Progressive and collective social struggle is the path out of neoliberalim

The UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Prof Philip Alston, has criticised the Australian government’s robodebt fiasco in a paper examining the worrying global emergence of the digital welfare state.

This is characterised by increasing levels of surveillance, punishment and control over the lives of people who have been left out or pushed out, with the added feature of outsourcing and privatising these functions so that you get real neoliberal bang for the erstwhile public buck: punishment and profit!

In Alston’s words:

The cashless welfare card, cheerfully championed by a mining magnate and rolled out by a private company with ties to the Liberal party, is another example of what Alston condemned as being “unduly punitive and unduly harsh”.

Related: There is growing empathy for those on Newstart. The dynamics of welfare politics are changing | Peter Lewis

Apart from being punitive, disempowering, profiteering and perplexing, policies including robodebt, cashless welfare cards and mandatory drug-testing all meet another really important neoliberal need. Instead of doing anything to address the grinding inequality experienced by the people they are imposed on, they exacerbate it.

Apparently, in these cases, it is more than OK to do unto others as you would never cop them doing unto you.

So how would we go about building a path out of the neoliberal way of doing policy? Here are a few suggested principles:

1. Begin with the bleeding obvious

Be wary when you are told that a problem is too complex to fix. Or that by focusing on the bleeding obvious you won’t fix everything. This is usually accompanied by: “It’s not enough to just throw money at the problem. We have to think smarter.” (Code for: let’s cut spending on ordinary people so we can give tax cuts to wealthy people.)

The 2015 reform of the federation white paper consultation on housing began with the burning question of commonwealth/state relations rather than the obvious need for an urgent increase in the quantum of social housing. Similarly, the 2017 McClure review of welfare was keen on system simplification and income quarantining.

Astonishingly, we were told that an increase to Newstart was not within the review panel’s purview. It was as if every effort was being made to erase the bleeding obvious question of income adequacy.

It was a stunning exemplar of the old joke about the person asking directions and being told by their interlocutor, “Well, I wouldn’t start from here!”

The here is always the concrete situation people are in, not some secondary question or deliberate distraction.

Which leads to the second principle …

2. Lay bare the destination

Always question the stated purpose. It is sometimes a lie. Look for the context.

When a government says it wants to lift people out of poverty, alongside the assertion that “welfare dependence” is the primary cause of poverty, it isn’t hard to work out that, pious platitudes aside, the real aim is to reduce social expenditure.

When, in 2016, Christian Porter, announced an overhaul of the welfare system, he began with the cost of our social security system (instead of the human, social and economic cost of poverty and inequality).

3. Do not artificially sever the connections

Everything is connected to everything else. There’s usually another destination that multiple connected policy roads lead to.

This does not mean that you have to address everything in one go but it does mean that if you look at a problem in isolation from the connected issues you are asking for trouble.

Trouble, that is, for the people impacted.

To analyse the social security system it helps to consider what is happening in the labour market and industrial relations. Stagnant wages, increased casualisation, the standardisation of precarity, wage theft and a systematic war on the legitimacy of the union movement should all be seen alongside the attacks on unemployed workers and other people who exercise their right to use the social security system, people who are made to live not only in poverty but in the misery of deliberate disempowerment and neopaternalistic control.

Forcing people to jump through hoops in the social security system is of a piece with the attempted de-collectivisation of people in paid work.

The fear of being unemployed is a constant disciplinary reminder to the low-paid, underpaid, precariously employed and casually contracted.

Related: The nightmare of Australia's welfare system: 'At the push of a button, my working life was erased'

What emerges are two policy roads, one neoliberal destination. As long as you do not artificially sever the connections. As the poet and theorist Audre Lorde reminds us:

4. The best policy comes from collective struggles by ordinary people

I cannot think of a single instance in which a progressive social change did not originate collectively with the people on the ground, sometimes literally taking to the streets.

From women’s reproductive rights to First Nations people’s rights, from workers’ rights to tenants’ rights; from marriage equality to the climate emergency; from the struggle against patriarchy to the struggle against continuing colonisation; the policies that best address the problems are those that arise from the collective analysis and agitation of the people affected by them, in other words … the actual policy experts!

When policy, no matter how well-meaning, is developed apart from, instead of by, the people affected, it will not hit the mark. The presumption that people are incapable of analysing their own situation is inherently disrespectful and disempowering.

Progressive social change does not come from above. It is formed in the crucible of organised analysis and agitation, collectively, under the guiding stars of struggle and hope.

• Dr John Falzon is senior fellow in inequality and social justice at Per Capita. He is a sociologist, poet and social justice advocate and was national chief executive of the St Vincent de Paul Society in Australia from 2006 to 2018