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Try to feel the pain of poverty

by Simon Longstaff

It now seems fairly clear that the Federal Government as found a serviceable hook on which to hang its social policies. This hook, the concept of mutual obligation, has been steadily moving to the foreground of public debate.

At the same time, this concept has been used to encourage greater corporate social responsibility. For example, the Prime Minister's Community Business Partnership has the virtue of helping further debate about the obligations of the corporate sector. However, this process of engagement with business is moving at a moderate and gentle pace, based on a clear preference for conversation and consultation (hardly the experience of the long-term unemployed). While the Government can only commend corporate citizenship, it can (and does) compel compliance by welfare recipients.

So, what are we to make of the Government's idea of mutual obligation? On one reading it would appear that we have resurrected the notion of the deserving poor – people who prove their worth to the community by giving something back, or at least by taking positive steps to alleviate their own disadvantage. Perhaps this is a good thing. After all, the Government has a responsibility to all of its citizens to ensure that it is prudent in its stewardship of the money we pay in taxes.

As such, it is right to be concerned that we control expenditure and avoid creating pockets of disadvantage built on dependency.

However, it may be that we lose something of value in our society when we reject the possibility of welfare being an unconditional act of human kindness in which the community reaches out to relieve the distress of people encountering hard times.

Another interpretation of mutual obligation could be that the Government is harking back to an older ideal of mutual reliance – the basis for the enduring myth of Australian mateship as the key to survival in a harsh environment.

On this account, welfare generates reciprocal obligations of a kind that allow the community to thrive as a whole. If this is so, then the Coalition may have inadvertently stumbled into the territory traversed by that favourite son of the Scottish enlightenment, Adam Smith. Unhappily, Smith is cursed to be remembered solely for his authorship of The Wealth of Nations. Worse still, he is commonly believed to have been an economist. In fact, he was professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, and was famous throughout Europe after the publication of his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

It was there that Smith argued the case for a society founded on two core principles: sympathy and reciprocity. Reciprocity should be understood in its usual sense. One good turn deserves another. To cause grief to others is to court disaster in equal measure.

In this, Smith had a radically egalitarian streak in his philosophy. No person was excused from applying this principle. No position of power or privilege lifted a person above society and the need for reciprocity. However, for Smith, reciprocity is not enough in itself. He argued that there is also a need for sympathy. Smith did not mean to suggest that we should feel sorry for other people; he was not using the word sympathy in its more modern sense. Rather, he wanted to suggest a sense of connectedness in which people recognised the dignity of others. In doing so, he hoped that we might know what it was like to walk a mile in their shoes.

There is little sense of senior ministers having tried to feel – to really feel – what life is like for those consigned to the margins of Australian society. While most of us feast on the fruits of sustained economic growth, far too many are left to sharpen their teeth on stones.

What might we require of such people after spending a week (or even a day) in their skins? This is not just a question for government. It is one that each of us should keep in mind as a matter of personal responsibility. A proper concern for each other is not something that can be completely subcontracted to the state.

Indeed, there is a risk that a state-imposed regime of reciprocity without sympathy will undermine the sense that we have obligations to each other. Instead, we will be left with the feeling that our obligation is primarily owed to the government. The problem with this is that it inverts (and therefore perverts) the proper relationship between the government and the people in a democracy. The government is obliged to serve the people. The people have obligations to each other, but are the masters of the government. Or, so the theory goes.

I do not want to suggest that those championing the idea of mutual obligation are callous. Nor do I think them indifferent to the fundamental principles of democracy. No political party has a monopoly on genuine compassion or democratic virtue. However, a better strategy might have been to start by focusing attention on the mutual obligations of the most powerful in society. If the Government had begun by seriously addressing this group, then it would have enjoyed far greater credibility when the time came to speak of the mutual obligations of the underclass.

Instead, the Government risks giving the impression that it is picking on the vulnerable. We might hope that John Howard will lead his Government to develop a somewhat richer notion of mutual obligation. If he does not, then the hook for his social policy may be put to an altogether different use.

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