The Politics of the Family

FOREWORD

This book originated in discussions in 1987.  Numerous aspects of modern society -- the divorce rate, the gradual weakening of the legal distinctions between marriage and cohabitation, juvenile homelessness and crime, the apparent increase in the incidence of child sexual abuse, to name but a few -- seemed to suggest that "the family" was in trouble.  It also appeared that these changes had coincided with the large expansion in Australian welfare programs since the early 1960s.  Similar things seemed to have happened in the United States since the "Great Society" programs of the 1960s, and indeed in countries such as the United Kingdom and Sweden.

The possible links between these phenomena seemed to demand investigation.  In the US, Charles Murray had shown in Losing Ground that people do respond to some extent to the financial and other incentives placed before them by welfare programs, and that a supply of welfare payments to some extent creates its own demand.

Little if any comparable work was under way in Australia.  Such writing as there was on the role and functioning of the family appeared to us to be either from a traditionalist Christian, usually Roman Catholic viewpoint, or from a "progressive" socialist or feminist sociological viewpoint.  These two schools of thought have little common ground, and, we felt, little appeal to the non-devout, non-radical majority of the population.  The policy proposals of both schools typically involve greater government intervention and government spending.  Despite pretensions to be "radical", proposals from the socialist and feminist side in fact just call for more of the same welfare state programs that are a partial cause of the evils they seek to alleviate.

Both sides, moreover, tend to deprecate or ignore economic considerations, both in the micro sense of how people respond to incentives and in the macro sense of what Australia's economy can afford.  The impact of family problems on the economy is substantial, most obviously via government spending and the associated taxation.  A frequent outcome of family breakdown is of course that one parent and the children rely for their income on the welfare system.  Other calls on the public purse linked with family breakdown include the family law system, refuges and other support for the homeless, and the costs of the police, courts and other institutions that deal with juvenile crime.

Ignoring the problem of paying for all this may reflect well on one's good-heartedness, but it also shows a depressing lack of practicality.  To discuss welfare without paying sharp attention to micro- and macro-economic factors is like carving a statue without paying sharp attention to the strength of the material and the distribution of the weight.  Get these things wrong and the statue will break or fall over even before it's finished.

Nevertheless, the family is not just an economic institution.  It is a complex of biological, emotional, economic, legal, and other kinds of relationship.  Investigations that forget this -- and many do -- are almost certain to omit some vital consideration.

All in all, there seemed to be a crying need for some radical thinking about the whole matter of welfare and the family;  radical, that is, in the sense of "from the roots up", and not of 1960s political activism.  Although the Commonwealth's Social Security Review was in progress, there seemed no likelihood that its recommendations would extend much beyond fine-tuning the existing system.  We therefore decided to commission a book-length study of The Family in the Welfare State.  We chose Richard Wood for the job because we wanted someone good at careful research and careful thinking, but without previous "form".  We gave him an open brief and -- when asked -- such assistance as was in our power.  We expected that as a philosopher and historian he would think clearly in this very complicated and often emotion-laden area, while life as a family man and sometime "house-husband" would keep his feet firmly on the ground.  The finished work, I feel, justifies this confidence.

John Nurick

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My own thinking has grown out of many years of talking with Julius Kovesi.  Though we did not much discuss the subject of this book, much of whatever may be good in it is in one way or another the result of his friendship, humour and wisdom.  It would be a better book had he been able to comment on more of it.  His death in August 1989 was a loss to everyone who knew him.

The book itself will show which writers and researchers I have found most constructive and interesting.  I am particularly indebted to those people -- perhaps a dozen in all -- who gave me their opinions on many of the topics dealt with in the book.  Without their encouragement I would not have had the confidence to trespass in so much unfamiliar territory.  I hope that I have articulated some of their concerns.

I also wish to record my thanks to the long-suffering Australian taxpayer, who supported me through my earlier studies in philosophy and intellectual history.  I would like to think that this book shows that years of wandering in remote centuries may eventually yield practical results.

In controversial matters it is more than usually necessary to emphasise that the arguments used and the conclusions reached are mine alone, and that therefore the errors are also mine alone.

I would like to express my gratitude to the following organisations, whose generosity made this project possible and who backed the idea before a word had been written.

ALCOA of Australia Ltd
Elders IXL Ltd
Hospital Benefit Fund of WA
Mutual Community Ltd
The Perron Group Trust
Western Mining Corporation Ltd

I hope they like the result.  Nevertheless, the fact that they supported the project does not mean that they agree with what the book says.

Richard J. Wood

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CONTENTS

1. The politics of the family
2. Welfarism
3. Welfare scepticism
4. The ideology of the family
5. Family finances
6. Children and taxes
7. Understanding family breakdown
8. Repairing the damage
9. Caring for children
10. Education and the family
11. Greypower, childpower and taxpayers
12. Conclusion
    Bibliography

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CHAPTER 1

"The Personal is Political":  it was with this mysterious slogan emblazoned across their breastplates that twenty years ago the early feminist leaders marched into battle against the serried ranks of male chauvinism.  Even now it is not very clear what the slogan means, or meant;  but it has not quite lost its capacity to sound revolutionary, or at least provocative.  Had the slogan read, "Some Aspects of Personal Life are Related to Some Aspects of Polities", the effect would have been lost, even if truth had gained.  But perhaps this mundane truth is an important one.  Amongst the multiple meanings that might be fixed to the not-very-illuminating words is the claim that the relation between the public and private worlds is more complex than is allowed by the orthodox distinction between state and citizen.  If this was roughly true twenty years ago, it is very much more apposite now.  The private world, against which the feminists were in rebellion, is largely -- but of course not wholly -- the domain of the family.  And the domain of the family is now very much a matter of political controversy.  Any survey of the boundaries of that domain is necessarily in part political.

Until recently, very little thought has been devoted to the relation between family policy and welfare policy.  Whole shelves of books have been written on welfare matters with barely a passing mention of the family.  Even the notion of family policy is relatively novel, at least in the Australian context.  Indeed, it will be an underlying tenet of this book that astonishingly little serious thought has ever been devoted to the role of the family in society, and that we are now reaping some of the effects of that neglect -- but a defence of this ambitious claim would require a separate and very different work.  This book's focus is contemporary and its intention is practical.  If it does no more than to collate some of the main questions that need to be considered under the heading of "family policy" it might serve a useful purpose.  If in passing it also manages to raise some of the larger and more puzzling questions about the relation between family and society then that will be incidental to the main design.

