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The poverty of poverty: the 'Poverty Wars' and the strange case of Saunders vs. Saunders are the worst way for progressives to look at inequality in Australia. No wonder the neo-cons like it so much.

Article Excerpt
The so-called 'poverty wars' got underway late in 2001 following the release by the Smith Family of a major report on the extent of poverty in Australia authored by Professor Ann Harding, director of the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM), an economic modeling unit at the University of Canberra. Professor Peter Saunders, social policy spokesperson for Sydney's Center of Independent Studies (CIS), launched a blistering attack on this report. The dispute was apparently about the extent of 'poverty' in Australia. Harding had used a computer model to produce an estimate of the extent of poverty. Saunders claimed this was an excessive estimate. Since then there have been occasional exchanges of fire at Saunders' criticism of various reports about 'poverty' by welfare organisations, such as Professor Tony Vinson's report for St Vincent de Paul, or the 2004 Senate report on poverty.

As with all such debates--especially those that come to be called 'wars'--the protagonists share more than they are prepared to acknowledge. In this case, both sides--in different ways--need 'poverty'. Whether the rest of us, in looking for ways to make a better society, need to think in terms of 'poverty', is doubtful.

On one side of this 'war' is the neo-lib/neo-con CIS, its journal, Policy, and Peter Saunders. Saunders is a former professor of family studies in the United Kingdom. An early convert to Thatcherism, he was brought to Australia by Prime Minister Howard in the late 1990s to be the Director of Research at the Australian Institute of Family Studies.

It would be fair to say that the CIS and spokespeople like Saunders (and Andrew Norton the CIS spokesperson on education) promote the usual array of pro-'enterprise' pro-'liberty' ideas common to the worldwide network of neo-conservative think-tanks whose history has been so well charted by Richard Cockett. The neo-cons have a huge vested interest in promoting poverty research and talking up the idea of 'the poor'. As Saunders indicates in his Kicking the Welfare Habit (2004), he wants nothing less than the dismantling of the 'welfare state'.

To the neo-cons, the 'welfare state' gives people...

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