and the present. “Nowhere is that clearer than the continuation of the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act, the right to appeal to the Social Security Appeals Tribunal and the right to seek redress under the Northern Territory anti-discrimination legislation. “The suspension of the right to seek redress have left those people subject to welfare quarantining with no avenues of complaint if they feel unfairly treated. And there are more reasons to be concerned about continuation of the intervention without reflection on what is working and what is not.” Punitive policy tools, the weapons of the new paternalism, can never be the bearers of social inclusion! Social inclusion does not come from above. It is created from below. Social Inclusion is not well-served by bonus payments and pension increases that capture some and leave others out. Social inclusion is served when governments do what markets cannot. In Australia, the past decade has seen a 50% increase in the number of people imprisoned at the same time as a 30% decrease in the amount of Federal Funding for social housing. The countries where there is the greatest rate of imprisonment are also the countries with the greatest level of inequality. The United States of America leads the world as the most extreme incarcerator of its own citizens, with 1% of its adult population behind bars. If you count the
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people under community supervision or on probation, the total rises to 7 million, or 3.1% of the adult population. It is impossible to look at the issue of housing and homelessness without analysing the patterns of incarceration. Philip Mangano, executive director of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness , said this week in Sydney that US studies showed half those coming through the front door of homelessness services had just emerged from foster care, mental health care, incarceration and even military service. He said that addressing homelessness improved once homeless people were consulted as part of the process, which only began happening in the US five years ago. "They don't ask for a pill, a program or a protocol. They ask for one thing first - they ask for a place, a place to live," he said. "When you ask what they might further want, about 70 per cent say they want a job. If we can keep our focus on those two things, we have a clear path forward." "The single most important factor to beat homelessness is the political will of the leaders," he said. "You can do all the planning in the world - but plans will just end up on a shelf covered in dust if there's no political will behind them..." My friends, I want to state here for the record that I am sick and tired of hearing, even from my own sector, that homelessness is a largely a reflection of individual incapacity; that people experiencing homelessness are primarily in that situation because they have a capacity deficit; because they need to learn the skills to cope with the complex world. Sure, we all need to learn more about the complex world. The capacity deficit, however, is clearly a deficit in our social system. This is where we should look first if we are serious about tackling the structural causes of poverty and inequality. And we should be listening to the people who are most oppressed by these structures. I would like to take you back a little to the 2004 Senate Inquiry into poverty and financial hardship. This process provided Australia with evidence that another kind of world is not only possible but absolutely essential. It provided a space in which people experiencing exclusion could tell their stories, eg: ‘Like millions of other low-income Australians, I am one of the hidden poor, just keeping afloat. We are flat out treading water out here. We are making very little headway towards our aspirations, and we are one crisis or catastrophe away from the poor box. We are living on the edge. ‘We live in the shadows of the dismal statistics. We are not mad, bad, sad or totally dysfunctionally overwhelmed by our life circumstances. Many of us are highly skilled and well educated. We are all doing what we can to contribute to society with the resources we have. Our poverty is poverty of resources, services, opportunities... it is getting too hard to make ends meet, let alone work towards our dreams.’i Going back even further, the 1975 Commission of Inquiry into Povertyii noted that:
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‘If poverty is seen as a result of structural inequality within society, any serious attempt to eliminate poverty must seek to change those conditions which produce it.’ Australia stands near the bottom of the list of relative social expenditures in comparison with countries in the European Union. Of the 27 EU countries assessed over 2004-06 all but one (Greece) invested a higher proportion of GDP in social expenditure than Australia. The EU25 average (23.4%) was almost twice that of Australia.iii It is time for us to put our money where our mouth is. To conceptualise the time of crisis as a time for creative social change is to make the best use of all that is favourable to social justice. During the period of prosperity we saw the dismantling of social protections along with the attempted destruction of the strong sense of the collective. Now is the time to reassert our interconnectedness; that strong sense of unity in a common cause; to see ourselves as part of a progressive movement for social change. In the words of the poem, “Unity” by Pablo Neruda: “I am surrounded by just one thing, a single movement.” The greatest power for progressive social change lies precisely with the excluded. The people who can best define and interpret the reality of exclusion and socio-economic insecurity are also potentially the only ones who can, in the end, determine the means towards, and the ends of, social inclusion. As Brecht put it so well, “the compassion of the oppressed for the oppressed is indispensable. It is the world’s one hope.”
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M. Clarke in Community Affairs References Committee, A hand up not a hand out: Renewing the fight against poverty, Report on poverty and financial hardship, 2004, p.9. ii Commission of Inquiry into Poverty, First Main Report: Poverty in Australia, AGPS, Canberra, 1975, p.viii. iii Source: OECD Social Expenditure
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