Family policy matters are now inescapable even for the most hard-headed and practical-minded of politicians and policy-makers.  It is no longer possible to regard family questions with the easy-going acceptance or indifference of earlier generations of social thinkers and planners.  Brigitte and Peter Berger exaggerated very little when in 1983 they entitled a book The War Over the Family.  The battle has been much more violent in America, which was their main subject, but it is acute enough in Australia.  The basic issues are the same here as they are in all advanced Western societies.  The following list of Australian family policy problems -- in no particular order -- would probably be easily recognisable in a dozen other countries:

• General assistance to ordinary families with children has tended to decline over time.  Those who wish to curtail welfare spending see family allowances as a prime target for further reductions.  Many parents feel a sense of financial crisis and believe that they need (and even deserve) greater social support in the form of increased allowances or tax relief.
• In response to this sense of financial difficulty the Family Allowance Supplement has been created to assist low-income working families.  The allowance is also designed to improve the incentives for families to take poorly paid work in preference to welfare benefits, but in pursuing this aim it has also created "poverty traps" -- high effective marginal tax rates with significant workforce disincentives.
• The divorce rate has tripled in the last twenty years.  It is estimated that between a third and two fifths of all recent marriages will end in divorce, many within the first ten years, many involving children and many resulting in loss of contact between the children and their non-custodial parent
• A high percentage of divorced couples re-marry, indicating that the institution of marriage is still popular, but the break-up rate for these couples is slightly higher than that for first marriages, suggesting that the difficulties of sustaining marriages are often too deep to be solved simply by a change of partners.
• Divorce law has been shifted from a fault basis to a no-fault basis, but "easy" divorce has led to no noticeable reduction in the ill-will and hurtfulness generated by the divorce process.  Post-divorce property settlements and issues about access to children are frequently controversial and sometimes end in violence and suicide.
• The Sole (formerly Supporting) Parents Benefit, introduced to assist sole parents at the beginning of the rapid growth in the divorce rate in the 1970s, has now become a major part of the welfare budget.
• A more rigorous system of maintenance payments has had to follow (though very belatedly) the Supporting Parents Benefit, as increasing numbers of non-custodial parents refused to support their children and the cost of Supporting Parents Benefit became increasingly burdensome to the community.
• The rapid increase in unemployment and the divorce rate in the late 1970s has put many families, and thus many children, close to poverty.  Long-term dependency upon welfare payments has become chronic for some families, and may be passed on from generation to generation.  Many families have found it difficult to work their way out of poverty, because of high effective marginal tax rates.  The combination of Unemployment Benefit and Supporting Parents Benefit is such that in some circumstances it favours couples who choose to separate.  The more basic question of how to prevent child poverty by helping families to stay together has been studiously avoided by those in a position to influence policy.
• The number of children born without a father available to support them has increased nearly threefold since the mid-70s.
• The proportion of abortions to live births has risen rapidly.  For every three children now born, one is aborted.
• Women, the traditional mainstays of family life, are now choosing to devote a much larger portion of their lives to the paid workforce, even to some extent when they have young children.  The reasons for this change are partly economic and partly to do with personal fulfilment.  This has been accompanied by an increasing demand for taxpayer-funded childcare services to assist the workforce participation of women.
• Many women who choose to stay at home with their children feel that their choice is belittled and neglected.  Underlying this feeling appears to be a major decline in the social status of family life and the work done by parents to sustain families and marriages.
• Feminism, which has dominated discussion of many family issues, is frequently hostile to the family, and portrays the family as a bastion of male privilege.
• Domestic violence, typically the violence of men against women, is now an important issue for social policy.
• Sexual abuse of children is becoming recognised as a major problem, though the question of how much this phenomenon is to be thought of as an intra-family problem is at present controversial.
• The fertility rate is now at an all-time low, and has fallen below the replacement rate.  Some welcome this as a necessary recognition of the limited resources of an overpopulated planet and a dry continent.  Others see it as a failure of confidence in our social future.
• As the proportion of young members of the population declines, the proportion of the old increases.  This increasing longevity poses a question about the capacity of the working population to support the old at the levels presently accepted.  At the same time as many of the elderly are enjoying an unprecedented opportunity for independence and leisure, some seem consigned to lives of loneliness and neglect
• In a period in which expenditure per child on education has doubled and yet serious doubts exist about whether educational standards have risen, debate about education has begun to take an interest in the interaction between families and schooling. ⁽¹⁾

Not all these questions will be discussed in this book.  The rights or wrongs of abortion is the most notable omission, though not of course because it is any less important than the topics which are dealt with.  Child sexual abuse is a subject for specialists with wide experience in child health and welfare.  Domestic violence is discussed only briefly, and then only in the most general way.  Little is to be said about fertility and population size.  The remaining matters are material enough.  The book will attempt to serve both as a survey of current thinking on the topics covered and as an independent critique of existing policy and practice.  The first four chapters attempt to clear the ground, by putting aside a variety of feminist and welfarist preconceptions which cloud the real issues.  The next four chapters deal with the central topics of the book, money and marriage.  The last three consider life-cycle stages -- childhood and old age -- and their place in social policy.

In matters as hotly contested as these all are, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to state the issues without seeming to prejudge their evaluation.  To make matters very much worse, policy-making requires some grasp of how these elements interact.  The developments mentioned are, though familiar, still relatively recent ones from a longer historical perspective, and some of them lack any historical precedent.  We can expect that the process of coming to some understanding of them will be a slow one, and that it will require intelligence, imagination and freedom from ideology.  A variety of viewpoints will be required, for no-one has a monopoly of wisdom in these matters. ⁽²⁾  Certainly, the old approaches of Left and Right are unlikely to be of much help.  Any new approach will need to be sensitive to the wishes and aspirations of families as they actually are, but what this entails in practical terms is very far from clear.  If some of the positions taken in this book seem to the reader extreme, two points need to be kept in mind before judgement is passed:  one is that the book may sometimes go to those extremes partly in reaction against what seems to the author as the premature fossilisation of debate imposed upon the subject by welfarist and feminist premisses;  and, more importantly, that the real test of an argument is not whether it is "extreme" or "orthodox" (or "fossilised") but whether it is well grounded and well reasoned.  Wherever possible the claims to be made here will rest upon assumptions, authorities and evidence accepted by those who may not share the conclusions drawn from them.

Social theory is a matter of following the argument wherever it leads.  Social policy is to some extent a different matter, involving compromise with those who do not see the issues in the same light.  This book attempts to be uncompromising about substantive questions, but it need not be read as unwilling to compromise in practice.  Most of all, however, it seeks to avoid the combination of rudderless pragmatism and ideological huffing, puffing and bluffing which has bedevilled discussions of this subject matter.

