I acknowledge the original custodians of this land, first. We remember them.
I don’t want you to think about respect or co-operation or social justice. I don’t want you to think about that. I’m interested today to think through the question of change. Markuso, I think, said back in the 60’s, the greatest single obstacle to change is the way things already are. And the Left hasn’t always understood that. Because it’s also the only place your going to be able to start the process from. The question I really want to explore today is how do we think our way into a project of change. George Laycoff has written a remarkable book I think, called, Don’t Think of an Elephant . To get the point of that title you need to remember that the elephant is the symbol of the Republican Party in the United States. And I’m going to come back to the point of why we shouldn’t think about the elephant because that’s when the trouble starts.
We’ve been told for some time, and Graham has already restated the proposition, that we now confront an alarming proposition of globalised change. As some of you already know I’ve long thought that kind of analysis not helpful. It’s been a convention, a cliché becoming an almost spray-on kind of analysis. It leads to paralysis because it’s very analytic, it’s very structuralist, it’s often very determinist and it invites us to sit on our hands and have a good whinge or a large whiskey to accompany the pessimism that sweeps over us. I don’t think its good enough that we engage in analysis. I think we need thinking connected to action. And what I want to do today is to think through with you how we might begin to do that.
Globalisation is undoubtedly a short hand way of referring to very large changes. The analysis perpetrated by political scientists and theorists over the last two decades is largely in my view the work of amnesiacs. It was after all Marx 150 years ago who pointed then to the global nature of the revolutionary changes taking place. And he gives us that marvelous phrase “all that is solid melts into air”. He understood then as we are again being reminded endlessly today of the nature, the sources, the dynamic relationships and the consequences of this project of change which has been going on now for some centuries. I don’t think that we should be either surprised or necessarily alarmed. What we should be I think, is the way many of us now experience this process of change as not the change we wanted or counted on or actually think is all that good. The problem of globalisation, as it has been called, is really the problem that it produces pessimism and paralysis. We need a way forward. George Laycoff is a Nuerophysiologist and a linguist. He’s written I think the single best book of the last few years called Moral Politics – How Neo-Conservatives Think. It was published in 2002. It’s a very detailed and scholarly account of how neo-conservatives have, as he says, won the political discursive battle in America. In a follow up book based on his own advocacy work with citizens groups, democratic party groups and so on across America, published just this year, called Don’t Think of an Elephant. His point is simple, when you negate a frame, you evoke that frame. To think in terms of globalisation and to critique it is to fall into the problem that Laycoff was trying get us to think our way out of. As he says memorably, when Richard Nixon went on to national television in 1974 at the height of the Watergate Scandal to say “I am not a crook”, everyone immediately said ‘oh, yes you are’. The negation evokes the frame. Laycoff’s point is a simple but profound one. It is not a comprehensive explanation of why the neo-conservatives and neo-libs have won temporarily the battle for the hearts and minds of lot’s of us. But it takes us into very important territory that the left historically has failed to go to. To that realm of stuff that we call values, that we call feelings, that are summed up in metaphors. When Bush the current President of the US talks and states in metaphoric terms of a strong father, he is evoking a frame that is at once metaphoric, emotional, full of feeling, full of value. And around that frame he has constructed the very powerful, the very seductive and compelling politics. To negate that frame is to fall into the frame. To critique it, to spend time on it says Laycoff, is to fall into the trap. I think that’s a profound proposition. It’s one that the left, because of it’s history of oppositionality, of critique, of protest, is all too pre-disposed to do endlessly. To fall into the trap set by the opponents. What we have failed to do, and this is a point that I have been making for 30 years, the left has failed to spell out a compelling alternative vision, with feeling, ideals, analysis all somehow put together. We’ve failed to do that because we have spent too much time negating the frame of the others, of the neo-libs, the neo-cons or whoever. The capo’s as they used to be called or whatever. Critique by itself is therefore not enough. Oppositionality is not enough.
We need to reach out to large numbers of people. It was said unkindly the other night by a mate of mind who came to another event in this building that he was the youngest person present in the audience, and he’s 59. Now as we look around this room, this is not ageism, but it is to say something rather alarming, but it reflects it properly, but this is not a cross section of Australia now here. It may be full of very good-hearted, good intentioned people, I have no doubt of that, but we have failed to reach out to large numbers of people, we have failed to construct a political project that reaches out to large numbers of ordinary Australians. That we can do so occasionally there is no doubt as the 150,000 people that marched recently against the IR legislation pointed out. Or when large number of Australians marched against the then pending war against Iraq. But we aren’t doing that systematically or consistently enough. And it seems to me that one of the things that we need to be able to do is to think our way into a politics of transformation.
To construct the kinds of compelling messages that we’ve seen the other side do we need to take leaves out of books written by the others. When I look at, for example, the Centre for Independent Studies, perhaps now the most successful of the neo-con think tanks, I see a sophisticated, smart, web savvy persistent strategy at work. It’s not usually well funded but it’s very smart, it’s very well done. They target students, they target journalists. They’ve been doing that for 10 years with enormous success, with a staff of three people who can write op ed pieces for the Age or SMH at the drop of a hat and do so with alarming frequency. That tells us also about the style of politics that we need to engage in. It’s going to have to be smart and consistent and its going to have to think it’s way into the job ahead for us. We confront a long 21st Century we’ve barely started it. We’re well behind the eight ball at this point. And the question then is how do we start to think our way through.
In the paper I’ve written, which is regrettably a long one, I reflect on the nature of change and I reflect as an example of framing the way social policy has been constrained over the last decade by a pre-occupation with poverty. And I look at the way the debate has been shaped in the last few years in what is now called the poverty wars by the two Peter Saunders’. There’s the Peter Saunders who is the Social Policy writer for the Centre for Independent Studies and there’s the Peter Saunders who heads up the Social Policy Research Centre. Both have engaged around the theme of poverty. Both tell us why this has been a fatal error of judgement by the well intentioned progressives because most Australians now know that the poor, welfare beneficiaries are bludgers, are dependents, are at best members of a criminal underclass disposed to drunkenness, sexual immorality, drug taking, criminality and all the rest of it. They know that because the Centre for Independent Studies and Peter Saunders has been telling them this for the last fifteen years. They believe it because the Labour Governments of the 1980’s told this story as well with stories about welfare dependency and unemployed dole bludgers and all the rest of it.
The story is now well and truly embedded in middle Australia, amongst working class Australians, amongst elite Australians, that to be on the welfare is to be a certain kind of immoral person. The endless frame working that been done here has been successful. To think in terms of poverty, of the poor is now to be on territory well and truly claimed by the neo-cons. The neo-con profile, identikit of the poor is now the one that most Australians relate to and understand. And when the word welfare dependent is now used it conjures up this underclass of people living in places like Bankstown, Cabramatta or Broadmeadows. This is a huge problem. It is not going to be therefore helpful for the Peter Saunders, that I know and care for, at the Social Policy Research Centre at UNSW to bang on about how we need more poverty research - to indicate that we need more and better methodologies to catch the numbers of people in poverty. This is not going to now turn the debate around. It’s playing into the neo-conservative game which they’ve largely won at this point.
The first point then, to think our way out of the trap is to step aside completely, not to engage with that kind of debate. In the bulk of my paper I spell out an argument given for innovation in social policy. It rests on a series of propositions and it proposes a single, simple model. Based on ethical ideas like respect, like co-operation, like justice, social justice. It’s an idea that I’ve been associated with for some 15 years. And the idea is now embedded in some social policy networks in Europe. The idea is a simple one, it’s an idea, that’s all. Whether it’s a good idea or a bright idea is to be tested. The idea is called Basic Income. And there is now a well established network of social policy writers and bureaucrats in Europe who belong to the well named BIEN Network, the Basic Income of Europe Network, which is the French word for well-being. The Bien Network is situated in Brussels and it is now generating clever, interesting, experimental ideas in innovation in social policy.
