A regular feature in Australian politics is the attempt to save money by penalising people who are struggling with life. It clearly plays well with groups of voters, although recently its effects have often been ameliorated by a recalcitrant Senate. It is usually accompanied by disparagement of the groups who are targeted.
This was true of the 2017 Budget which has been making its tortuous path through the Senate. In it young people face delay in collecting support, face testing for drugs and penalties if they are carrying. Unmarried mothers also face restrictions.
The strategy has a long history that provides a context. In England, as elsewhere, care for the poor was considered a duty of society. In England it fell on local parishes. After the Napoleonic Wars England faced widespread unemployment, with a consequent heavy burden falling on the local bodies.
An enquiry found evidence of mismanagement and called for a new system that would encourage people to seek work by deterring them from seeking help. It was predicated on the distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor, and the Benthamite principle that no one would work if they could find a labour-free way of living.
Central to the reform was the establishment of workhouses where the conditions would be more unpleasant than in any form of work. Families overcome by poverty could expect to find father separated from mother and both from their children.
The system was defended for its rigour and for upholding and embodying the moral distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor. It was only partially implemented, however, because it turned out to cost more than expected and delivered little of the moral improvement promised. It was also mercilessly criticised by such reformers as Cobbett and Dickens.
But it established an abidingly attractive division of society between the prudent, severe, highly moral, parsimonious and abstemious politicians with the imagined people who voted for them, and the feckless, dirty, profligate and immoral people in workhouses or illegally begging.
And it drew attention away from the employment crisis and the changes in the early Industrial Revolution that disrupted local communities and employment. It made those whose lives were devastated by these changes morally responsible for their own fate.
"In the Australian version, the reprobate, whether they be single parents, or unemployed young people with mental illness or addiction, is visited with financial doom to general opprobrium, and the government wins respect for its condign