THE DOMAIN OF THE FAMILY

Remarkably, after all that has been said against the family, and all that is manifestly or apparently problematic about it, the great majority of the Australian population continue to identify with the battered old model.  After all the social changes of recent times, and despite the undeniable evidence of considerable breakdown in many families, this central allegiance has changed very little.  The staying power of this institution is beginning to be reckoned with.  "The family" is now busily being "discovered", at least by some of those for whom it was somehow mysteriously lost.  This is probably no bad thing;  but having for so long been ignored and neglected, families are unlikely to be carried away by the new-found enthusiasm of those previously indifferent or hostile to family interests.  After two decades of "liberation movements", most of them raucous and some of them savage, the notion of a "family liberation movement" has a distinctly comical sound to it, however appropriate the substance of such a movement may be.

Governments, always on the lookout for new and appealing slogans, are already starting to dress up their old programs in the clothing of family policy, and there will be a rash of family policy tokenism in the next few years.  We should not be taken in by this, however well-meant it may be.  The danger is that cosmetic alterations will be passed off as real improvements.  What we need is some hard thinking about what a really family-centred society would be like.  And because the subject has been for so long ignored, there are no ready-made answers to this question.  Good answers will have to accept the fairly rigorous conditions of proof now properly required by economically responsible or "dry" governments.  This book will try to make out a strong case for generous public support for families.  But in passing it will try also to weed out weak and partial special pleading for family policies.  Not everything that calls itself a family policy is designed to help all families.  To be successful the argument will have to establish that families are not yet another special interest group lining up for a government handout.

Three cardinal principles will inform the argument of this book.  The first is that the family is a miniature society, a social unit.  The second is that in producing, caring for, and educating children the family contributes to the good of the wider society.  The third is that in caring for dependants -- young or old -- the family is a welfare institution.  All three principles, stated simply, may seem innocuous, but the consequences which follow from them are likely to be regarded as controversial.  They certainly conflict with much of our present practice in this area.  The principles themselves may also turn out to be controversial when the consequences become apparent, so it will be part of the book's strategy to argue not just from but (as far as possible) for first principles.  The public good and welfare aspects of the family will be considered in later chapters.  Since we are here thinking about the relation between the state and the family it is appropriate to think for a moment about the family as a social unit.

Amongst the many matters of family policy which require serious thought is the general question of the domain of the family.  Very little has been said about this in policy discussions, yet it is of considerable importance.  Like states, families are social units.  They have their own boundaries, their own domestic policies, and their own foreign relations.  A conceptual border exists between the family and the state, and between the family and the individual.  To obliterate these distinctions is in effect to pretend that the family does not exist;  but it is no more accidental that we have families than it is that we have states.

This point may be clearer if we think about cases where the family trespasses on the domain of the state.  When family-based organisations such as tribes, clans and mafia-type syndicates evolve their own legal and policing machinery we quite properly protest that they are setting up as "a state within the state".  Similarly we would protest against nepotism if we suspected family favouritism in appointments to the public service, though the same sort of favouritism is unobjectionable in a family business.  But we are far less sensitive to interference by the state in the internal life of the family.  We do not, although we should, protest against the state setting itself up as "a family within the family".

The operations of clans and mafia are perhaps not current problems in Australia, but the trespasses of governments are certainly of topical interest.  Should, for instance, government policies be designed to help mothers join the workforce?  Or should they be designed to encourage women with dependent children to stay at home?  These questions are very similar to the question whether warrior tribesmen should be allowed to carry weapons.  To recognise that there are boundaries here is to accept self-denying ordinances.  As a tribal warrior I may think that I could do a better job than the police.  As a feminist or anti-feminist policy-maker I may think I know what is best for families.  I may even be right.  But a boundary is not a boundary if it does not permit people to be foolish, wrong-headed and perverse.  And in any case there is no good reason to expect that in general policy-makers will possess greater insight into most family issues than that already possessed by family members themselves.

To argue in this way is not to say that the state should never interfere in the family.  Membership of a family is not a licence to practise murder, violence or sexual abuse on fellow members of the family.  Likewise, it seems very plausible to argue that the whole of a society, as embodied in the state, has a responsibility to give all children a fair start in life beyond that which their family can give them.  Children are as much the future members of the whole society as they are future adult members of the family into which they are born.  But while there are grounds for state intervention in extreme cases, there are in fact many matters in which we readily agree that there is no role for state interference in family decisions.  The state should not decide how many children we should have, except perhaps in situations of famine or disease.  It should not dictate how we bring up our children, except to prevent extreme abuse.  It should not attempt to settle ordinary domestic disputes.  It should not prevent mutually agreed divorce, though it does have some role in seeing that children of divorcing couples do not suffer too greatly from the outcome.

A similar set of questions arises about the relations between families and individuals.  All family members are also individuals, and all have interests of their own separate and distinct from the interests of their family.  A family which did not recognise this would be oppressive, just as would a state which did not recognise the separate interests of individuals and families.  A family which assigns all the drudgery to the mother without permitting her to foster her talents is an obvious example of such injustice.  But it can just as easily be the case that individuals can harm their family by pursuing their own interests.  Parents can do this by becoming engrossed in their careers, or even in housework, forgetting the needs of their children or their own parents.  Children can do it by becoming selfish and grasping.

Whether in any particular case family relations have become unbalanced is often difficult to determine even by the family members themselves.  Friends of families know how much caution and tact is required before they risk intervening.  Social workers and teachers face the same dilemma.  Exactly the same tact and caution, only multiplied many times over to allow for the imbalance of power in one direction and knowledge in the other, should be demanded of the state when it decides to intervene in family affairs.  Respect for this principle will incline us to put the onus of proof that intervention is required on the state.  The general rule should be that the state may intervene only in extreme cases.  Put in this form the rule seems unobjectionable.  Applied to actual situations it leads immediately to controversy.

Consider the following question:  Should the state take up a moral stance in favour of the "traditional" two-parent family or should it aim to be neutral between different family forms?  The above rule suggests that it should be neutral, but the result conflicts with current practice.  Since changes to divorce legislation and welfare benefits policies in the mid-1970s it is not at all clear that the state does anything to sustain the two-parent family.  It can be argued that in providing benefits to custodial single parents that are not given to dual-parent families, public policy is far from neutral about family form.  At present total annual Commonwealth expenditure on single-parent families exceeds that for assistance to two-parent families, although the children in the latter outnumber children in the former by about eight to one. ⁽³⁾  (In fact, as Chapter Five will show, the position of two-parent families is far worse than this contrast suggests.)  The obvious replies to this claim are not very convincing.  Supporting Parents Benefit, it will be said, aims to assist with the costs of children or to compensate for the custodial parent's difficulty in joining the workforce.  But dual parents have the same costs and one partner has the same difficulties.  It will be said that (barring unemployment) the two-parent family at least has one income.  But there is no clear reason why a separated or divorced couple cannot still share an income.  To argue this is not to claim that there should be no payments for single parents, only that if we are to have such benefits then on equity grounds similar assistance should be extended to two-parent families.  This argument will be pursued more fully in Chapter Eight;  it is introduced here merely to illustrate the way in which family policy questions return us so rapidly to first principles.

