CHAPTER 12
Human attachments and affections are generally arranged as it were concentrically, first to family, then to friends, to work, to community and to the state, roughly in descending order of perceived importance. A welfare system which makes the state the first line of support in time of difficulty can expect to suffer from the alienation and anomie which accompany such a divorce between natural attachments and artificial obligations. Such a system can be made to work moderately well, but it goes against the grain and requires special effort, such as a bureaucratic investigative and policing mechanism. The difficulties are only compounded if -- as we have done -- we try to pretend that they do not exist. They are doubly compounded in a time in which, for relatively independent reasons, family status and morale is low and the family as an institution is subject to much unbalanced criticism.
Unfortunately, we understand very little about why family status and morale have fallen so dramatically. At the heart of this book there is a blank: in Chapter Seven it is argued that we have no good explanation of the increase in family breakdown in the past fifteen years. All the hypotheses presently in the field are found to be either deficient or else tend to suggest that family stability should have improved in that period. Most discussions do not seem to notice that there is something to be explained here. The Social Security Review, which set out to consider the financial position of families and appropriate family support policies, and which included the "increase in the formation of sole parent families" as one of the main determinants of the present situation, has devoted barely a single paragraph to the causes of family breakdown. (1) Some better grasp of the issues here seems urgent, for without it our collective self-understanding of family matters will continue to flounder. Even mere curiosity should prompt us to want to make sense of such a massive phenomenon. The distinguished historian Lawrence Stone, a specialist in family demography, has said of the international situation that "The scale of marital breakdown in the West since 1960 has no historical precedent and seems unique. There has been nothing like it for the last 2000 years, and probably much longer". (2)
On the question of causes Stone believes that we have no good general theory. At the end of the most comprehensive recent analysis, that by Roderick Phillips in Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society, we are "left hanging, faced with choosing between contradictory reflections of individual spouses, vague statistical correlations of sociological probabilities, broad socioeconomic models based on urbanisation and industrialisation, and the influence of cultural forces like individualism, secularisation, and sexual liberation". Of these, Stone suggests (following Phillips), the most important of all was "rising expectations of emotional, sexual, and economic fulfilment in marriage, hopes that were inevitably disappointed when faced with the rough reality of married life, with its critical in-laws, cranky children, disabling sickness, and the frustrating day-to-day grind of intimate cohabitation". (3)
Is the divorce phenomenon to be thought of as an epidemic or as a form of liberation? Stone goes on to remark that "Divorce in the 1980s is ... often a liberation from an often agonising relationship for both husband and wife. But it also often ends up as a financial bonanza for men, a financial and personal catastrophe for women, and a psychological disaster for the children". Why so many relationships have turned out to be agonising in this way we do not understand. Stone speaks of spouses "being traded in almost as cheaply and easily as used cars". He underestimates the "personal catastrophe" which men suffer after divorce, but he is surely broadly right about the "psychological disaster" for children. In response to this disaster Stone maintains that we need to think again about "no-fault" divorce. He believes that "An argument could ... be made that the divorce laws and divorce practice in the 1950s and early 1960s had the virtue of being free enough to liberate the desperately unhappy, but restrictive enough to make both spouses think long and hard before smashing up a marriage". (4)
Another distinguished commentator, David Popenoe, concludes his Disturbing the Nest: Family Change and Decline in Modern Societies, a comprehensive and intelligent survey of the international trends, with a "Personal Appraisal". Popenoe sees the family today as a "perishable social institution that is being quietly corroded by some of the social and cultural currents of our time". In his view the opposite to the natural ethos of family life is an individualism in which "self-fulfilment has become one of the paramount cultural values". (5) The most important recent shift has been away from a child-centred view of family life and towards an emphasis on the emotional needs of the adults. In Popenoe's judgment, "The trends of our time that are improperly labelled 'revolutions', each of which has advanced in its own way the value of self-fulfilment -- the sexual revolution, the feminist revolution, the therapeutic revolution, the welfare revolution, the consumer revolution -- have probably all played a role in the weakening of this main human relationship", the parent-child bond.
It has become clear that adults no longer need children in their lives, at least not economically. The problem is that children, as much as they ever did, still need adults. They need not just adults, however, but parents who are motivated to provide them with, in the words of Urie Bronfenbrenner, "enduring, irrational emotional involvement". Just any adults cannot ordinarily provide that environment, only parents (at least one, but preferably two). ... What is still required, and has no substitute in the technological realm, is an abundance of time, patience, and love on the part of caring parents. In short, children need strong families. (6)
Popenoe expresses the hope that "today's children of divorce, in view of what they have been through, will as adults take the lead in bringing about a more child-centered, familistic society". (7)
He also notes that in most modern societies, as divorce has been gradually made a private matter (though subject still to controls over the division of property, custody and maintenance), children have been given no legal protection against psychological injury. "With regard to the continuation of the parental bond, children are regarded as having virtually no rights at all". The oddity of this fact in an age preoccupied by personal rights and welfare provisions is certainly striking, yet it is almost never discussed. Popenoe adds that "in virtually every welfare state the growth of benefits for the elderly has exceeded that for children. If children were involved in formulating welfare-state policies, I have little doubt the situation would be different". He concludes that although the state cannot and should not try to force parents to stay together, "there is much to be said for making divorce more difficult for the parents of children and for the state signalling in various ways that family stability is extremely important to children and therefore to society as a whole". (8)
Neither Stone nor Popenoe claim to explain the trends in family life, but they agree that the tendency has been generally retrograde for children's interests. Fortunately, it does seem that we can devise appropriate social policies for families without any very good theory about the causes of family breakdown. The policies argued for in this book are based not on a speculative diagnosis of the causes of family breakdown but primarily on the requirements of justice between different family forms and between families with dependants and individuals without dependants. Whether a fairer social welfare and taxation system of this sort would help to reduce family breakdown we do not know, though we may suspect that it would, and we have no reason to think that it would have detrimental effects on family stability and success.
