Dependency: An ideology chasing its tail

In Basic Income News John Tomlinson writes:

There is little doubt that those who wish to limit the scope or generosity of income support provisions find the frequent repetition of dependency rhetoric useful. However, it should be noted that the veracity of an idea is not established by its longevity nor by how frequently it is asserted.

The distinctions which neo-conservatives attempt to make in these dependency/ self reliance debates are based on distortions of reality. They are, as Joshua Holland notes, “a ‘zombie lie’ – no matter how many times you shoot it in the face, it keeps coming back to haunt you.”

Currently, in Australia, the favourite prevailing welfare myths are:

• Australians pay high levels of taxation compared with the rest of the world,
• asylum seekers without visas arriving by boat are entering Australia illegally,
• Aborigines get exceedingly generous welfare payments compared with other citizens, and
• there is such a thing as a ‘self-funded retiree’.

The reality is that:

• “Australia has a low tax burden, both currently and historically. In 2003, Australia had the eighth lowest tax burden of the OECD-30 countries and has typically ranked in the bottom third of countries for the period since 1965” (Treasury 2003).
• Because Australia has signed and ratified the 1951 Convention on Refugees asylum seekers have every right to enter this country to seek protection.
• As a group, Aboriginal citizens are the least wealthy section of the society, who face the greatest health difficulties and they get less generous assistance than other Australians. This is sometimes because of the rural and remote regions in which they live. But mainly it is often due to Indigenous people’s lack of bureaucratic sophistication coupled with non-Aboriginal racism and governments’ determination to foist their ‘best intentions’ upon Indigenous citizens rather than to listen to Aboriginal peoples’ suggestions.
• The statement that, unlike age pensioners, ‘self-funded retirees’ don’t draw on the public purse’ is a nonsense – they get exceedingly generous tax waivers on their superannuation and, provided their income is below $50,000 annually, get government subsidised medicines. Some of the recently beatified ‘self-funded retirees’ get more assistance from the government (by way of tax concessions) than age pensioners get from the pension.

The absence of logic, in many of the arguments propounded by rightwing ideologues about the need to force recipients of social security to meet onerous obligations in return for payment of benefits, should make it easy to destroy their arguments. But in Australia, as elsewhere, this is not the case.