To treat the family as a social unit is most likely to be resisted by those most committed to change (of whatever sort) in the internal structure and behaviour of families.  How families are changing, and how they ought to change, are matters in which we all have some interest.  Active social research and lively public debate, in which a wide variety of viewpoints is encouraged, can only be beneficial.  However, a vital distinction needs to be drawn between influencing family change by public discussion and causing changes by public policy action.  It is often taken for granted that a good case for change is a good case for government action which favours such change.  This would be unobjectionable if it could be done in such a way as to expand the options of all families.  In practice it usually requires action which restricts the freedoms of some families in order to expand the freedoms of other families.  Change by persuasion is so much to be preferred to state-imposed change that the latter, however well-meaning, should be considered only as a last resort.

THE FAMILY AND THE INTEREST GROUPS

Family policy is, inevitably, political, though how it relates to the traditional divisions of political debate is an open question.  To understand the political fortunes and prospects of the family we need some wider context.  A brief sketch of the political and ideological changes in Australia of the last two decades is unavoidable.  Matters of family and welfare policy are not merely technical questions for specialists.  They affect us all.  Changes in these matters become part of our social history.  Without some picture of our recent social history we cannot see where we have come from, nor where we ought to be going, yet the question of where we have come from is always as difficult and controversial as the question of where we ought to be going to.  The following sketch lays no claim to detailed verisimilitude;  it attempts only to put a point of view different from that found in conventional accounts of the matter.

For a very long time the political world has been neatly divided into two parts, quaintly known for historical reasons as the "Right" and the "Left".  The average voter may have found it difficult to define these terms, but he or she knew that they roughly corresponded to a division in the social order between the middle and the working classes.  The aim of the Right was to preserve and enhance the achievements of the propertied business and farming sector, seen as the domain of the middle class;  the aim of the Left was to promote the interests of the workers and to protect the poor.  This was an immensely convenient fiction.  It was relatively easy to know where you stood on most issues.  It was relatively easy to know who was with you and who was on the other side.  The mythology sometimes came with a standardised catalogue of heroes and villains.  However acrimonious divisions within each party at times may have been, the metaphors of Left and Right were thought to mark a major rift running across the political and social landscape which could be taken for granted by all participants.

Yet while this dichotomy dominated political debate and allegiance, the political and social behaviour which took place under its auspices gradually came to exhibit some very powerful convergent tendencies.  In almost every corner of society the attitude grew that government existed to be exploited for all it was worth.  It became the overriding aim of innumerable interest groups -- some enormously powerful, some minuscule -- relentlessly to persuade and pressure governments and parties to provide for their own particular and eminently worthy "needs".  A magical, new word -- "funding" -- entered common parlance to symbolise this trend.  Tariffs, subsidies, regulations, grants, concessions, rebates, services, reductions, discounts, favours, positions, privileges, committees of enquiry, advisory bodies, and many other "lurks and perks" proliferated, until the art of politics became that of being seen to be doing something for everyone, where "everyone" consisted of the collective membership of these innumerable lobby groups.  And for all practical purposes it must have seemed that everyone did belong to one group or another.  The list was impressive enough:  big businesses, big unions, farmers, students, environmentalists, age pensioners, feminists, sporting bodies, professional groups, multiculturalists, teachers, Aborigines, welfare organisations, animal liberationists, old Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all.  It used to be said that the preferred social policy of the farming community was to individualise its profits and to socialise its losses;  this now became the primary strategy of anyone with the power to put it into practice.  At the same time each group cultivated its own rhetoric of "rights", until the moral universe was populated by as many rights as there were good causes.

The proliferation of interest groups in recent times has been an international phenomenon, but in Australia it has been aggravated by the unique centralised wage-fixing system -- an Antipodean freak of social evolution -- which has functioned as a parallel polity, with exactly the same weaknesses as the official political structure.  The system is quasi-judicial rather than democratically elected, but this distinction has made no discernible difference.  In this period (at least until the 1985 Wages Accord) the Arbitration Commission was bombarded with demands for pay rises which bore little relation to the harsh realities of stagflation and high unemployment.  The Commission could no more resist the demands of the entrenched interest groups -- both unions and employer organisations -- than could the elected representatives.

Even with the wisdom of Solomon, no politician -- or Arbitration Commissioner -- could be expected to adjudicate intelligently between all these conflicting claims.  With the rather ordinary quotient of wisdom that politicians enjoy, the results were, very predictable.  Total public sector outlays as a proportion of GDP grew from 28 per cent in 1970-71 to 33 per cent in 1975-76, 35 per cent in 1980-81, and 38 per cent in 1985-86. ⁽⁴⁾  Commonwealth social security and welfare expenditure grew more or less in parallel to this expansion, from (in 1986-87 dollars) $6,4 billion in 1970-71 to $12.9 billion in 1975-76 to $16.1 billion in 1980-81 to $20.5 billion in 1985-86. ⁽⁵⁾  It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the growth of government, and not any item from the agenda of one or other of the parties, is the central political event of the last twenty-five years.

There was one small logical difficulty in all of this:  if everyone gets something from government then in effect no-one gets anything, for whatever government has to give away it must first take from those who seek to benefit.  The difficulty was swept aside.  All it showed was that all parties should renew their efforts to get a little bit more than anyone else.  But the greater the demand for funds, the harder it was for government to meet it.  The high tax rates required encouraged creative accountancy:  at all levels of society, from the unemployed to small self-employed tradesmen to family farmers to highly-paid professionals to big corporations, an enormous amount of mental energy and financial ingenuity was devoted to the gentle art of avoiding taxation.  The process was self-generating:  the success of the unscrupulous lowered the ethical barriers of the moderately self-interested which in turn made the more high-minded wonder why they should stick to principles recognised only by themselves.  The growing demand for government spending was a major reason for the huge budget deficits of the 1970s and most of the 1980s.  These deficits were only partly funded by selling government bonds;  printing paper money for the remainder was government's own creative accounting.  The consequent inflation both whittled away governments' accrued debts and introduced Australians to the phenomenon of bracket creep, the insidious increase in revenue arising from the failure to index income tax thresholds.

In this stampede of self-promotion and self-interest two groups were left behind:  the PAYE taxpayer and the person with a family to support.  And the burden was borne most heavily by the PAYE taxpayer with a family.  The PAYE taxpayer, however virtuous or villainous he or she might aspire to be, could do very little about the taxes extracted directly from his or her pay packet.  As a consequence the proportion of PAYE tax to total Budget receipts grew from under 25 per cent in the mid-1960s to pass 30 per cent in 1970-71 and peak at 43 per cent in 1981-82, since when it has declined slightly.  (Chapters Five and Six will seek to show that the Australian taxation and welfare systems are considerably biased against families with children, particularly two-parent families.)

