[This is Part I of a longer piece on welfare, labour and the body of politics. Yes, it's a drafting process]

The Australian government is currently setting about changing the criteria for which people, in particular indigenous people and those with disabilities, can receive welfare payments. Australia’s welfare system has always operated as a direct adjunct to work and is a principal technology for the organisation of the national labour market. Welfare is paid at a level far below any estimates of a livable income because it is, quite literally, disbursed as an unemployment income. It is not meant to supplant the injunction to work, but supplements that injuction in a very particular fashion. ‘Welfare payments’ do not amount to welfare in any abstract sense and are certainly not outlayed by the state as an unconditional right. Rather, they are an index of the relative force of very specific understandings of what ‘the welfare of the commonwealth’ might mean.

If recent elections and policy are anything to go by, there is an alternation between the blunt corrective of fiscal ‘rectitude’ and the unprecedented disbursement of constituency-building measures, mostly in ‘marginal’ electorates. Indigenous peoples, immigrants, people with disabilities, young people and creative types are out; families are in. To be clear, this is not some battle between discrete ‘classes of persons’ over proportions of the social income, as if it were possible to squeeze actual people into one category or another. Rather, the shift to ‘families’ has much to do with the pressure of a decade-long shift from national to ‘household’ debt coupled with the twinned strategies of re-defining the national in familial and enterpreneurial terms—which is to say, along Darwinian and biological (racialised) lines. For the enterpreneurial unit of ‘the family’, the task of managing psychological—if not material—risk has been given over to the fast-growing industries of pharmacology, ‘self-help’ and evangelism. What each of these industries has in common—aside from their competing but similarly rigid foundationalisms in biochemistry and a Higher Power respectively—is an emphasis on salvation and revelation as processes of individual behaviour modification.

That said, proposed changes to welfare include intensive monitoring and control of “behaviour” deemed to be “passive”, that is: unproductive—and certainly not properly familial—in the strict terms of what it means to reproduce the conditions of a national labour market. Changes include the introduction of ‘smart cards’ to monitor what people buy and the extension of work-for-the-dole and ‘mutual obligation contracts’ to entire communities. Other measures include the cutting of payments or denial of repairs on public housing if parents do not ensure their children attend school ‘clean and neatly dressed’. Moreover, in a process designed to shift “native title” landholdings into commercial circulation (and quite likely, to mount an eventual land grab), lands recently returned to indigenous communities and held under communal title will become real estate and used as collateral for loans.

Among other things, the changes to welfare are designed to force people off welfare (and into ‘self-employment’ and low-paid work) by introducing punitive measures against certain “behaviours” and making life on welfare unbearable. They are widely seen as a test case for the welfare system as a whole. Indeed, the specific criticism from human rights organisations of the proposed changes suggests this is more rather than less than likely. For the most part, human rights organisations have criticised proposed changes to welfare arrangements for indigenous people as a contravention of anti-discrimination laws rather than amounting to the extension of forced labour, thereby implicitly making a case for the generalisation of those changes (and forced labour).

Nevertheless, these changes are continuous with Australia’s history of forced labour (especially of indigenous people) and of welfare arrangements since the 1970s. In the 1970s, the Fraser Liberal Government introduced the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP) which made welfare payments conditional upon work, well before the Keating Labor Government’s extension of work-for-the-dole scheme to all long-term unemployed over 25 in the early 1990s, and the Howard Liberal Government’s more recent ‘mutual obligation’ contracts, which similarly made forced labour a condition of welfare. Nevertheless, the extent of recent proposals indicates a more aggressive attempt to end, as the Government terms it, “passive welfare once and for all”.

In this aim, they are supported by some indigenous people whose resort to the jargon of “uplift” and “prohibition” reasserts the “civilising” and paternalistic doctrines of the missionary organisations vested with the task of “Aboriginal Protection” since the beginning of the last century. With that resort has come a prominence granted on the basis of deflecting the charge of racism. Noel Pearson—whose assertions that welfare payments are “a major contributor to the drug problems of Aborigines” can at best be described as a teetotaler’s fantasy of causation—has become a significant figure in the legitimation of government policy. That legitimation functions, as it always has, by insisting that punitive measures and control are enacted ‘in the best interests’ of those who cannot ‘control themselves’ sufficiently to be entrusted with the task of exploiting themselves. But while Pearson and others holding photo opportunities with the Prime Minister have been presented as representatives of and for indigenous people, conflicts between indigenous people remain more than apparent, but largely (as is often the case) unrepresentable as such in a context where mediation is principally the performance of simulation, inclusion/exclusion and the legitimation of state violence.

Part II: Redfern, Palm Island and deaths in custody ...