“Those people”
Speech to the Escaping Poverty Open Forum
UWS, Parramatta 12th November, 2008
Dr John Falzon Chief Executive Officer St Vincent de Paul Society National Council of Australia johnf@svdpnatcl.org.au
I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners and custodians of this country, the Darug People. Colonisation and dispossession have been, and continue to be, the carriers of unthinkable pain. But they have not blotted out the spirit of hope. There are places all over Australia where the country is calling out to us, where the old people of the country are calling out to us, where the hidden histories are calling out to us... that another kind of world is possible. I am a proud graduate of UWS and a proud son of Sydney’s Outer-Western suburbs, having grown up and gone to school in the Blacktown area. Growing up in Blacktown, especially as a migrant, I came face to face with some of the prejudices against “those people” who live out west. Upon encountering people from some of the more affluent parts of Sydney we were often given a look that moved between sympathy to outright fear or hostility because we had emerged from the dangerous zones. At UWS, in the late nineties I recall a Student Union organiser telling me of her encounter with a Senior Federal Ministerial Adviser. She was, unsurprisingly, advocating for better funding for UWS. The Adviser responded, quite frankly I think, if not brazenly, by informing her that this would be a waste of precious education resources since “those people out there aren’t interested in sending their children to university”. I have entitled this speech “Those People” in remembrance of his informative incident. While I was working on my doctoral thesis as a student at this university, in 1996, I recall sitting on the front porch of our flat in Liverpool. I was taking a break from writing, having a quiet smoke. A woman and a man walked past; the man a few steps ahead of the woman, yelling: “I know people. I’ve been to the factory where they’re made.” Running inside I wrote this down. Then all but chased after the guy to thank him. Oh, happy theft! His insight crystallized much of what I was working on: “The factory where they’re made.” Or unmade. 2
I thought of the people I knew, starting with my own old man, who had been unmade in the factory. In my dad’s case it was cancer from carcinogenic solvents he was required to use in testing road materials for Boral down the road from here at Prospect. How many stories have I heard since then? People made and pulled apart by social and economic structures that de-humanize, that compartmentalize, that destroy, that humiliate, that blame. 1987 was the year I read Frantz Fanon for the first time. It was Frantz Fanon, the great psychiatrist and theorist of the dehumanising effects of colonisation, who reminded us nearly 50 years ago: “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.” Humanity is yet to answer this question. Inhumanity, however, has offered an abundance of replies. And we have been shaken to pieces by this question. And we continue to live with the degrading reality of internal colonisation; the control of “those people”. I’m not going to beat around the bush. The current Global Financial Crisis comes after a long history of injustice built upon injustice in the context of the historical development of what the Prime Minister recently referred to as “extreme capitalism”. Markets are very good at providing choice and, in some respects, encouraging innovation but they are not good at enabling an equitable distribution of essentials. This is why governments must do what markets cannot. The failure of governments to do this has meant a great deal of freedom for the beneficiaries of the accumulation of wealth, but not much freedom for those who have experienced an accumulation of poverty. This is the group that is growing fast around the globe. Despite the “good news” messages we have been bombarded with over the last couple of decades, the fact of the matter is that the income and assets of the lower and middle strata of industrialised countries has become increasingly insecure.