The stampede of the 1970s, while it has not quite run out of steam, is gradually losing momentum.  Economic reality has begun to intrude, and necessity is beginning to make us if not virtuous then at least relatively prudent.  The pork barrel has been scraped to the bottom.  Government, we have discovered, is not an endlessly self-regenerating Magic Pudding.  The old clear-cut Left/Right dichotomy no longer dominates political argument.  The differences within each of the two main parties are now greater than the differences between them.  It is less interesting to know whether a person or a politician is Liberal or Labor than to know what kind of Liberalism or Laborism he or she supports.  It is also less important to know whether someone is a "worker" or an "employer" than it is to know whether he or she favours a more efficient and internationally competitive economy.  Much of the traditional "conflict" between "labour" and "capital" was (and still is) a highly elaborate form of shadow-boxing, more appropriately judged as a theatrical genre than as a representation of social reality.  The long history of collusion between big business and big labour unions whereby each in turn employs government to protect its own interests against those of the ordinary consumer, the ordinary worker and the ordinary family is, with any luck, coming to an end.  A deregulated society, if we achieve one, is likely to be less exciting for those who find the theatre of politics exciting;  but it is also likely to be better at maintaining average living standards, thereby allowing us to pursue other, more exciting and civilised interests.

The confidence that the Left once placed in government as the instrument for controlling and correcting the alleged imbalances of a market economy has been eroded.  It is now widely believed that a productive economy is not incompatible with the interests of the working class.  Deregulation and privatisation are gaining acceptance as possible strategies for improving living standards for all.  All parties accept that the current account deficit must be brought back to earth.  An efficient public service is considered a high priority.  Tax avoidance and evasion are being brought under control, and the tax base has been broadened.  Wage rises have been kept within some limits.  These changes have not yet brought about any great alteration in the structure of politics or the economy.  Savings remain inadequate and productivity growth is minimal;  the high current account deficit is evidence of these unsolved structural problems.  But at least we are no longer dominated by the blind conviction that any such changes will be automatically disastrous.  Economic deregulation has to be preceded by this kind of ideological deregulation.

At the heart of this process of ideological deregulation are two conflicting theories:  the theory of market failure, and the theory of government failure.  It was Adam Smith who observed that "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices".  Two hundred years later we know there is equal truth in the proposition that people engaged in the process of government seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise taxes.  The choice between markets and governments may be seen as a choice between two different kinds of "conspiracy".  The real question is which is more easily detected and controlled.  There are good reasons for thinking that in general markets are better at controlling prices than governments are at containing taxes.  The much-derided competition that markets entail is both more efficient and more humane than competition for the spoils of government.

It was the idea of market failure (with some assistance from Keynesian economics) that cleared the ground for post-war large-scale government intervention in the economy and in social affairs.  The idea was that in many matters markets do not operate efficiently to serve the general interest.  The particularities of this thesis matter less here than the once commonly-accepted assumption that government is, in general and all other things being equal, more rational than market processes.  Because they usually do not involve conjoint deliberation, markets and market prices appear irrational.  Governments, on the other hand, do involve centralised decision-making and deliberation, and thus appear to be rational institutions.  This contrast is a conceptual illusion.  All else being equal, conjoint deliberation is no more likely to be rational than the multitude of decisions which go into market processes.  Indeed, the presumption should be the other way round:  very much more deliberation, cumulatively, goes into the setting of market prices than can possibly pass through the narrow bottle-neck of government.  Also, the quality of information about people's needs and wishes is superior in market decisions, because each person knows his or her own needs and wishes better than can any person representing them.  And, further, people are more careful about what they do with their own money than they are about what they do with other people's.  On grounds of both quantity and quality of deliberation, then, we can assume that market decisions tend to be more rational than those made by governments.

Government failure is a theory forced upon us by two or three decades of experience of governmental attempts to correct what was perceived as market failure.  The theory (made familiar through the television series Yes, Minister) contends that government employees -- public servants -- are no more altruistic than any other kind of employee or employer.  They are as much committed to securing their own advantage as to promoting the good of the public.  This is not to say that they do not serve the public, only that they do so within a certain framework.  Public servants, for instance, do not recommend the abolition of their own positions, even if those positions have ceased to serve any essential purpose.  The public service unions make it practically impossible to lay off any workers, no matter how redundant they may have become.  Public service management has an interest in expanding the programs it supervises and maximising the number of persons who work under its supervision.  Because its efforts are dictated by political considerations rather than economic necessity, it has difficulty in setting and policing standards of efficiency.  Because its internal structure involves no close connection between performance and reward there are few incentives to find new, cheaper or otherwise better ways of achieving the goals of the organisation.

But perhaps governments are more humane, even if less efficient, than markets?  Perhaps sometimes they are;  but, phrased this way, the question is being begged.  Efficiency and humanity are not necessarily mutually exclusive.  Socialist societies are notoriously inhumane, not just in the sense of being very often brutal, but also in the more mundane sense of requiring shoppers to spend half the day queueing to buy a small quantity of poor quality food or clothing.  This form of inhumanity has little to do with economic incapacity and much to do with government inefficiency.  The limitations of socialism are now apparent even to many socialists;  by comparison commercial societies look like lands flowing with the milk of human kindness, even though markets require little sense of mutual goodwill between participants.  The point is borne out by the contrasting standards of living enjoyed by ordinary workers in East and West Germany and in North and South Korea.  These examples do not show that some hybrid of government and market societies is not more humane than the pure form of either, but any argument along these lines needs to show that the hybrid will not inherit genetic defects from its government component which will override the genetic strengths of markets.

Government failure has not gone unnoticed by the electorate.  As a result, governments have now discovered that they can do things which once would have seemed electoral suicide.  They are not locked into ideological stereotypes.  They can over-ride the pleas of narrow interest groups.  Short-term pain will be borne by voters if there is a reasonable prospect of long-term gain.  There is more to good political leadership than buying the maximum number of votes at the lowest possible price.  All this is of vital importance in determining the future of welfare policy.  There is no painless solution to welfare problems.  There are justifiable long-term approaches to the issues but to achieve them will require resolution and intelligence of the kind now slowly beginning to be applied to our economic ills.  This intelligence will not come from thinking conducted in the hardened old ideological categories.  A rethinking of welfare matters will require the same sort of mental flexibility.

The discoveries here referred to were made by a Labor government, as recently as 1984-85. ⁽⁶⁾  It need not have been Labor that made this discovery.  In the 1950s and 1960s it was the Left which supplied most of the ideas for changing society and the Liberals who implemented them;  today ideas for social and economic change come from the Right but are put into practice by the Labor Party.  The preceding Fraser Liberal government talked some of the rhetoric of the New Right, but the almost universal hostility to economic rationalism that it encountered amongst manufacturers, trade unions, the welfare lobby and the press persuaded it to return to the ways of its predecessors.

