Last week, Prime Minister Gillard announced the outcomes of the 2013 Closing the Gap Report giving us a view, albeit filtered through statistics, into the appalling disadvantage of Australia’s indigenous people. This is disadvantage that costs lives. This is disadvantage that seems incomprehensible in a society like ours. This is disadvantage so bad that the best we seem to hope for is simply to halve it, not remove it.
The Closing the Gap report was delivered with an interesting mix of paternal pride and furrowed brow. “We are on course (reputedly), but still have a long way to go” was the message from both sides of politics. It was a message of shaky optimism ... a message that could perhaps be made even shakier by pointing out that one of the few areas where we are claiming to be “on target”, halving the gap in child mortality rates by 2018, is actually a mathematical impossibility because, despite the achievements in this area, at present the non-indigenous child mortality rate is actually falling faster than the indigenous rate. But that’s just, you know, details.
Of interest here is the discourse around the Report and that discourse was a veritable chorus of acknowledgement, concern and commitment. Political enemies were united in the cause.
That same evening, I sat in cool air-conditioned comfort at a seminar into “insecure work” put on by the Victorian Fabian Society. It was an eye opening discussion that presented evidence which challenges our view of ourselves. It challenged the unquestioned myths that poverty is an isolated feature on the Australian landscape and that the land of plenty will provide for those willing to set their back to the plough.
Two million people in this country, we were told, live below the poverty line. ACCOSS has reported a 100% increase in the number of people accessing charitable services in recent years, with 50% of the people accessing such services being in employment. 40% of homeless people are employed. Having a job is no longer immunisation from poverty. Indeed, the emerging picture is that some employment structures are perpetuating cycles of disadvantage. And yet, this type of “working poverty” is contested in a narrative that glosses over the fact that some employment contracts can be as crippling as welfare dependency. We are told that structures like casualisation and individual contracts are good for employment overall and, most insidiously, that employees actually like them because they offer flexibility. We buy this promise. But for many workers, this “flexibility” means they cannot get a home loan or a car or a credit card or invest in long-term life plans like education because they don’t know if they’ll have a job next month, next week or tomorrow. One person’s “flexibility” is another’s uncertainty and risk. It all depends on your negotiating power ... and that ain’t something that gets shared around.
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A question that emerges is why is indigenous disadvantage so heartily recognised and accepted in political discourse, while working poverty is not?
Not for a second do I mean to suggest that indigenous disadvantage is not due the focus and concern it receives. On the contrary, the Closing the Gap Report would suggest, if anything, we are still not placing enough effort and focus on this issue. But why is it an uncontested political narrative compared with working poverty? Why is it that both sides of politics will (rightly) join hands in solidarity over the plight of indigenous people, while at the same time further discriminate against single mothers stuck in low-pay casual working arrangements that offer no foundation for a future? Why isn’t the latter form of disadvantage even seen? Working poverty is no less real. It may reasonably be argued that indigenous disadvantage goes “deeper” or is more harmful than working poverty, but this (at worst) should influence our priority on addressing working poverty, not our recognition of its existence. If the concern of our political parties over indigenous disadvantage is evidence of a truly humanitarian ethos, then couldn’t we expect to see that compassion extended to other vulnerable members of our communities? Something doesn’t add up.
The answer is, of course, that there are two self-serving political narratives at play here.
It serves a political purpose to openly acknowledge and bemoan the shocking plights of indigenous people in impoverished communities. Establishing indigenous disadvantage as a fact creates its own excuse. A kind of “get out of jail free” card for any sitting government. We all know that indigenous people live in terrible, life threatening poverty – that’s the way it is. It becomes a foundation fact in our political discourse and that allows us to be all care and no responsibility. So, when any particular government fails to make significant headway on this issue – as the 2013 Close the Gap Report reveals – we can furrow our brows, slap the table in bitter disappointment and say we must work harder, but nobody really kicks up a stink. Nobody is going to lose their seat. Nobody is going to say that our failure is unacceptable. We are simply failing because it’s just the reality of the situation. In political terms, embracing the problem and bringing to the foreground has neutralised it. The beast has been tamed and domesticated.
Why then contest working poverty? Why not employ the same “normalisation” strategy?
The difference is that working poverty is a political threat and, therefore, must be hid. It reveals the great untruth of the ideological myth we have been fed and swallowed whole: the myth of self-determination in a society of opportunity, where it is the role of government to create an industrial environment to support the advancement of the individual. A myth based in our own self-perceived agency and brilliance … who wouldn’t want to believe that!?
Working poverty, research tells us, is the very result of this shifting of risk from employers to employees through casualisation of the workforce and the entrenching of “precarious” relations between the disempowered employee and the employer. The vicious nexus of low rates of pay and uncertainty diminishes (if not obliterates) many people’s capacity to leverage their employment to anything beyond a subsistence existence … and ACCOSS’s statistics would suggest that subsistence would be a step up for many. In this industrial world, precarious forms of employment do not provide a pathway for improvement in people’s lives, but a shackle to the status quo. Working poverty renders plain the gross structures of advantage and disadvantage that influence our lives more greatly than those of us on the positive side of the ledger would care to admit.
So, like the projectionist, working poverty is invisible to us as we focus with our wilful suspension of disbelief on the main feature: I’m Alright Jack. And the myth will be perpetuated, and our vision obscured, until the horror story of its human cost forces its way on to our screen and its “evidence-base” (which consists of little more than assertion) is dissected piece-by-piece and at every opportunity. Meanwhile, the monsters of poverty in our indigenous communities hide in plain sight … [fades to static]
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