Worse, actually, because slaves are valued, whereas this government is about to use children against their parents as an excuse to deny them sustenance.
I wish I was making this up. Just as I'm sure the chronically ill, the disabled, the solo parents, and the petty criminals who are now all lumped in together with "ordinary" unemployed in the new "find a job or get nothing" regime wish it was a bad dream from which they'll soon wake. But no. Forty years of neoliberal greed has brought us to this. A society where the top five per cent have more than the bottom fifty, and are so far removed from need they cannot comprehend that imbalance is perpetuating dependency.
Else they'd do something genuine about it, with measures to re-balance the nation's wealth, instead of demonising the poor as the problem. Here's the real news: it is the rich who are the problem.
Creating jobs - even at minimum wage - with their wealth instead of buying bigger holiday homes or simply stuffing it into lucrative (overseas) investment funds would be a very good start.
And if you seriously believe there are already "jobs for all" out there, you're stuck in the 1960s.
Think people enjoy welfare?
That they want to have to scrape and beg through the rigmarole of endless paper-shuffling that is a beneficiary's lot, just to put food of the meanest sort on the table?
Do yourself a favour: go down to your nearest Winz office and stand in line for the hour or more it takes just to see the receptionist. Look at those in line around you: the ragged clothes, the depression, how much they mumble and shake. That's poverty and fear, pure and simple.
Fear that no matter how desperate their need, relief will be denied them.
And with these draconian changes, that fear factor just went through the roof.
When even your pre-schoolers are numbered, and because their number didn't make it to kindy this week your benefit is cut off and maybe not reinstated (if it is) for a month, what do you tell your kids when dinner is literally an empty plate?
Maybe you tell them this, from Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America: "The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high.
To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else."
Except that's those who do have jobs. All the unworking poor can say is, we have nothing more to give. Perhaps that's why they get the blame.
Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.