A new set of distinctions is needed to understand this change.  The central metaphors of the new politics are "wet" and "dry", or big and small, government.  (Perhaps "drunken" and "sober" might be more descriptive.)  These concepts measure a government's resistance to expenditure pressures, whether they come from the Left or the Right, from labour or capital, from the poor or the rich.  Wet and dry governments operate with quite different public expenditure criteria.  Under the downpour of wet government the reasoning was that if X is a good thing then X is a good thing for governments to do (and, equally important, be seen to be doing).  Dry government asks the simple question, "Yes, but why should it be the government that does it?"  This question is not easy to answer.

Governments, we would all agree, have a responsibility to care for the public interest.  What is needed here is the ability to distinguish sharply between special interests and the public interest.  The problem is by no means purely theoretical.  Every special interest naturally (sometimes even sincerely) attempts to represent its cause as being in the public interest.  The public interest is by its very nature such that no-one can be taken as its authorised spokesman.  And it needs to be borne in mind that the public interest often might be best served by government doing nothing at all.

But further than that, we need to come to grips again with the notion of social justice.  Without this central concept we cannot hope to develop impartial public policies.  For some time now the dominant notion in social advocacy has been that of a "right".  This term has now been exploited and abused so comprehensively that it would be better if we could delete it from the lexicon.  A few decades of peace and quiet would do the word a world of good.  The notion of a right is the natural rhetorical ploy of every special interest group because the concept allows us conveniently to overlook the question of what that right is based on.  Rights, after all, are rights.  If I have a right to do or get X then I have that right and there's no more need for discussion.  Or so we assume, though the argument is blatantly question-begging.  The fact that my opponent cannot see that I have this right is taken to be neither here nor there.  The fact that the notion of a right is necessary primarily to distinguish between the claims of two plausible but conflicting proposals is somehow forgotten.  The fact that rights can be forfeited goes by the board.  And the fact that rights entail responsibilities is equally downplayed.

A reduction in the dominance of interest group politics, while necessary on both economic grounds and as a matter of justice, is also an important goal for anyone interested in the welfare of families.  It might be going too far to imagine a constituency of virtuous hard-working families struggling to raise children in the suburban mortgage belts who were left behind in the rush for the spoils of government.  Some who fit this description were also members of the grasping interest groups.  But many were not, and for obvious reasons.  Political activism requires an economic base, as radicals so often remind us.  At the end of the day -- for parents of young children the phrase is more than a cliché -- raising a family does not leave much spare time, energy and money for political wire-pulling.  Perhaps also the inclination to engage in such gamesmanship diminishes as other responsibilities crowd in.  Many who fall into this category have no deep convictions about old-style Left/Right partisanship, which they observe like side-on spectators at a not very exciting tennis match.

In the seventies, raising a family, though still the preferred mode of life for most of the populace, was not an activity which commanded much social or political status -- nor does it now, for that matter.  Indeed, it would be difficult to name a politician, a party faction, a political lobby group or a social "movement", in that era of lobbies and "movements", which spoke up for the interests of families (the Australian Family Association and the Australian Institute of Family Studies were begun in the early eighties).  The exception who proves the rule here is B.A. Santamaria, a figure whose unflagging advocacy of family interests made him seem eccentric and unfashionable to moderates and outrageously provocative to radicals.  But the political weakness of families in this period is a natural consequence of the growth of interest group competition.

There are also deeper structural reasons at work here, the logic of which has been clarified by American economist Mancur Olson.  Olson argues for the paradoxical conclusion that relatively unrepresentative groups are usually more effective in manipulating the state than are widespread but diffuse interests.  His detailed explanation of this apparent paradox, and the historical evidence for its truth, is presented in his The Rise and Decline of Nations.  Here we are concerned only with its practical implications.  Olson notes, for instance, that

In no major country are large groups without access to selective incentives generally organised -- the masses of consumers are not in consumers' organisations, the millions of taxpayers are not in taxpayers' organisations, the vast number of those with relatively low incomes are not in organisations for the poor, and the sometimes substantial numbers of unemployed have no organized voice. ... By contrast, almost everywhere the social prestige of the learned professions and the limited number of practitioners of each profession in each community has helped them to organize. ⁽⁷⁾

On Olson's account, industry associations and trade unions are at the same end of the spectrum as the professional bodies;  and clearly (although he does not discuss this case) families are at the dispersed, disorganised and diffuse end.  The exception to this rule -- an exception which tends to confirm the rule -- is the single parent family, the interests of which are protected by the well-organised welfare lobby.  (The evidence for these claims does not need to be taken on faith here -- it will be presented more fully in Chapter Five.)  Whether the rise of the elderly as an interest group can be accounted for by Olson's account is perhaps more doubtful.  The age pension seems to provide a focal point for joint action which otherwise would not be possible.

Olson's theory is a theory about political life between elections, and in a democracy the voter can to some extent restore the balance which is threatened by the natural tendencies of the pressure group process.  However, even democracy does not serve family interests particularly well.  Children do not vote:  this fact is both blindingly obvious and universally overlooked.  It is one of those facts so much taken for granted that it is never mentioned, much less justified.  Yet children are individuals and they have needs and interests.  If the purpose of democratic politics is to represent the needs and interests of individuals then there would seem to be a good case for enfranchising children as well as adults.  This vote would have to be exercised for them by their parents, but a proxy vote is certainly better than no vote at all, particularly if it is exercised by those best placed to understand the child's interests.  With growing maturity children could make their views known to their parents, and the process of discussion between parent and child would play an important part in their political education.  Such an extension of the franchise would also do much to restore the political balance back towards those who do the once-respected work of raising the next generation.

ICONOGRAPHY AND FAMILY VALUES

So far in this discussion two general claims about the "politics of the family" have been made:  that families tend to suffer when governments take it upon themselves to interfere in their internal affairs;  and that families tend to suffer in societies organised into interest groups competing for the spoils of big government.  Later in this book these points will be taken further.  Here a third and final political point might be made:  "the family" is not a symbol which belongs to any one party or position on the political spectrum, nor need it have any special ideological affiliations, and there is nothing in the ordinary traditions of both "Left" and "Right" politics to justify the ideological suspicion and hostility to the family which have been so prevalent in recent times.

