Back in February 2004 historian John Hirst wrote an article for The Age, praising then Labor leader Mark Latham for distinguishing between 'good' and 'bad' parents, and between the 'real' unemployed versus the 'slackers'.
Hirst's article might seem an odd throw-back to Victorian-era distinctions between 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor, but it is a distinction of which the Howard Government made frequent use. That Government had plans to introduce contingency to welfare payments for various transgressions, including convictions for drug offences.
Five years after Hirst's article, the Rudd Government has not altered that trajectory, trialling the connection of welfare payments to kids' attendance at school. And, of course, there are the distinctions in social security budgeting. In the 2009 Federal Budget, politically popular age pensioners were granted increases to their fortnightly payments while single parents and the unemployed (who live on $227 a week) missed out.
So ironically, at a time when Centrelink officers come to resemble parole officers, when, like pocket money, welfare money is taken off you if you act up, and when the state acts like Victorian-era charity workers towards single parents, churches and other charities must provide help to the 'leftovers'.
This regression is interesting in the light of the historical development of the notion of 'social justice', with which social workers and charitable organisations are more than ever concerned.
The emphasis on social justice developed partly in response to the perception that charitable workers were censorious and treated their 'charges' without respect. Social justice engrained the principle that assistance to those in poverty is not the responsibility of private agents, but is a right born of citizenship and the responsibility of governments. This ideal has been in retreat of late.
Pope Benedict XVI's first and third encyclicals, Deus Caritas Est (2006) and Caritas in Veritate (2009), provide illuminating reading in this context.
In Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict called for the Catholic Church to return to Christian ideas of charity, writing that 'the Church can never be exempted from practising charity as an organised activity of believers', and that 'there will never be a situation where the charity of each individual Christian is unnecessary'.
He returns to the distinction between 'justice' and 'charity', the former the responsibility of the state, and the latter of the Church, insisting that the Church has a role in fighting for justice within the state.
In Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict further