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Is there such a thing as welfare dependency? While, everyone agrees that increasing numbers of Australians are reliant on welfare, they differ vastly on the causes and potential solutions.

Article Excerpt
In recent years, the notion of welfare dependency has loomed large in Australian welfare policy discourse.

The 1999-2000 McClure Welfare Reform Review, for example, was driven by a concern that too many Australians of workforce age were dependent on government income-support payments and that their poverty was due to individual rather than structural characteristics. The then Minister for Community Services, Senator Jocelyn Newman, referred to a 'culture of welfare dependency' that prevented unemployed people from accepting jobs that were available.

Hence the emphasis of the review was primarily on individualistic solutions to social and economic exclusion, involving greater demands for the economic and social participation of recipients. Yet many left-liberal analysts point to entirely different definitions of this problem, based on exploring structural barriers to social and economic inclusion and facilitating the social and economic empowerment of the poor. These analysts reject the concept of welfare dependency as inherently ideological and pejorative, intended to focus attention on the individual flaws of the person who is poor.

This raises the question of what welfare dependency precisely means, given the apparent association of the concept with neo-liberal political and ideological agendas. Arguably a relatively neutral definition might incorporate the following: the increasing (and prolonged) financial reliance of individuals or families on income-support payments for their primary source of income.

From this definition, we can reasonably discern a major increase in the numbers of working-age people receiving income-support payments over the past twenty years. According to statistics provided by the Department of Family and Community Services, the proportion of working-age Australians receiving forms of income support has doubled since 1980, from approximately 10 to 20 per cent, to reach 2.8 million people. In particular, there were major increases in the number of people receiving unemployment payments (from 3.4 to 7.3 per cent); lone-parent payments (1.7 to 3.1 per cent); carer, partner and parenting payments (2.4 to 3.9 per cent); and disability support payments. There is also some evidence that the children of income-support recipients are more likely to claim income support payments.

Of course statistics do not necessarily tell the full picture. Some of these recipients entered the system not because they switched from paid work to welfare, but rather because policy changes (for example, around support for low-income or part-time workers with dependents) widened eligibility for income-support payments to new categories of people. Government publicity campaigns have also contributed to increases in the number of recipients of parenting payment. In addition, there is significant contention (prompted by Bob Gregory's recent research) regarding the extent and longevity of lone-parent reliance on Parenting Payment Single Income Support (PPS). Whilst the average spell on PPS appears to be short-term and limited to somewhere between two and three years, Gregory has claimed that most PPS recipients have a long-term rather than short-term reliance (about twelve years) on the overall income-support system.

Regardless, it does seem reasonable to conclude that there is significant growth in the number of working-age Australians relying on income support. The key point...

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