Of all the political options currently available, concern for the family is usually identified as a preoccupation of the so-called "New Right".  ("So-called" because what is referred to under that description is neither new nor Right.  It would be better known as the Old Centre.)  Many family policy issues, it is true, do lie in the borderlands between liberalism and conservatism.  When free market thinkers start to talk about the social importance of the family they are immediately confronted with what seems to their assailants as a nice knockdown argument which attempts to pit their liberalism against their conservativism.  Michael Stutchbury puts the argument this way (referring to Liberal Party leadership difficulties):

As fashionable economic dries, the Liberals are supposed to worship laissez faire -- individual freedom, diversity and heterogeneous outcomes.  This tends to be how markets work best.  But, as social conservatives, they are drawn towards prescriptive moralising, curbs on individual behaviour and rigid homogeneous outcomes. ... Social conservatives tend -- sometimes cynically -- to exploit "the family" as some sort of idealised social norm. ⁽⁸⁾

If this is a fair description, is there a contradiction here?  The argument assumes that to be committed to a free market economic philosophy entails a commitment to free market thinking in all areas of life.  But maybe the family is not to be thought of as a kind of market arrangement?  Maybe freedom is not the only social good?  Perhaps markets work best in one way and families in another.  This does not seem too outrageous a claim.  Perhaps stability and security are important in private life, and especially in the care and upbringing of children.  Families, after all, need to manage children who have not yet acquired the independence of adulthood.  If the family is a welfare system, then perhaps it is not a market system.  Few, if any, libertarians would deny the need for some social welfare system, though they may prefer it not to be state-run.

Commitment to a family does entail some curbs on individual behaviour, but who would claim that it does not?  But then, if family life is not reducible to the pursuit of individual self-interest, perhaps markets are not so different.  Markets also require restrictions.  A free market philosophy might maintain that people should uphold their private commitments, just as they should honour their promises in the market.  On the other hand, families are free to adopt their own ways of doing things in many aspects of life:  support for "the family" does not require prescriptive moralising about how to run a family.  Nor is it obvious that families produce "rigid homogenous outcomes", whatever they might be.  As almost everyone grows up in a family it is hard to see how "the family" might be accused of stifling diversity.  Some family policies might be designed to increase the range of choices open to families, and could be seen as libertarian.

Australian society does not dragoon people into starting families;  it is very hospitable to the decision not to have children.  But most people do choose to form families of their own.  To express some support for this decision can hardly be construed as defiantly or daringly conservative.  Most Australians favour parliamentary democracy, but it would not be thought remarkable if a politician said he thought their preference a good one.  Is democracy an "idealised social norm"?  No doubt democracy is flawed, and so too perhaps is the family, but their popularity and the absence of any remotely credible alternative ensures that they both merit a central place in our society.

Unfortunately, Stutchbury's remarks are typical of the way in which some journalists comment on this subject.  It is they, rather than the public, who are the victims of stereotyped thinking;  and it would be a pity if sensible family policies had to be delayed until such people managed to struggle free from such self-imposed intellectual limitations.  A more serious cause of delay might be the assumption, which Stutchbury makes, that family policy is somehow the prerogative of what he thinks of as "the Right".  Suppose it were the case that conservatives had given more thought to family matters than the so-called Left.  So what?  If a policy is a good one then who cares who brings it in?  In a world no longer regimented by the ideologies of the past, Labor should not feel inhibited about borrowing "conservative" family policies.  Contrary to the conventional iconography of this subject, there is no reason at all to regard support for the family as conservative.  It is a long-standing part of working class traditions, in Australia and elsewhere.  If Labor wishes to regain contact with its traditional constituency, and with its own tradition, it could hardly do better than to start here.  But, in any case, no party in Australian politics has given much serious thought to family issues.  The field is wide open for anyone with the imagination and initiative to take it up.

The argument of this book will make quite a lot of the ethical importance of family and work.  When this sort of notion gets discussed in the press -- in connection with Mrs Thatcher's references to "Victorian values" for instance -- the tone of the discussion is usually one of condescension or ridicule.  The not-so-veiled implication is that these values are perhaps fit for shopkeepers' daughters, but they bear little relation to the enlightened world of the late twentieth century.  Work and family, we are being asked to believe, are merely the totemic cults of the petty bourgeoisie.  But are they?  Of course they are not, as anyone who stops to think can see.  It is a fair bet that few of those who write in this vein could bear to be deprived of their work or of their families for a year or even a month.  Most people who face enforced idleness hate it, and few who choose idleness voluntarily make any creative use of it.  This is not surprising -- it is the way things have always been in most societies.  The only exceptions are tribal societies, where commonly the women did almost all the work, and aristocratic societies, where the men cultivated a military ethic.  Neither is a very attractive alternative.

Such attitudes ought to have no place in left-wing thinking.  No social movement has emphasised the importance of work more than has socialism -- it even claims to derive all value from labour.  The socialist tradition has had much less to say about love and family life than about work and production, but it has not neglected them altogether.  Engels' anger at what he saw as the forced disintegration of working class family life in the Manchester slums in 1844 fed into the Communist Manifesto.  And, at another level, the young Marx aspired to assess all human relations by the criterion of how well they compare with the natural relationship between man and woman.

The immediate, natural and necessary relationship of human being to human being is the relation of man to woman. ... From this relationship one can, therefore, judge man's whole level of development. ⁽⁹⁾

How much can be read into this cryptic but suggestive section of the Early Writings is difficult to say because the thought in them is not expanded or followed through elsewhere, but it can hardly be insignificant that it immediately precedes his first full high-flown description of "Communism" as "the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man, the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species". ⁽¹⁰⁾  If Marx thought that all of this is encapsulated or foreshadowed in the natural relation between men and women then he rated the importance of that relation, and presumably also of marriage and family life, very highly indeed.

It is interesting to turn from Marx to another patron saint of twentieth century thought, Sigmund Freud.  Erik Erikson tells us that

Freud was once asked what he thought a normal person should be able to do well.  The questioner probably expected a complicated answer.  But Freud, in the curt way of his old days, is reported to have said:  "Lieben und arbeiten" (to love and to work). ⁽¹¹⁾

If Freud is right, the capacity to love and the capacity to work are the basic elements of sanity.  Freud was thinking of individual sanity but there is no reason why the same test might not be applied to measuring the sanity of a society, just as Marx also argued from the relation between individual men and women to wider social relations.  One need not be a great admirer of Freud or Marx in any other respect to see that their judgements are not to be lightly dismissed.

However, yet another "eminent Victorian", one more unreservedly deserving of our admiration, is worth hearing on these questions.

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.  You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.  You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage payer.  You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class-hatred.  You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.  You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man's initiative and independence.  You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could do for themselves. ⁽¹²⁾

The speaker is Abraham Lincoln.  Lincoln's attitude to family matters is aptly symbolised by the occasion when, during the deliberations of the Civil War, his young sons interrupted a Cabinet meeting by opening mock fire upon the officials with a toy cannon, and Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy had to restore peace.  A good deal of his greatness lay in his refusal to allow politics and public life to take itself too seriously or to interfere with his domestic and family affections.

