IF MUTUAL OBLIGATION IS THE ANSWER, WHAT IS THE QUESTION?

Abstract

Introduction Over the next decade, mutual obligation will undoubtedly come to be viewed as the Howard Government's major legacy to Australian social policy. In the early years of the Howard administration, mutual obligation was cast as the Australian version of Blair's `third way' and the Clinton administration's `new deal'. However, unlike the welfare reforms of the UK and US, the underlying policy approach that mutual obligation represents remains ill-defined and surrounded by implementation controversies. At different points, various government ministers have invoked the language and ideas of a range of social philosophy positions from Marshall's social citizenship through to Mead's new paternalism--and many others in between--in order to justify or explain the government's mutual obligation policy. The difficulties generated by the mutual obligation policy prompted the Howard government to commission a Welfare Reform Reference Group in late 1999 to address several aspects of its policy. There is much to commend in the resulting report of the reference group--now referred to as the McClure Report--and according to national media its basic premises received broad community support at the time of publication. Such widespread support was unsurprising given that the report adopted an approach which insisted on matching responsibilities and duties with social rights and benefits, within a `framework of reciprocity', which aims to `help individuals and communities develop their capacities for [social] participation' (McClure, 2000: 32-34). For us, the issue is not to question citizens' reciprocal obligations, or to challenge the interdependence of various social actors but rather to ask how such obligations are likely to be distributed in policy implementation. Our quarrel is not with the normative assumptions adopted in the McClure Report but rather with the vagueness of those assumptions. Such imprecision has the obvious benefit of attracting wide consensus concerning `shared values' but it has the undesirable effect of leaving open both the range of possible justifications for such policy and the precise processes of policy implementation. Mutual obligation, as policy, thus runs the risk of offering a vague solution to even more vaguely posed questions which range from concerns about a perceived growth in welfare dependency through to concerns about meeting social obligations to care for vulnerable citizens. For example, one style of policy implementation of mutual obligation may be justified through interpretations derived from Lawrence Mead's distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor, such interpretations often involving a moralistic and punitive aspect (Mead, 1997). At the same time, mutual obligation may allow interpretations which stress the reciprocal call upon all members and groups of a community to pool the costs of the risks to which we all are vulnerable and to protect those most exposed to these risks. What is unambiguously, and correctly, represented in the report is the widespread concern and anxiety over issues of responsibility, security and risk. (1) The manner in which the mutual obligation component of Australia's `new deal' is conceived and implemented is likely to have profound effects on the future shape of Australia's social security system as a whole and, for this among other reasons, it is worthy of close and critical scrutiny. In what follows we attempt first, to bring some clarity to what is at stake in the redesign of the Australian welfare system; second, to give prominence to the problem of contemporary risk as the pertinent question that lies behind the need for welfare reform; third, to offer a critical contrast between Lawrence Mead's approach to welfare reform and an approach more compatible with Marshallian social values; and finally, we suggest practical ways of understanding mutual obligation that do not sacrifice the moral defensibility of welfare reform initiatives to purely pragmatic factors. …