Basic Income is a very old idea. It’s been embraced since the late 18th century when Tom Payne spelt out an early version of it, by all sorts of people across the entire political spectrum. As someone who has written about the history of social policy I’ve long understood that those ideas that get up in social policy, get up because they are attractive to a number of different interest groups. Basic income is a simple idea. It simply says that all citizens from moment of birth to moment of death get paid a basic income. No means test, no assets test, no activities test, no tests whatsoever. It’s a citizen’s right to receive basic income. The questions that you would have immediately in your heads as soon as I’ve said this is, at what level will we strike the level of income that these people, all Australians, receive? It’s an interesting question that no doubt would be very provoking to the community. And a very important debate would follow as we sorted out what this would actually need to look like. As an idea it would also have to go with, as Graham was indicating before, a very robust change in our taxation system. Basic Income would not break the budget. In the estimates that I gave to the Greens in the early 1990’s I indicated that a 10% to 12% increase in total social security budget would be required to fund the basic income model. But you certainly need to raise extra money by the taxation system, particularly in the income tax and property and wealth tax area.
Basic Income is an idea for our time. It’s an idea for the 21st century. It rests on the proposition that the old welfare state that we set up in the 1940’s is now obsolete. That the systems that we set up in the 1940’s, to provide unemployment benefits, sickness benefits and so on, is now irrelevant. And of course as we’ve seen in the last 15 years of so called reform introduced by the Hawke, Keating and now Howard Governments have produced an abusive, demeaning, humiliating and unrespectful system. Of highly intrusive and abusive social security. There is no sense of right or entitlement in the current scheme, it’s almost become a form of punishment for a low income people. This is a disgrace. A simple absolute, obscene disgrace. And any of you who read Mark Peals book, published last year The Lowest Rung will know the anger, the fury of low income Australians exposed to this system.
When I point out that one in three Australians, 37%, are dependent on our welfare system you understand that the welfare system is not just a minority of odd ball, weirdo deviants. This is a third of the Australian population now caught up in the mis-named welfare system. It’s an abusive, disrespectful system. It’s long overdue for radical change. At the moment however, because of the success in how the neo-cons have changed the terms of reference in which we understand welfare recipients, the large number of Australians, including many of them in the system themselves, accept the punitive and disrespectful logic of what is currently being done to them. And this again is very unfortunate.
The arguments for change seem to me to be compelling. There are three kinds of basic arguments. One is that the original structure of the welfare state that we created in the 1940’s no longer is sustainable. It rested on assumptions about full-time work, about the gendered nature of work, about who would get access to paid work and who would stay behind in the home and do the right thing for father and the kids. It rests on all sorts of assumptions that have simply fallen apart in the past 50 years. That falling apart was recognised in the late 1980’s by Bettina Cass when she carried out a major review of the social security system. But all they proposed in it’s place was the elements of what we’ve got now. A system which is increasingly abusive of fundamental rights. The second set of arguments in favour of basic income go to the idea of citizenship. Of what it means to be a citizen. Of what it takes in order to be a citizen in a world now in which full time work is increasingly less available, in which all sorts of new relationships are now being forged between what were once separate life activities. As a university teacher I now have to remind myself every week that I’m no longer confronting the kinds of students I was once part of in the 1970’s. Once you could be a full time university student only engaged in university study. Now you combine study with up to 20 hours of paid work each week. This is a sign of the social transformations which are going on underneath our very feet. There are new kinds of linkages, new kinds of relationships between what were once separate zones of human existence. And one of the most important and weighty arguments in favour of Basic Income is that it will sustain the linkages that are now needing to be sustained. If we now have a circumstance where 1.2 million Australians are in universities and another 900,000 are in TAFE. That’s 2 million out of a population of 20 million. How do we sustain that relationship between education and the rest of peoples lives? Basic income provides one mechanism for doing it. Basic Income would require and necessitate the sweeping away of all the current plethora of welfare and social support schemes. And their replacement with a single, simple, no doubt wonderfully electronic, transfer of funds on a weekly basis to every citizen in the country. It is possible to envisage technically that as a system that would work easily from the moment of birth to the moment of death.