Lincoln, Freud and even Marx, it appears, did not share the now common disdain for "Victorian values".  (The term is itself a misnomer, since the values are not exclusively Victorian, nor were they particularly well exemplified by the Victorians.)  We need not contend that these values were universally esteemed until recent times -- we know too little about intellectual attitudes to the family, in particular, for confident generalisations.  All that is being claimed is that blanket presumptions against family and work are alien to our main traditions.  The sentiments expressed by Lincoln, Freud and Marx may be platitudes but they are platitudes which have now been the subject of strenuous efforts aimed at their refutation.  It may be that they have now stood the test of time better than their negations.  We do not need to accept them in their finest details to allow that in general they manifest a better grasp of the large questions of social policy than do those negations.  Indeed, it is very difficult to imagine a society in which the values of work and love, of creation and procreation, are not central for most of the population.  They are the values which the great majority of Australian people -- whether "working" or "middle" class -- practise and affirm,

Any defence of the importance of the family in personal and social life is, tediously, guaranteed to produce the accusation that the defence is nothing more than nostalgia for some past time, usually thought of as the 1950s.  This objection is itself a device for avoiding real debate.  It reduces discussion to the level of mere imagery and style, as if social policy decisions are tantamount to the judging of a fashion parade.  This stratagem is characteristic of the "New Class", a category whose members might be defined by their distaste for "capitalism" and "the family", a legacy from the radicalism of the 1960s and 70s.

Sometimes the "nostalgia" objection is fleshed out with details of all that was wrong with life in the 1950s -- the conformism, the anti-intellectualism, the xenophobia, the sex role stereotypes, the backbreaking drudgery performed by women in the home.  This version of the argument seems to invite a response in kind, as if defenders of the family must show that these complaints are invalid.  It is tempting to return the compliment:  Is not the New Class itself conformist (in a fashion-conscious way), anti-intellectual (style substitutes for argument), xenophobic (it seems actively to dislike anything "Anglo"), stereotyped (women must on no account be seen to be doing anything domestic), and in favour of drudgery (the "Feminist Mystique" requires women to prove themselves in the workforce at whatever cost to their private lives)?  Mirror images of ugly objects are not themselves usually very attractive.

But it is better to decline this gambit altogether.  The objection is simply irrelevant.  There is no necessary connection between a belief in the importance of family life and any of the things complained of above.  Les Murray captured the flavour of "New Class" politics in a 1976 essay which is still remarkably apt.  Murray's remarks are worth quoting in full:

The new class is the natural upper class of a socialist world order, and has come into existence as it were in anticipation of that order.  In it, tertiary education plays a part analogous to that played by land ownership in past ascendencies:  it is a central but not an entirely exclusive organizing principle.  Just as a university degree or some ability in the general field of letters or the higher fornication could gain one a place in the English gentry of two centuries ago, a certain radical style can get one into the new class now.  Style, in fact, is probably the broadest common denominator of the new ascendancy, and one of its most important cohesive principles.  Another feature that is diagnostic for the whole class, above and beyond all of its apparent divisions, is its tendency to see all opposition to it as being right-wing, and to use fashion as a weapon of defence and attack. ⁽¹³⁾

Murray added that "The new ascendancy has, if we want to be dramatic about it, captured most of education, much of the arts, and much of fashion in Australia";  and he predicted that it would "get into the corridors of power again", though perhaps not under the aegis of Labor.  Its survival skills, according to Murray, involve "a powerful psychological safeguard built into its belief system, the image of itself as a valiant, downtrodden band bearing aloft the torch of enlightenment against all oppression".  Murray thinks that "We have reached the age of privileged, often subsidized martyrs". ⁽¹⁴⁾

The "New Class" phenomenon Murray describes is familiar enough, not least in the world of welfare policy and practice, and his speculations about it are interesting;  but the notion is perhaps unlikely to figure strongly in any would-be scientific sociology.  As a device in argument the concept is as obviously ad hominem as the comparable usage of the term "the right" about which Murray properly complains.  What is needed most in discussions of "the politics of the family" is a refusal to use fashion and style as weapons of defence and attack.  Sociological aesthetics is no basis for social policy.

The remainder of this book will endeavour to concentrate on matters of substance.  In this chapter three main claims have been made.  One, that families are social units possessing a degree of autonomy, which governments should respect.  Two, that families with dependent children are not well able to compete for the spoils ef big governments, and they tend to fall behind in periods of intense interest group competition.  Three, that there is nothing in the mainstream Australian traditions ("Left" or "Right") to warrant the now-common suspicion of families or to warrant the neglect of family interests which -- it will be argued -- is now built into the Australian social system.  But before pursuing the question of family interests, we need to examine the fortunes of the other major welfare institution, the welfare state.

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ENDNOTES

1.  For a very fair-minded and cautious survey of the international trends see Popenoe, Disturbing the Nest.

2.  Readers are recommended to consult Eastman's Family:  The Vital Factor for another recent, interesting analysis of Australian family policy issues.

3.  In 1987-88 Family Allowance expenditure amounted to $1355 million and Family Allowance Supplement $213 million, about 85 per cent of which would have gone to two-parent families.  The budget for sole parent families included $1525 million for Supporting Parents Benefit and Allowances, and an unknown proportion of the $1000 million outlay for the Widows Pension Class A.  (How many Class A recipients are widows, and how many are divorcees or never-married sole parents, is not disclosed by the Department of Social Security.  The Class A pension has recently been subsumed under what is now known as the Sole Parent Benefit.)  At the time of the 1986 census about 5,500,000 children were living in two-parent families and 550,000 in sole parent families (Census 86 -- Australian Families and Households, ABS Catalogue No. 2506.0, Figure 1.1.)  Adding the taxation contributions to the sole-parent/two-parent comparison would only accentuate the disparity between the two:  two parent families are generally high tax payers, and sole parent families pay little in tax.

4.  See Hyde, Deregulate or Decay, 37.

5.  See Hendrie and Porter, "The Capture of the Welfare State", 24.

6.  It will be remembered that the change of mind took place almost exactly at the time when senior members of the Labor Party were doing their best to vilify "the New Right" whose ideas they immediately set about borrowing.

7.  The Rise and Decline of Nations, 34f.  See also Olson's Australia in the Perspective of the Rise and Decline of Nations.  It is notable that consumers, families and the unemployed have never been represented in the deliberations of the Arbitration Commission (now the Industrial Relations Commission).

8.  Australian Financial Review, 17 August 1988.

9.  "Private Property and Communism", 154.

10.  Ibid., 155.

11.  Erikson, Childhood and Society, 229.

12.  Quoted in Conway, The End of Stupor?, 144.

13.  The Peasant Mandarin, 148.

14.  Ibid. 149.