It is an old belief. It was certainly around a long time before the Coronavirus Supplement was, quite appropriately, initiated by the federal government. It was a belief that was around when the JobSeeker payment was so low (which, of course, without the coronavirus supplement, it continues to be) as to abandon people to a daily battle for survival from below the poverty line.

For years we have had to listen to this dogma. The refusal to raise the unemployment and other similar social security payments by successive governments was cloaked as both an economic necessity (it would cost too much) and a behavioural imperative (people will only look for work if they are starving).

Unemployment and underemployment (the combined underutilisation rate now being more than 20 per cent) are not personal choices. They are structural realities. And they should be viewed alongside related patterns in the labour market, notably wage stagnation, accelerated levels of insecure works, the reduction in workers' rights and the attempts at stymying the ability of the union movement to organise and advocate for working people. They should also be viewed alongside the related patterns in the economy, notably the decline in manufacturing, in private productive investment, and in public ownership of social and economic infrastructure.

When I call them structural realities I am not suggesting unemployment and underemployment are faits accompli we should just learn to accept and shrug our shoulders at any attempt to understand and address. I do not accept, and I don't think Morrison does either, that our society should be content to park people on unemployment payments indefinitely and forget about them. Which is why I join the call for a sustained and systematic government-led program of job creation.

The ACTU, for example, has called for the creation of 2 million secure jobs and a halving of the number of people in insecure work. You have no doubt seen and read some of the excellent suggestions for how this might be done, for example through a massive and much-needed investment in social housing, the provision of free early childhood education, investment in social services, and, of course, the exciting possibilities we have as a nation in developing post-carbon industries.

But while people are locked outside, trying to get into a job, there is never a justification for making their lives miserable. There is never an excuse for making anyone's life miserable, whether they are aged, ill, in paid work, underemployed, unemployed, detached from the labour market, studying, living with a disability, or engaged in the unpaid work of caring. The fact that we want to create jobs doesn't mean that those without jobs should be made to suffer.

It is wrong to make people suffer because they do not have a job. It is suffering enough to be forced into this position. And when I refer to this mode of manufactured suffering I mean not only severe income inadequacy but also the humiliating and disempowering measures such as cashless welfare cards, breaching regimes and time-wasting, soul-crushing programs such as Work for the Dole, PaTH, and the CDP.

MORE JOHN FALZON:

Morrison said recently that we can't help everyone. Perhaps, not everyone needs the extra help. But we can help everyone who does need help. It is not a matter of ideological preference. It is a matter of responsibility. The help, whether it be in the creation of new secure jobs, the prevention of precarity, the repair of the social security system, investment in social housing, education and health, reconfiguring the economy to address the climate crisis, or the instigation of paid pandemic leave, is critical to people's lives. And given it is about the difference between looking after each other and leaving each other at sea, it is critical not only to the future of the economy. It is critical to the defence of our democracy.

The Prime Minister has spoken recently about the dangers of a post-COVID-19 world. Our greatest danger lies in how we treat each other. Now is not the time to throw people overboard by cutting wages and forcing the unwaged to walk the plank. Neither is it the time to administer another dose of fear. Low wages and poor working conditions are not the answer to the challenges we are facing as an economy and as a society.

It's one thing to understand how things work but that doesn't mean you can't also understand how things must change. Must we not fortify our ability to see a different future rather than desperately, and uselessly, maintaining our grip on an unjust past?

The word "security" comes from the Latin se cura, "not having a care". And yet the very notion has become the quintessential cause for worry. Security, in its political usage, is precisely a worry. It is about fear, especially of the "other": the refugee, the one who is ill, the person who has no home or no job, the stranger, the unknown. As Shakespeare observed: "In time we hate that which we often fear". And so security, instead of conjuring up a sense of peace, demands a state of constant suspicion.

I have some news. The people we have been taught to fear, well, they are us. They are ourselves. And what greater insecurity can there be than to fear or hate ourselves? Our collective self-belief can only be achieved when we confront the contradictions upon which our economy and society are built, starting with the fact of colonisation and then cutting a swath through all the structures, all the false stories, that cut a destructive swath through us.