Real welfare reform

Noel Pearson, aboriginal Australian and "visionary", is about to attempt a revolution in welfare delivery. He believes if this approach doesn't work then "there is not much hope."

Pearson's vision, 20 years in the making, underpins a radical experiment that began last week in Coen, Hope Vale and two other Cape York communities — Aurukun and Mossman Gorge — turning 30 years of welfare orthodoxy on its head. The pilot project, run by the Cape York Institute, will redefine access to welfare, paying incentives for behaviour that improves education, health and the prospects of the next generation finding work. But with money will come obligation. Under the project template, a families commission in each community — a panel of perhaps two elders and a retired magistrate — will be empowered to make orders that dictate and direct payments, using sticks and carrots to require, for example, that children not only get to school, but are rested and fed and capable of learning. If a parent is drinking the family income, payments could be redirected to another relative. If they're not caring for the kids, they might be sent for counselling.

Pearson rests his reform agenda on the rebuilding of social norms — the invisible conventions that guide and moderate individual behaviour. Manners and grooming, standards and expectations, rules of behaviour. The challenge, and the controversy, is in leveraging such behaviours against the welfare stream. Such coercion under existing law would be illegal. Over the next year, Pearson will head to Canberra to argue that such discrimination is not only desirable but crucial. In the meantime, work proceeds on the ground — talking to communities, determining what the problems are and what mechanisms might fix them — with a plan to roll out the changes from March.

Many of the households on the cape are kept running by grandparents raising children. The generation in between is too disabled to do the job, bequeathing only inertia and hopelessness, says Pearson.

His welfare reform pilot aims to spring the poverty trap of "perverse incentives" that he says causes people to lose ambition for themselves and their children. He says countering this will require a revolution in attitudes within the communities — towards education, aspiration and mobility — and beyond in the mind-set of the "well-intended progressives" who shape welfare policy. It's a line that delights conservative politicians and commentators and discomfits the softer elements of the left.

Personally I am not big on the conservative approach but it is better than what we do now. The crucial aspect of this reform is the 'disabled' generation will be sacrificed (if they don't respond) to create opportunity for the next. That is what we currently cannot accept in this country. But we will come to it