It appears in his profound ignorance and overwhelming arrogance Australian Prime Minister and Liberal MP for Cook Scott Morrison intends to privatize the welfare safety net.......
Patreon,
“Testing
the limits of welfare in the age of the Prosperity Gospel”,
9 September 2019, excerpt:
Morrison has a very particular
view of how welfare should be approached. On one level, it is a sort
of neoliberal/austerity view, entirely at one with the direction of
government policy since the 1980s.
But
it is more complex that. Morrison seems to want to move to what we
might call a post-neoliberal approach, with welfare built around
financial instruments such as so-called Social Interest Bonds
(SIBs)…..
“To
put it another way, there is no money in ending poverty, but there is
profit to be had in meeting metrics that break 'the intergeneral
cycle of poverty and disadvantage.'
Regardless,
the whole approach ties in completely with Morrison's view that,
'welfare must become a good deal for investors' and that 'we must
make it a good deal' (emphasis added).
That
is to say, to be a good deal for investors, various forms of control
and discipline must be enacted upon welfare recipients in order to
help ensure targets are met and profits are realised via instruments
like SIBs.
Drug
testing and cashless welfare cards are two ways of doing that, and
that is why Scott Morrison is advocating them. He is laying the
groundwork for the introduction of instruments such as SIBs.
In
the meantime, he is more than happy for the State to be an 'enforcer'
without them.