We see in this the possibility for sustaining new forms of creativity as the third of the arguments, which I see as sustaining Basic Income as a transformative idea. We now understand that we are not, unlike the 1940’s economists, able to envisage a world of endless growth in economic production. We understand that we are on a fragile spaceship, whizzing around the universe at the rate of 66,000 kms per hour. We are very alone, it’s very fragile. It could be very lonely out there. We now have understood for the last 30 years that we are going to have to change the way we do things in fundamental ways. We don’t have at this point the kind of sophisticated infrastructure to permit that kind of change. Basic Income provides one simple mechanical basis for underpinning change and transformation. In our relationship with the natural world, in the changing kinds of relationships we are constructing for ourselves as we reinvent things like family life. As we reinvent new forms of fertility. I was much struck recently by evidence from La Trobe University, that the demographic group that is now the most fertile in Victoria are lesbian women. That is to say simply that we can no longer assume that the old order will simply keep unraveling out. There is radical change going on here. Some of it’s technological, some of it is social, some of its moral, some of it has to do with simply how some people want to reinvent life.
Basic Income again provides us with a simple economic basis to experiment for transformation for change. It does not require the kind of elaborate, again often humiliating, time consuming exercises, that I see some of my students engage in as they try and access the very complex income support system for themselves. We should not be wasting peoples time with what can now be a simple, administratively uncomplicated method of providing people with a basic income. It goes without saying that in the 15 years I have been an advocate for the idea of Basic Income its not gone without notice, it’s failed so far to make the big political development that you might have thought. I’ve spoken, for example, at the Council of the Aging and I found that the older Australians that Ive spoken to, median age 86, love the idea, thought it was a fantastic idea. When I talk to young people it’s a turn off. Not interested. When I talk to Unions they’re puzzled. When I talk to Greens they’re interested. So its an idea which is very much an experimental idea that is yet to be shown to be either a good idea or a bright idea. Good ideas should be embraced with alacrity and robustly. Bright ideas I think we’ve got to be careful about.
Basic Income is an idea in pursuit of a social movement base. It needs advocacy and to be embraced and thought through. Its not a detailed program for legislative change. Over a long period of time we could invent a system that ends up having in it all the core elements of what I understand to be Basic Income. That is simply one example of the kind of careful thinking that we need to do on the left. The left will go nowhere if it remains locked into an oppositional, critical, negating kind of political style in which it’s always debating on the other fellows terms. That is fatal. That is endgame for all of us. And at some point this building will become, what it is beginning to look like, a museum. It will go to remember what radical change embraced by social movements used to look like. That would be a tragedy too unthinkable to think.
So how do we engage in change? The basic problem is that the way things already are is the obstacle. But it’s the only place where ever going to have to launch out from. And we’ve got to think our way out to what that actually means. For me it means that we have to take some of the work that Grahams been doing in areas like urban transport and housing and so on, and turn them into good ideas. Ideas that have policy clout, that can pass tests of critical analysis which the neo-libs will put up endlessly in front of us. But we’ve got to regain the ascendancy. We’ve got to regain the momentum for change. It struck many of us here in the 1990’s in Victoria that the cleverest thing Kennett did, as an advertising man, was to understand that he was now the source of novelty, change and innovation. And that the left was now the conservative, reactionary forces for no change. He pulled that stunt off beautifully and we fell for it. In 1993 I remember going to a seminar invited to plan contemplate radical change for the 1990’s and the audience was hijacked by two people who wanted to have a debate on Kronstadt and its impact on the revolution in 1919 –21. Wow, I thought, this is really going to advance the fight for change in the 21st century. We’ve got to stop being backward looking, embrace the commitment to change and the fact that it’s a difficult project because change is never easy. And its too easy historically for the left to say, well, let’s have a revolution, worry about a change later. That was also a not very smart idea.
So I have a long paper, which is not a ramble in the way Ive been rambling. I promised Mary a rave and this is what a rave looks like. And if she wants to come backstage with me later I’ll show her what discipline looks like.