Scott Morrison’s Liberal-National coalition was re-elected to govern Australia on 18 May. The character of the returned government has been defined by their aggressive welfare policies.
These include (deep breath, now): compulsory drug-tests for the unemployed, a “cashless welfare card” that functions like food stamps, a “robodebt” scheme that issues computer-determined debt notices to welfare recipients and a “ParentsNext” program that shanghais disadvantaged parents into paternalistic “activities” by threatening their income. Oh, and maintaining the rate of the unemployment benefit, Newstart, beneath poverty level.
The prime minister – a very Christian man – informed us last week this program is “compassionate conservatism”.
One wonders, if being forced to piss in a cup in front of someone, stripped of the freedom to even carry loose change and living in poverty under the threat of being unable to feed your children is “compassion”, what precise hell awaits conservatism left unmoderated?
Tony Blair – remember him? – once described the distinction. “The only difference between compassionate conservatism and conservatism,” said Blair, “is that under compassionate conservatism they tell you they’re not going to help you but they’re really sorry about it.”
Yes, just like everything else in the Scott Morrison Memorial Cupboard of Stale Ideas Stolen from Conservative Movements in Other Countries, the language is borrowed. American in origin, the concept of “compassionate conservatism” gained political currency in the 1970s. It originated as a statement of self-justification for the early adopters of free market ideology, the refrain of an insistence that retracting the welfare state and allowing markets to run riot would, somehow, be better for the poor. How better? Apparently, super heaps better than such a faddish concept as “having enough money to eat and pay rent”. According to the history of “compassionate conservative” thought, what will properly feed the poor instead is “to hear the message of personal responsibility and self-reliance, the optimistic assurance that if they try – as they must – they will make it. They need to know, too, that they can’t blame ‘the system’ for their own wrongdoing.”
Eat that, povvos. In Australia, there is but one job for every three jobseekers, but being on the losing side of a simple maths equation in an economy skewed to keep a percentage of the population unemployed is a character failing, you’re just not taking enough personal responsibility.
In the 1970s, neoliberal theories could be this whack because they had the excuse of occupying the fringe of economic orthodoxy. Forty years later, its framework assumptions are the status quo, the longed-for free markets are here yet the need for welfare remains with us – it’s just that investment to meet that need is declining in real terms; the rate of Newstart has not risen in 25 years.
To what end?
American conservative pundits admit that “compassionate conservatism” is “a convenient marketing slogan” to woo swing voters, but the likes of Nobel laureate Paul Krugman have examined the phrase with more precision. When George W Bush described himself thus, Krugman detected the reference to 1995 book The Tragedy of American Compassion, by Christian right author Marvin Olasky. It proselytised for the “welfare system of 19th century America, in which faith-based private groups dispensed aid and religion together.” Sound familiar? It was on a similar model that former conservative British prime minister David Cameron founded his “big society” policy. Cameron’s example was to show that if one shrivels the outreach of the state – like through a forced “austerity” program – desperate welfare recipients will experience “power and control” when they have a choice of which big charity to beg from.
For Krugman, the ideological endgame here is that “conservatives want those in need to be dependent on the charity of people who will seek to dictate their behaviour”.
I politely suggest, given recent events, there may indeed be local religious movements all too eager to take up the cultural policing of a poor indentured to them for survival, and that the prime minister himself may know this.
To imagine Scott Morrison’s statement was glib just because it was unoriginal would be in error, as would be to think Morrison’s present welfare agenda represents any outer limit of his ideological ambition. “Compassionate conservatism” is a cocktail of free market mania mixed with the moral vanity of the hard Christian right, and he sips his cup of this stuff daily. What it tastes like for the rest of us – as the brutal legacies of both Bush and Cameron make too plain – is a bitter, bitter thing to drink.
Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
