We will win: the struggle for good policy Speech to the Crunchtime Conference Sydney, 22nd April 2009
Dr John Falzon Chief Executive Officer St Vincent de Paul Society National Council of Australia johnf@svdpnatcl.org.au
I begin by acknowledging and paying my respects to the traditional owners and custodians of this land, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. I wish to pay tribute to their spirit and practice of resistance and collective hope. May we who meet hear be attuned to the stories and teachings of the old people. I have been asked to speak on what we have learnt from the history of social policy in Australia. Social policy is indeed a science but good social policy is science born out of struggle. For me, the way I looked at the world changed forever when I first read Frantz Fanon, the psychiatrist and great theorist of the confluence between the colonisation of land and the crushing of the spirit. Colonial Algeria, a site of incredible violence, seems like a world away from industrialized Australia at the dawn of the 21st century. It may seem to be a world away. But it is not. It is not a world away when we are living with laws that have been forced upon sections of our population on the basis of race and “for their own good”. It is not a world away when the first nations of Australia continue to live with the toxic fruits of historical colonisation and the perpetuation of the structures of internal colonisation. It is not a world away when, in the language of the beatitudes which, as Oscar Romero pointed out before his own violent death, have turned everything upside down, the people who hunger and thirst for justice here and now are really joined at the hip with those who hungered and thirsted for justice there and then. When here and now we can make our own that poignant prayer on Fanon’s lips: “Oh my body, make of me a human who always questions!” This is the first point I wish to make about good policy. Good policy is a product of this questioning. It is formulated from below, not from above. It is not inherently disempowering. It is not made for a people ‘for their own good”. You are well aware of the fact that one of the strongest determinants of health is the degree of empowerment. The World Health Organization's Commission on the Social Determinants of Health last year released its report entitled Closing the Gap in a Generation: Health Equity through Action on the Social Determinants of Health. According to its findings: "Social injustice is killing people on a grand scale." Sir Michael Marmot, Commission Chair said: “Central to the Commission’s recommendations is creating the conditions for people to be empowered, to have
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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.” Included in the Report is the now-familiar fact that life expectancy for Indigenous Australian males is shorter by 17 years than all other Australian males. Another fact mentioned is that in the United States, 886 202 deaths would have been averted between 1991 and 2000 if mortality rates between white and African Americans were equalized. Interestingly the Report also found the following: ”Wealth alone does not have to determine the health of a nation's population. Some lowincome countries such as Cuba, Costa Rica, China, and the state of Kerala in India... have achieved levels of good health despite relatively low national incomes. But wealth can be wisely used. Nordic countries, for example, have followed policies that encouraged equality of benefits and services, full employment, gender equity and low levels of social exclusion. This is an outstanding example of what needs to be done everywhere.” Good policy is organically connected to empowerment and a redistribution of resources as an essential element of genuine empowerment. When the former and current Federal Governments both sign on to a regime of compulsory income management as part of the NT Intervention or to suspension of welfare payments for parents whose children are not attending school, we are looking down the barrel of inherently disempowering policies. Similarly when parents are constructed, according to the dominant discourse, as being “bad” and therefore in need of income suspension or management, all in the name of helping the children, the truth flies back in our faces: you don’t help children by humiliating their parents. Going back to Fanon’s prayer, good policy needs not only to arise from critical questions; it should itself provide a relentless critique of existing reality. When, for example, we embarked in Australia on a road of universal free health care we were collectively posing a question to the existing reality. The policy itself cried out: “Who has been missing out? Why is healthcare not best left to the mechanisms of the marketplace? Why were people going to prison for failure to pay their medical debts? The second point I would suggest regarding how to get policy right is that the solution to a problem must follow from the very conditions of the problem. Policy is usually presented as a fait accompli cooked up in the rarefied atmosphere inhabited by those whose lives and learnings are alien and alienating to the people whose lives will be affected. There is often an incredible presumption that people are incapable of analysing their own situation. This presumption carries with it a handy rejection of the notion of actually providing resources to people to allow them to articulate their analyses and proposed
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solutions. And yet under the guiding stars of struggle and hope the greatest social reforms have been wrought by grass-roots movements, even in Australia. As the German poet, Bertolt Brecht, put it so well: “The compassion of the oppressed for the oppressed is indispensable. It is the world’s one hope.” Without the organised analysis and agitation of the people we would never have seen gains in the fields of industrial rights, women’s rights, the establishment and public funding of refuges for women and young people, tenants’ rights, environmental justice, workers compensation, citizenship rights for Aboriginal people and so on. In the years of the Great Depression when the families of the unemployed were being thrown out of their homes by the landlords a movement of resistance sprang up against these evictions. People gathered around the home of the soon-to-be evicted family and fought back against the police force sent to carry out the law. From home after home the families were evicted by the law and the women and men and the children and their goods were forced to make the street their home while their supporters had the intellectual honesty to never stop being shocked by this brutality. People were radicalized by reality, by their concrete analysis of the concrete conditions. Good policy was born from such struggles. As the great poet Pablo Neruda put it: The word was born In the blood… The third and final point is that good policy sees a diversity of issues as being whole cloth, of being interconnected. With the exception of a couple of fanatical poverty-deniers who are taken seriously by nobody there is a broad consensus in Australian social science that we do have a serious problem with poverty and disadvantage, that this problem affects the lives of at least 11% of the population, that the causes of poverty are primarily structural rather than behavioural, and that we can, as a society, address these causes. It was Frantz Fanon 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.” We have been shaken to pieces by this question.
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If wealth is correctly understood here as access to appropriate housing, health, education, transport, employment, social security and wholeness I would simply add that, in order to achieve this, there must be a massive redistribution of hope along with the redistribution of wealth. As Brecht put it: ‘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. 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. 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. 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. 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 5
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.’ As the Australian Catholic Bishops' 1996 Social Justice Statement affirmed so strongly:
In the main, people are poor not because they are lazy or lacking in ability or because they are unlucky. They are poor because of the way society, including its economic system, is organised. At the risk of stating the obvious I wish to reiterate the truth that 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. It is fitting to end on the collective word to the wise formulated by Lilla Watson and a group of Aboriginal activists in Brisbane in the 70s: “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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