When Peter Dutton proposed special visas to allow persecuted white South African farmers refuge in Australia, the uproar that his motivation was shameless, naked, racism underscores something deeper and more widespread in Australian politics: the narrative of ‘the deserving.’
You will see this narrative play out in almost any discussion of welfare. Slashing welfare to the poor, the unemployed, single mothers, take your pick: it can always be justified because these are the people who don’t ‘deserve’ welfare. The narrative plays out in different ways depending on the subject, but it’s always insidious and always aimed at persuading us to accept inequality.
What Dutton wishes us to believe is that white South African farmers, being hard-working, law-abiding, and – to use his slippery term – “civilised”, deserve our help. On the other hand, other oppressed peoples, having not demonstrated their work ethic or devotion to “civilised” ways of life as the South Africans have via their farms, don’t deserve it. Burma’s Rohingya, for example, haven’t earned their shot. Black Africans, who Dutton has been keen to paint as violent criminals, haven’t earned their passage to Australia the way white South Africans - with their respectable agriculture - have.
Black Africans, who Dutton has been keen to paint as violent criminals, haven’t earned their passage to Australia the way white South Africans - with their respectable agriculture - have.
The complexities of why someone might be unemployed aren’t the point, any more than a debate on whether Rohingya are as hard-working as white farmers would be. The point is that government has no business making policy on the basis of who deserves what. A parent might give their kid a treat because she deserves it: the government is not a parent and we are not its kids. The only reasonable basis for determining how to distribute funds is: need. Who needs it most, and where will it do the most good? Once the basis becomes “deserving”, it is incredibly easy to divide the population into the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’. This flawed justice rewards conservative ideological allies and punishes their ideological opponents.
We have to stop talking about who’s earned what, and start talking about who needs what instead.
Why should a jobseeker expect money for nothing? On the other hand, if a person has worked hard to get rich, shouldn’t the government reward them for that effort by… cutting tax to make them a little bit richer? And if someone is too damn lazy to get rich – in fact, too damn lazy to get a job at all – why should the government reward their lack of effort? Won’t giving money to people who don’t deserve it just encourage that sort of behaviour?
Take the current dispute over Labor’s policy on dividend imputation: the government and its boosters are going to the barricades to defend self-funded retirees from what is painted as a shameful grab at their income. Why? Because they’ve earned that cash refund. They worked hard, they invested wisely, they built up their own wealth, and they therefore deserve to be rewarded for it. Whether giving these retirees a cash refund is the most useful way to distribute that money is irrelevant to the argument, which hinges only on whether the recipients deserve government largesse. And, of course, once you reduce the argument to that question, the answer is yes: if they didn’t deserve it, they wouldn’t have their nest egg in the first place.
We have to fight against the narrative of the deserving. We have to stop talking about who’s earned what, and start talking about who needs what instead. When you hear someone spout phrases like “Australians deserve the best in health care” or “Our children deserve a world-class education”, you can stop them right there: what we deserve isn’t the point. What we need is. And letting the government decide who’s deserving and who isn’t is not the path we want to go down.
