Why I wrote today’s column

A situation report from the front line of Australia's welfare crisis

There is a backstory to my column in The Australian today which I’d like to share with subscribers to Reality Bites.

Tonight, being Tuesday, I’ll be in Miller in Western Sydney helping out at a community dinner hosted by Community Cafe Inc, a not-for-profit organisation which I chair.

There will be more than 100 people there this evening — families, single parents, pensioners, refugees — as broad a cross-section of Australians as you might imagine in a low socio-economic suburb where six out of ten working-age adults are on welfare and almost half of all children are growing up in jobless households.

There are many reasons why I make the trip along the congested M5 every Tuesday afternoon, but the main one, if I’m honest, is that it’s fun.

I’ve made a lot of friends among the people who use the service, all of whom have a story to tell. The conversations are never dull and frequently sobering. Life on welfare is tough and no one in their right mind would make it a career choice.

I’ve made friends among the terrific volunteers and admire their can-do attitude and humbled by their commitment.

But my day job at the Menzies Research Centre obliges me to think about the policy implications of what I encounter every Tuesday evening. So here goes:

A substantial cohort of Australians is missing out on the great promise of this country: the freedom to do your best and make your best better.

The question nagging away at the back of my mind was neatly framed by American economist Richard R. Nelson in his 1977 book, The Moon and the Ghetto.

If we can send astronauts to the Moon, why can’t we fix poverty?

Every Tuesday reinforces a lesson that decades of Budget papers have taught me.

Poverty is not an engineering problem. And it can’t be fixed with government money. If that was the answer, why has total government welfare spending gone up this year, as it does every year, with little apparent progress?

The difference between a successful moon landing and fixing poverty is this:

NASA’s task was to make machinery obey the laws of physics. Engineers identify a fault, apply resources and solve the problem.

But communities are not machines.

Social policy operates in an open adaptive system populated by millions of individuals with different goals, different information and different aspirations.

The challenge is not merely to transfer resources. The challenge is to create the conditions in which people can exercise agency over their own lives.

The system of spontaneous order — free markets, voluntary cooperation, enterprise and civil society — works remarkably well for most Australians. The challenge is bringing communities like Miller into that circle of opportunity so they too can thrive.

That is easier said than done. The history of social policy in Australia is, in many respects, a story of disappointing results.

The deeper challenge is not how to support people indefinitely. It is how to help people become self-supporting.

Or, to put it bluntly, how do we help people escape dependency without abandoning them in the process?

That is the question behind today’s column.

A Personal Favour

Community Cafe is currently raising funds to continue and expand its work in FY27.

Our objective is not simply to distribute food, although we do plenty of that, helping retailers redirect perfectly good food away from landfill in the process.

Our objective is to help people move from dependence to participation, purpose and help.

The most rewarding moments come when someone who once stood in the queue returns months later as a volunteer, standing on the other side of the counter helping friends, neighbours and strangers.

If you’d like to support that work, I’d be grateful for your help. Donations are tax deductible.

DONATE TO COMMUNITY CAFE INC HERE

As a small gesture, I’ll be donating all of my Substack income for June to Community Cafe.

Two final things…

First, thank you to my growing circle of paid subscribers. As a full-time writer, your support matters enormously.

Second, I’d welcome your feedback. Would an occasional backstory like this be useful as a bonus to my subscribers? Would you like to hear more about the experiences and conversations that sit behind some of my columns?

Let me know.

Here’s today’s article in The Australian.

Anthony Albanese’s jobs boom masks a surge in welfare dependency

There are statistics the government highlights and those it seeks to obscure. While Anthony Albanese is happy to claim credit for more than a million new jobs created since 2022, he prefers to ignore the alarming growth in welfare dependence during his tenure.

Some 115,000 more working-age Australians have joined the ranks of the welfare-dependent since Labor came to office. Disability Support Pension payments have risen by 11 per cent and Carer Payments by 10 per cent. The number of Youth Allowance recipients who aren’t enrolled at a university or TAFE has risen by 27 per cent. Single parent payments are up by 44 per cent. So much for the Prime Minister’s mantra “no one left behind”.

Qualification for these welfare categories is an acknowledgment of a diminished existence, a life of perpetual struggle to make ends meet, deprived of the purpose, independence and dignity derived from meaningful work.

Add to that a quarter of a million new National Disability Insurance Scheme recipients, and the outcome of the Albanese project becomes clear: a rise in dependency, a fall in self-sufficiency, a surfeit of misery and a deficit of hope. The excuse would probably be the same as last week’s explanation for the rise of One Nation: It’s the economy, stupid.

Leaving aside the dubious suggestion that the economy is driven by factors beyond the government’s control, the days when a rise in welfare payments could plausibly be explained by a fall in the job market are over. Unemployment may have risen from its 50-year low of 3.4 per cent in October 2022 to 4.5 per cent, seasonally adjusted in April, but the number of JobSeeker claimants has remained relatively static.

The largest increases are in programs that tend towards long-term welfare dependency. They are the categories a responsible government should reduce, as the Coalition did between 2013 and 2022. In the space of four years, Albanese has reversed the quiet achievements of his three predecessors, beginning with Tony Abbott, who began to turn the tide against the seemingly inexorable rise in Disability Support Pension as surely as he turned back the boats. The number of DSP recipients fell from 832,000 in March 2014 to 765,000 by April 2022.

The true benefits of welfare reform are not measured in aggregate numbers or in the fiscal savings, which in any case were dwarfed by the runaway expansion of the Labor-designed NDIS. The real gains were priceless: the restoration of human dignity one person at a time. When the Coalition left office, 77,000 fewer Australians were receiving DSP – a form of welfare that effectively wrote off their chances of entering the workforce for life.