The basic message of this book is simple and twofold: Do not subsidise family breakdown. Do support families which care for their children by staying together. The book's basic claim is that at present we do subsidise family breakdown, and we do not support families which stay together. The book's main policy proposal is that the state should treat separated and divorced families exactly the same as it treats intact families. It is also argued that a taxation system committed to horizontal equity would eliminate many of the main perverse incentives in the welfare system. More generally it has been argued that the welfare state in Australia (and probably elsewhere) has been unbalanced in three ways: against families with children (and more generally against people with dependants), and in favour of independent individuals; against intact families, and in favour of families which break up; and (probably but not yet provably) against the young, and in favour of the elderly.
The contention that we subsidise family breakdown is of course controversial, so it is necessary here to restate in outline the argument for it. The argument takes two forms. One form rests on the claim that in general (though not always in particular) two-parent families are preferable to sole-parent families. Sole parent families tend to give children less support; and they are commonly formed by a separation and divorce process which children usually find emotionally traumatic, sometimes with severe and lasting after-effects. These are not tendencies we have any reason to promote. The appropriate social policy response must surely be to assist families to avoid these consequences, which would involve supporting two-parent families at the same level as we support sole parent families.
However, the evidence for these claims is (like so much social research) somewhat sketchy, and some observers take Paul Amato's view that the divorce revolution has done no lasting harm to children's "growth to competence". Even if that is so, the contention that we are subsidising family breakdown can be recast as a horizontal equity argument. No good reason has ever been given in the Australian literature why, for every dollar spend supporting children in two-parent families, we should spend about ten dollars on children in sole parent families. The common assumption that the needs of the two family forms are radically different is quite implausible. Families which split up are just an ordinary cross-section of the whole population of families, and they have the same social resources, educational achievements, occupational qualifications and child-rearing commitments as do families which stay together. Since the two forms are so similar in essentials there is no obvious justification for treating them as differently as we do.
In a time such as Stone and Popenoe describe, political leaders might seek to restore the self-confidence of families with children, and might sponsor policies which give families real status in society. At the least, responsible politicians should seek to do no harm to families. This book has argued that harmful policies are presently in operation in the Australian system; it has tried to show how they might be corrected; but it does recognise that to repair the damage will require considerable courage and wisdom.
The Hawke Labor Government has four achievements to its credit in the welfare and social security field. During its tenure of office unemployment has fallen from ten to six per cent; it established the Child Support Scheme; it built up the Family Allowance Supplement; and it shifted the emphasis in support of the elderly away from reliance on the pension and nursing homes and towards superannuation and assistance in the home. All these are significant improvements upon what went before. However, they go only halfway towards the generally accepted goals of equity and efficiency.
Unemployment has been halved by two strategies, by controlling wage demands and by enforcing stringent benefits criteria. (Rapid growth in the money supply has also aided job creation, though with seriously detrimental effects for inflation and the current account deficit.) In both cases marginal members of the labour force have been protected not by giving them more generous assistance but by protecting them from unscrupulous wage and benefit claimants. The success in this area suggests that pursuit of the same tactics could continue to eliminate the evil of involuntary unemployment. There is no obvious reason why the goal should not be to cut unemployment back to two per cent, as it was for thirty years after 1945.
The Child Support Scheme is important because it recognises the basic moral principle that obligations to one's children do not end with separation and divorce. Enforcement of fair maintenance payments can be viewed as a form of "protecting the vulnerable", though again this is not a matter of more generous payments. This book has argued that the basic principle here requires the elimination of all payments to broken families which are not also given to intact families. The argument is an argument for justice. Families which stay together should not be penalised for meeting their obligations to their children, as they are at present.
The Family Allowance Supplement (originally a Fraser government initiative), which assists working families and reduces the incentives to welfare dependency, has done much to alleviate the hardship faced by low-income families. But it too goes only half way. In reducing poverty it has created poverty traps. This book has argued that poverty traps are in large part a by-product of an inequitable tax system which fails to recognise the necessity of horizontal equity between families with children and individuals without dependents. To really protect vulnerable low-income families it is first necessary to establish a fair taxation system.