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This insecurity is largely invisible but it is real. Socio-economic insecurity is not an abstract idea. It is experienced by real people of real flesh and blood. This is the context in which I would like to make three key points about social inclusion and poverty reduction: Firstly, the current global financial crisis will result in increased unemployment in Australia. It will also impact the people who are currently underemployed at the low end of the labour market. They are clearly vulnerable to the loss of more hours. The fact that unemployment and underemployment are being acknowledged as structural phenomena is highly significant. We have always known that the patterns of unemployment are structurally and historically determined and yet, especially as official unemployment figures declined, the dominant discourse was one that demonised people who were outside, or marginal to, the labour market, even when specific areas experienced notoriously persistent levels of high unemployment. Now is the time to abandon both the language and the policy of blaming the individual for their marginalisation. Now is the time to consign the poorly framed policy of breaching or payment suspension to the garbage-bins of social policy history. This practice has been embedded in the moralising discourse of the undeserving poor and the need to infantilise and coerce “those people” for their own good! Now is also the time to reclaim the language of the social; to question the dogmatic adherence to the religion of rugged individualism. This has resulted in the systematic exclusion of ‘those people” and the removal of social responsibility in favour of the “anything goes” credo of the market. Secondly, I wish to address the critical role of government. The United Nations’ Human Settlements Programme report, The Challenge of the Slums, makes the global point that the ‘main single cause of increases in poverty and inequality during the 1980s and 1990s was the retreat of the state’. The state did retreat as far as the allocation of resources to “those people” was concerned but it has not retreated in respect to its controlling and coercive instrumentality. 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 4
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. Individual, families, communities, and, in the case of the Northern Territory Intervention, a target group based primarily on race, are either pathologised or criminalised. The momentum for such interventions in the zones of chaos has not slowed. Furthermore, the confluence of race, class and gender is never far from the surface. Over the weekend the ABC reported the following story: A former Queensland Magistrate wants the Cape York welfare reform trial extended to some suburbs in Brisbane. Under the trial, welfare payments can be withheld if people do not send their children to school, ruin their homes or commit crimes. Commissioner Glasgow says the Cape York model, developed by Indigenous leader Noel Pearson, should also be tested in Brisbane as well as the mainly non-Indigenous community of Mossman in far north Queensland. "Places like Inala, Redbank and places of that nature where children are not looked after properly," he said. "If an analysis was made of school attendance records in say Inala and some of the suburbs of Brisbane, you'd be surprised about how closely they resemble some of the Indigenous communities." The criminalisation of “those people” has gone hand in hand with the retreat of the State from adequate resource allocation. In Australia, the past 10 years 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. Imprisonment and exclusion of the poor grew alongside the early development of our modern capitalist society. When public land was being enclosed as the private property of the powerful and the poor were punished for continuing to use these lands for their livelihood an anonymous English poet came up with the following lines of verse: 5
“The law locks up the man or woman who steals the goose from off the common, but leaves the greater villain loose who steals the common from under the goose.” 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.’ Going back even further, the 1975 Commission of Inquiry into Poverty noted that: ‘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.’ I would put it to you that the chief condition for addressing the causes of poverty and inequality is not only the reallocation of resources but also the redistribution of power; the empowerment, rather than the discriminatory control, of the people who have been left out or pushed out. Sir Michael Marmot, Chair of the recent WHO Commission on the Social Determinants of Health said: “Central to the Commission’s recommendations is creating the conditions for people to be empowered, to have freedom to lead flourishing lives. Nowhere is lack of empowerment more obvious than in the plight of women in many parts of the world. Health suffers as a result. Government needs to assume responsibility for achieving concrete anti-poverty targets. A social inclusion strategy cannot lack this component if it is serious about genuine inclusion. Nothing excludes people in a market economy like an inadequate household income. Then there are, of course, the fundamentals like housing, healthcare, education, transport and childcare, which the market is notoriously bad at providing on an equitable basis.
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The greatest power for progressive social change, however, 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 the poet Bertolt Brecht put it so well, ‘the compassion of the oppressed for the oppressed is indispensable. It is the world’s one hope’” Thirdly, I would like to note the reality of inequality. Australian Bureau of Statistics Australian Social Trends data demonstrated that in 2003–04, the mean weekly equivalised disposable household income for low economic 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. 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. Brecht, also penned the following 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. As one who has consistently been accused of representing the evidence of the Marxist control of the St Vincent de Paul Society it would be remiss of me not quote Marx before I finish. And so I will, well Groucho anyway, since he characterizes much that we have to contend with, not only in relation to the state but also in relation to the economic interests that dominate our society: “These are my principles”, he thundered, “but if you don’t like them I have others.” We are at an important moment of global and national history, a time for re-articulating some key principles for living together as a society. For one thing, the Federal 7
Government’s commitment to a Social Inclusion Agenda is, as my colleague, Professor Vinson put it so well: “a brief opportunity to institutionalize a good impulse.” Now is the time to actively reject the construct of “those people” and replace it with a truly inclusive: “We, the people”.
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.”
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