Business Council of Australia chief executive Jennifer Westacott recently asked what the national disability insurance scheme was trying to achieve, and if it would impose a cost we could not afford. The council is behind the program, in assessing a key issue for national productivity and casting judgment on its fiscal prudence.
The Productivity Commission answered the question 18 months ago. The goal of the NDIS is to increase the economic and social participation, and therefore productivity, of 410,000 Australians with severe disability.
This is what John Della Bosca, the national campaign director of Every Australian Counts wrote in his op ed a couple of weeks called This Scheme Makes Business Sense. That’s right. The point of the NDIS is to increase productivity. People with a disability are only useful to our society if they are ‘being productive’.
Whilst NDIS supporters have used a range of arguments to promote the scheme, recent coverage has been dominated with the use of economic benefits to promote its passage. Following on from Della Bosca’s op ed for example, a segment in The Project in the same week focused almost solely on the economic benefits of the scheme as the reason for its passage. On the following Sunday, Peter Martin wrote a piece on the increase of the Medicare Levy, saying:
Some things are worth doing precisely for the reason that they will boost Australia’s economic performance. Whatever its other merits, the national disability insurance scheme is one of them.
I’m not going to say that helping people get into work is a bad thing. Of course work can have positive impacts (although as I’ve noted before we have to be careful is assuming that work is always a good for individuals). But the use of pure economic indicators to promote social reform is becoming all too consuming.
We can see these argument across the policy spectrum. The Productivity Commission is becoming an extremely influential Government body – having major influence in policy ranging from the NDIS to climate change. Our arguments about high-speed rail seem only to be able to focus on ‘return of investment’, as if mass public transport doesn’t have other benefits. And education reform now seems focused on ensuring all students can ‘get into the workforce’.
This is part of a continued neo-liberal agenda that puts the economic individual at the heart of policy. The negative impacts of this are clear.
First, if we focus entirely on economic output, we ignore people who may not be able to be productive in the way we desire in our society. Whilst the NDIS has the opportunity to help many get into the workforce, there are many others who may not be able to. Framing everything about economic output means that those who may not be able to ‘contribute’ to our economy have the potential to get left out. If you can’t be productive, you’re not worth providing assistance to – you’re not a worthy part of our society.
And this really opens up big questions about our public policy priorities. Productivity and employment are simply not ends in themselves – they are means to get to other ends our society desires. We need an employment system so people can work to get the resources they need to survive, and productivity is about getting these resources as efficiently as possible.
Bertrand Russell describes this best in his piece, In Praise of Idleness:
The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human life. If it were, we should have to consider every navvy superior to Shakespeare.
As Russell points out in his essay, there is a lot more to life than work. Our desires to be part of a society, and to achieve enjoyment in ‘idleness’, or in other words to be able to do the things we enjoy in life, are what work should be about. It is these things that are often shown to have real impacts on human happiness and well being.
Yet, our economic focus has changed this. We are now treating productivity and jobs are an inherent good in our society. Everything is focused on growth and if you cannot add to that you are no longer worthy. And in doing so we have switched our priorities. Instead of using employment and productivity to achieve a social good – we are framing them as an inherent social good and basing all our policy around how to achieve them.
This is part of a growing neoliberal agenda, which the left wing movement is buying deeply into. Whilst we often think about neoliberalism as about individualist freedom – it is more than that. It frames this freedom in economic terms – turning us into economic individuals, rather than a society that is good in and of itself. Producing is the way for individuals to succeed. And left movements are now buying this wholly – whether it is linking the NDIS to productivity, talking about the jobs benefits of climate action, or unions being almost wholly obsessed with ‘jobs’.
After Margaret Thatcher died earlier this year, much of the criticism about her focused around her infamous statement “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” The statement was the worst example of Thatcher’s awful individualism . Yet, in the criticism of Thatcher’s individualism, we often forgot an important part – that individualism wasn’t just about ‘individual rights’ – but it was about an entire state of being and ‘usefullness’. The individual in neoliberalism is only useful if it is being economically productive – societies are a collection of people competing against each other to be economically productive.
And whilst progressive people and organisations were quick to criticise Thatcher, if we look at the way we deal with social policy today, we can see the ongoing impact of neoliberalism. Even when it comes to social policies that are supposed to be to heart of the left we have bought into an economic neoliberal agenda – one which puts the economic individual before our society. The society has been taken out of social reform.
* Feature image sourced from: http://everyaustraliancounts.com.au/images/NDIS_logo_htext_hires.jpg