By encouraging superannuation, the Hawke Government has gone part of the way towards preparing for the demographic changes of the next few decades. But it is by no means clear that superannuation as presently structured will on balance significantly relieve the burden of the retirment income system on the taxpayer. Nor has there been any public discussion of the extent to which the elderly need an income-support system -- whether pensions or superannuation -- on the present scale. The Home And Community Care program has partly corrected the imbalance between the family and the state in aged care, but the carer's pension remains little more than a token.
At various points this book has touched on economic questions. The comments made at those points have made no pretence of economic expertise. Economists can make their own evaluations of the policies here argued for on equity grounds. All that has been presumed here is that a policy of justice for families would not be economically imprudent. It is assumed here that we do have available to us many purely economic strategies to improve Australia's competitiveness and thus to maintain our high living standards. Some of these have already been implemented, but our failure to pursue the obvious remaining strategies is more a failure of nerve than a failure of insight and argument. (9) Broadly, it seems best to proceed simultaneously towards both fairness for families and economic efficiency. There is no glaringly obvious conflict between the two, but if to some degree fairness does detract from efficiency then we should simply try harder to achieve both at once.
Both economic criteria and equity require an efficient welfare system -- a system with stringently designed eligibility tests, willing to eliminate welfare cheating, and with the primary objective of making recipients self-supporting as soon as possible. Some progress has been made in this direction by the present government but there is still a long way to go. If fairness for families is felt to be "too costly" then much could be saved in the social security and welfare area. Reducing unemployment to two per cent, eliminating lump sums to people contemplating retirement and tightening the assets test on pensioners would all be moves in the right direction. At present, if this book is right, it is families with children which are carrying the costs of these inefficient and inequitable practices.
Families, friends, community and the state are all, to some degree, welfare systems. The fact that there is more than one natural welfare system makes it difficult to evaluate the performance of any one system. We now put the emphasis on the state system, but no proof exists to show that this is the optimal approach. For all we know we might all be better off if we abolished the welfare state. This, however, has not been the main theme of this book. All that has been argued for here is a better balanced welfare state. We have a state welfare system partly because we have been living in a period in which the state has been powerful and has therefore tended to absorb functions previously regarded as outside its ambit. If, as we become disillusioned with its general performance, the power of the state is beginning to wane, so will its welfare functions tend to decline. This tendency is not at odds with this book's theme of the need for welfare balance. We can still insist that state welfare should decline in a balanced way.
In passing, the argument of this book has involved a deconstruction of the standard feminist "critique" of the family. That critique turns out to be tendentious, over-stated or plainly false insofar as it is distinctive, and to be commonplace and commonsensical when it is not. Liberal feminist thinking about public policy -- about taxation and childcare, for instance -- is little more than the special pleading of a narrow interest group, of a kind all too familiar in democratic politics. Fortunately, however, there is no need to construe the issues as a battle for and against the true spirit of feminism. At various points my argument has borrowed from the work of lively and intelligent women thinkers and social critics, some of whom have or have had at least one foot in the "feminist" camp. But the term is obsolescent, if not yet quite obsolete. "Feminism" so-called never did manage to speak for women in general; its portrait of men was rarely better than a caricature; it had no feeling at all for the interests of children; and it failed to see that families often embody the cooperative, communal ideals which it espoused more often than it practiced. It will not be missed. The obsolescence of "feminism" is matched by a similar irrelevance in the traditional "Left/Right" dichotomy. It is as pointless to categorise the political arguments borrowed in this book as "Left" or "Right" as it is to categorise the claims about personal life as "feminist" or "anti-feminist". Debate about "the family", which so often descends into name-calling, is far more fluid -- and interesting -- than those committed to rigid, partisan positions would like us to believe, but then partisan rigidity has always been the main enemy of free thought.
The power of the state has always had a tendency to mesmerise. Welfarism is in part a phenomenon of this kind. State power also tends to entrench special interest groups who enjoy selective incentives to act as what Olson calls "distributional coalitions". These are the forces which must be resisted if we are to achieve a balanced and functional welfare state. In democratic theory at least, the majority should have no difficulty in controlling such minorities, but in practice the matter is not straightforward. We may doubt that, on welfare matters, the majority opinion is being put and heard. This book has been an attempt to articulate majority opinion on family policy, but whether it has succeeded in this can not be known in advance. If it has not it may still have succeeded in expressing an alternative to the ruling but disintegrating orthodoxies in the field.
ENDNOTES
1. Cass, The Case for a Review ..., synopsis.
2. Stone, "The Road to Polygamy".
3. Phillips, Putting Asunder; Stone, op. cit., 15.
4. Ibid., 14f.
5. Popenoe, Disturbing the Nest, 329f.
6. Ibid. 330.
7. Ibid. 332.
8. Ibid. 335f.
9. See e.g. Kasper et al., Australia at the Crossroads (1980); Nurick (ed.), Mandate to Govern (1987); Marsh, Australia Can Compete (1988); Freebairn et al., Savings and Productivity (1989); and the Garnaut Report (1989).
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