Forget the Cashless Welfare Card - We're already doing something far worse.

You think this is bad?

I don't have the emotional energy right now to crunch the numbers on this, but whatever the figures are, you don't really need the specifics to get the principle.

So, there has been a lot of talk here in Australia about putting people on welfare on a cashless welfare card system. It's caused a lot of controversy.

So I'd like to float a hypothetical policy suggestion to see how it sounds to you, then I'd like to make some comments about it at the end which might surprise some people.

The Policy

So what my suggestion is that we cut all welfare payments in half.

What we do with the money saved is we take a small amount of it and give it to private institutions contracted to feed, clothe and provide services like showers and the like for the homeless (since they obviously won't be able to afford rent).

Now, say we give one of these organisations $280,000 a year to do this, what we do now is make sure that $200,000 of that goes to administrative staff on fat wages that do mostly nothing apart from protecting the institution financially and politically. So we'll need people to do the real work, and a place to actually get the food.



So what we'll do is do a big PR exercise to make people feel these institutions are charitable institutions so that that they are willing to volunteer to do much of the real work involved in caring for the poor - even better if we encourage them to do it themselves (which you have to be grateful for if you want to get volunteer position). Then we'll use the same PR to get businesses to donate food waste (much of it out of date...occasionally so rotten it gives you diarrhea).




Then we'll make sure that people can only use these services have to be supplicant and grateful for the favour of robbing them of half their income and replacing it with a rotten meal.

This has the added benefit of transferring the responsibly and accountability of caring for these people from the government to private institutions, so if anyone wanted to litigate, the government is off the hook.



Sounds pretty nasty, right? A lot worse than a cashless welfare card. You can at least choose the food you eat and buy, even if you can't choose where you shop, and at least it's fresh.

This has already happened

Unlike my policy suggestion, this did not happen overnight, it happened in increments.

Since Prime Minister John Howard put a freeze on Newstart, it's effective buying power has been reduced. Putting a freeze on a payment while inflation and other living costs are rising is the same as cutting the payment slowly over time.



Now, as I said, I don't have the energy to work out the numbers, but you can imagine that has already saved the government a lot of money. The price has been reduced living standards for the poor.

A small fraction of that money is being paid to charitable institutions to fill the gap at a fraction of the price. And because they are charities, people aren't looking too closely at what's being done with this money.

So welfare payments have been cut drastically, and a fraction of that saving is being used to privatise welfare.

Now where I eat a free meal they are often feeding us rotten food or food that is two years out of date. I have now heard multiple reports that I am not the only one getting sick from eating this food. In America, once it was discovered that the privatization of prisons was leading to rotten food being served, there was an outrage.



So how outrageous would that be if it were happening not only to prisoners, but the poor?

When I asked about the quality of the meals they said it's because they "have to rely on donations". But then I looked at the books (they are public because they are a charity) and found that donations are only 3% of their income. The rest is a government grant, the lions share of which goes to wages of people who sit upstairs doing what David Graeber would call bullshit jobs.



The real work - cooking, cleaning, caring - is done by volunteers downstairs.

As monstrous as my policy suggestion sounds, it has already happened. Silently, slowly and with no political discourse this is where we have landed.

Sorry if this is badly written or has spelling errors. I'm furious right now.