Civil conscription or reciprocal obligation: The ethics of 'work-for-the-dole'

The Coalition parties campaigned on the need to create 'real jobs' during the 1996 Federal election. After a number of years in office joblessness, both for young people and prime age workers, remains as high as ever. Yet as major companies and government agencies continued to downsize their work force, the Coalition government decided to respond to this central social problem by introducing a 'new' plan that initially required some young people (between the age of 18-24 years) to work for their unemployment benefits. Those 'eligible 'for participation in the program have been extended from its original 'youth target' to included older people. Prime Minister Howard maintained that his 'work for the dole scheme' will give priority to the long-term unemployed and thereby help jobless young people, who he claims have lost the incentive to work and/or become welfare dependents, to re-enter the labour market (DEETYA, 1998). In the first part of this article I query official justifications for the Australian workfare scheme; concentrating on the arguments for reciprocal obligation, I ask what those rationales indicate about government understandings of the causes of unemployment. In the later part of the article I assess the value of the scheme in terms of certain human rights criteria, arguing that it contravenes the Australian constitutions which prohibit any form of civil conscription. As I indicate, the workfare scheme provides little if any reasonable economic justifications, and none have been advanced by the Howard government. Although I concentrate on the Howard government's work-forthe-dole policy initiative, it needs to be made clear that the principle of reciprocal obligation is not unique to the Liberal National Coalition government, it provides the basis for similar programs in the UK, USA and Canada. It was also embedded in the Keating Labor government's 'Working Nation' and has been practiced within many Aboriginal communities for many years.