People are poor because they have no money: rich platitudes from 'experts'

There's a lot of it about, though not quite as much as we have previously thought, and, amazingly, it seems to be disproportionately present among people who are indigenous, mentally ill, in single parent households, or any combination of them.

These are chief among the entirely unremarkable insights and conclusions of a report on "addressing entrenched disadvantage in Australia" issued on Tuesday by the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia.

Among secondary conclusions from the experts consulted are that the problems are difficult, "wicked" and warrant further study, presumably by professionals such as those who have offered the insights contained in the report, or, indeed, those professionals themselves.

Otherwise, there's not much new. A vast industry of bureaucrats, academics, lobbyists and helping professionals have long been describing the problems of poverty, and of those who cannot seem to shake it from their shoulders..

Generally, such reports provide little in the way of guidance about effective action, apart from motherhood slogans about consulting with, engaging with and having the active involvement of the subjects of one's social experiments, or about the critical role of education, or housing, or employment, or job opportunities, or a good many other things, if anything much is to change. That nothing much ever does may be testament to the fact that they are wrong, or that no one pays any attention.

The fact that most such statements are entirely obvious and have been said many times before does not, of course, mean that they are integrated into policy, or are about to be. Indeed, it is perhaps entirely typical of an insipid report presented by an organisation headed by a former Labor Speaker, "Professor" Stephen Martin, that general comments in the report about policy failures of ministers are never sheeted home to particular politicians, such as Malcolm Brough, Jenny Macklin, or Kevin Andrews. Perhaps doing so might introduce a defensive edge among politicians that would inhibit their capacity to stand around looking concerned and worried as yet another such report is launched.

But alas for those who are concerned, and would like to see something done, there are few solutions that can be reduced to a slogan, and the problem is much too complex for Bill Shorten to have an opinion, even a worried-looking face.

"The main conclusion from the results and research [of materials about entrenched disadvantage in Indigenous communities] is that the issue is complex, and that there is unlikely to be one single or dominant cause of disadvantage," says Dr Nicholas Biddle of the ANU. Fancy that.

"Education is important, as is where people live. Discrimination, health, disability and caring are all likely to combine to significantly affect hiring decisions (of employers) and labour supply responses. Preferences of indigenous Australians and development of social norms and attitudes to work are also likely to play a part.

"Each issue alone is not enough to explain employment and income differences between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.

"Such complex policy issues require a careful policy response with a long-term perspective. This includes the best available evidence on what works. ... Indigenous communities are diverse and local conditions and aspirations matter. Policies designed to reduce disadvantage need to be carefully evaluated and developed in genuine collaboration with affected communities."

There's not a phrase with which one disagrees, but it hardly seems a manifesto for doing anything in particular, apart, perhaps, from having more evaluations, and hiring some more bogus consultants to certify that the local community is entirely au fait with, and on board with, the latest thought bubbles emanating from the minister, the people he is listening to this week, and the department.

The author of the best paper, Professor Peter Saunders, did make a mordant remark suggesting that one of the things entrenching poverty was not the ineptness of the schemes intended to deal with it, but the inadequacy of the sums devoted to alleviating it. This novel idea is not, of course, taken up in the executive summary.

Saunders comments that there are two broad strategies that can be used to address poverty. One is an employment strategy for getting more people in jobs. The other is a benefit strategy that raises the benefits for those out of work.

"These are not alternatives," he says. "Both are important. However, recent Australian governments have emphasised the former and shown great reluctance to address (or even acknowledge) the other.

"This is evident in the long-running (and bi-partisan) failure to adequately index Newstart Allowance (NSA) – the main benefit paid to the unemployed. As a consequence of this failure, the maximum single rate of NSA (including rent assistance) has fallen below 40 per cent of median income, well below the accepted international adequacy benchmark of 50 per cent implicit in the poverty line.

"Raising NSA to this benchmark would do much to reduce poverty among single working-age people, but the change should be accompanied by investing in the human capital of the unemployed (and others on benefits) through training programs that increase their employability while meeting the skills shortage and other needs of employers."

But it might be more complicated than that. As the analysts perpetually complain, rightly, the broad attitude of government (on both sides of politics) is to pander to a view in the community that all people on welfare benefits are idle scroungers, shirkers and malingerers, who can be forced to work only by the stockwhip or starvation. For most Australians, instead, time on benefits, whether because of unemployment, illness, difficulties of getting a roof over one's head or structural change, is only only for a short period, after which the person is able to re-engage with the workforce.

But the underclass, or the entrenched disadvantaged, are, in many respects, just what the straiteners all fear. In many households of the underclass, there is not an adult currently working; in many of them, the fathers and mothers, perhaps grandparents of the adults have not had regular work habits. Poverty, as well as what the straiteners consider fecklessness and a lack of work ethic, is heredity, as is, often, a failure to properly look after and educate children. Illness, including mental illness, is often compounded by discrimination, violence, drug and alcohol abuse and the sheer rawness of life without much money.

These are what Jesus described as the poor who are always with us. Put another way, even general economic prosperity, and a multitude of jobs for unskilled, often illiterate workers, will probably not have many such people out of poverty, dependence and social dislocation. One may argue until the cows come home about whether or how much the victims contribute to their disempowerment, helplessness and continuing poverty, but one cannot improve them by starving them out, or by further punishing their children or their dependents. It's not a moral issue. Nor can the current minister return victims, under a media blackout, to Indonesia.

This report estimates that this underclass is between four and six per cent of the population. They are doubly poor. They are on benefits and, in this sense, by definition living under the poverty line. But for them, poverty is not a temporal incident but, often, a cradle-to-grave affair, a fate from which many seem unable to escape. (My own guess is that the underclass is bigger – between seven and eight per cent.)

If a high proportion, perhaps half, are of Aboriginal descent, most Aborigines are not members of this underclass. Likewise with single mothers, or people with mental illnesses. One is not of the entrenched disadvantaged merely by conforming for some label (or, as the report shows, unhappy simply because one is of the entrenched poor). But social disadvantages are particularly concentrated among particular groups, and strategies for dealing with it must, perforce, concentrate on such groups.

It does not help much simply to re-describe and recatalogue their misery, which, alas, is what I fear is all this latest report does. More than 30 years ago, I wrote a chapter in a book in which I remarked that there were by then (1980) already more than 30,000 articles in the medical literature describing, one way or another, the ill health of Aborigines. I predicted that a day would come when there was at least one per Aboriginal Australian. It must have by now.

But just as one cannot cope with or help such people by mere punishment, it seems to me unlikely that their problems can be addressed merely by treating them as a subset of the temporarily poor, people transitting briefly through some bad times. The (entrenched) poor are different, and in major part because they have less money, and fewer means of getting any.