The Coalition’s pledge to revive work for the dole and
income management has reignited the inevitable claim that those receiving welfare have a ‘sense of
entitlement’. The Prime Minister-elect’s own
pledge to build an Australia of ‘lifters not leaners’ is indicative of this.
The gist of this claim rests in an assumption of the moral or psychological
deviance of welfare-recipients that itself is an unacknowledged and
uninterrogated ideological stance.
The pejorative ‘leaners’ demonises those on welfare while
framing the struggle over needs in a way that avoids engagement with the
structural change that is required genuinely to bring along all in society in a
common endeavour.
