Victorian Government backdown on Fair pay for communty sector workers: Will the Barnett Government be next?

Once again the not-for-profit sector has been betrayed by a government that made all sorts of promises about the importance of the sector and the need to address the problems of funding shortfalls and low wage.

The newly elected Baillieu Government in Victoria has backed away from a promise made before the election to fund a pay rise for the community sector workforce should it be ordered by Fair Work Australia.

In its submission to Fair Work Australia in relation to the Equal Remuneration Case for Community and Social Sector Workers, the Victorian Baillieu Government warned of possible cuts to jobs and services if it has to fund a large pay rise for the female-dominated workforce.  The Australian Services Union brought the case before Fair Work Australia (FWA), and is seeking a pay rise for community and social sector workers – a workforce which is predominantly female. The case is based on a 2009 Queensland decision to award pay rises to such workers of up to 37 per cent over three years.

The online publication Pro Bono News reports that

....Victoria’s Not for Profit sector has reacted angrily, pointing to the election promise made by the Minister for Women’s Affairs and Community Services Mary Wooldridge to fund the pay rise even it went over the budgeted $200 million over four years.

In its submission to FWA, the Victorian Government says that that contrary to the unions’ submission, it ought not be assumed that all governments have undertaken to fully fund the unions’ claim in the event that it is granted by FWA.

It says the Victorian Government estimates that this year it will provide $1,568 million funding for SACS workers wages.

It says the pay rise sought by the union means the cost to the Victorian government of funding SACS workers will be in the range of between $700 million over 4 years (if an 18% rise is ordered) and $1,700 million over 4 years (if a 37% rise is ordered).

The submission says the Victorian Government’s public commitment of $200 million over 4 years to support the decision by FWA is consistent with their election commitment of responsible management of the State's finances, which includes maintaining an operating surplus of at least $100 million each year without pushing up debt.

The submission says depending upon the extent of any wage increase granted and the prospect that any increase in wages may not be fully funded by the Commonwealth Government, this may mean that there will be a “gap” between the rates of pay prescribed by FWA and the funding of the sector.

It says this gap may result in a reduction in services which in turn may have an impact on the numbers of positions in the sector, and / or on the hours of work available to workers employed in the sector.

The Government submission says evidence provided by Lincoln Hopper from Mission Australia demonstrates that there is a possibility that the claim, if granted in full or in part, will have adverse effects on employment, hours of work and service provision in the SACS sector.

It says Mission Australia employs 1,052 people who would be affected by an equal remuneration order, which would see the organisations salary costs rise by a total of $3.735 million per year, affecting the organisations ability to employ people and resource projects.

In a pre-election interview with VCOSS, CEO Cath Smith just a couple of days out from the 2010 Victorian State Election, Liberal member for Doncaster, Mary Wooldridge said the Liberal Government would fund the pay-rise even if it cost more than the estimated $50 million per year.

In the interview, Wooldridge said the Victorian Coalition fully supported the pay equity case, and would support the decisions of Fair Work Australia and would be passing them through in their funding arrangement.

She said the Victorian Coalition was very clear that they believed this needs to happen and that they would be funding the outcome.

The Australian Services Union says the Baillieu Government backflipped on the election promise in their submission to Fair Work Australia, stating that any unfunded increases would have to be paid for by reducing services and jobs.

ASU Assistant Branch Secretary Lisa Darmanin slammed the recent announcement, saying it is an insult to hard-working, mostly women community workers who the Minister for Community Services Mary Wooldridge promised - on the eve of the state election - that a Coalition government would value their work by funding and supporting the equal pay claim at Fair Work Australia.

Darmanin says the Baillieu Government’s submission is effectively saying that equal pay for these workers needs to be paid for by cutting services to the most disadvantaged in our community, or make those working in it work harder by reducing staff.

VCOSS CEO Cath Smith says she expects the government to honour its pre-election commitments to community sector workers.

With the Victorian State Budget to see an estimated $46 billion in transaction revenue over the next 12 months, Smith says there must be room in the budget to fund this key election promise.

The consequences of social and public policy that transfers the burden of risk and care to families and individuals

Cam McKellar tells a profoundly moving and shocking story about the burdens placed on his mother and family by public policy and social policy driven by economic and market imperatives, bureaucratization and the transfer of risk, responsibility and care to private individuals and families.

My brother has an intellectual disability. He is autistic and he can’t speak. He makes noises and flaps his arms. He’s different and he’s charming. He’s demanding and he needs daily care.

My mother cared for him for most of his life. The sheer intensity of his needs bound them brutally together. 

She feared that if she died, my sister and I would be bound to him in the same way, so everyday she worked to win his independence. 

At first we found small freedoms — a meal without screaming or food flung in frustration; a visit to friends that didn’t end in an apology and a hurried exit; a rare, blissfully uneventful evening out for my mother, a bus ride together, and then years later, miraculously, a ride alone on the bus.
My mother believed in my brother. She loved him and she fought for him. 

If she were alive today she’d still be caring for him and as an aging carer she’d still be ignored by the state and federal government disability services. She’d still be reliant on family and friends to shoulder the burden of care.


She’d be forced by yet another agency to prove and categorise my brother’s disabilities in order to receive the smallest of concessions. She’d be even more exhausted, even more isolated.
She’d be told that in a country debating a super-profits tax, there was not enough public funds available to sustain my brother in community accommodation. 

She’d be turned away because she would continue to cope and would not give up her son.
She’d be turned away because she was not "in crisis". 

As my mother lay dying from cancer, I spent the last precious weeks of her life in furious negotiations with NSW disability services fighting to establish a system of care for my disabled brother.


Last week the Productivity Commission released its draft report into Australia’s disability support services. If the Commission’s recommendations had already been implemented in those precious weeks, our lives could have been so much less desperate. 

As it was, the calamitous reality of NSW’s underfunded disability sector forced me into a terrible dilemma — either abandon my brother to become a ward of the state, or take on his full-time care for the rest of my life. 

This was exactly the same awful predicament my mother faced 30 years ago and spent half her life trying to resolve. It’s the same predicament families and other carers of people with a disability all over Australia face today. 

The Productivity Commission’s draft report confirms that the current disability support system is chronically underfunded. Services are haphazard, inefficient and dependent on irregular state revenues. 

The system is characterised by a siege mentality; carers must literally desert those under their care to receive consistent support. Mindful of state budgets and the intense desperation in the community, workers within the system will only allocate scarce resources to those families or individuals in crisis or where a long-time primary carer has died and there is no one in the family to replace them.

Death of disability advocate and practioner Wolf Wolfensberger

My friend and colleague Erik Leipoldt has written this piece on his blog in memory of the academic and disability advocate Professor Wolf Wolfensberger who died recently. As Erik points Wolfensberger was one of the most influential thinkers and practitioner in the disability field worldwide and his work had a significant effect on the lives of people with disabilities. Wolfensberger's ideas changed  the way professionals, policy makers, governments and service providers think about and respond to people with disabilities.

Erik writes:

"Dr Wolfensberger had a strong commitment to people made vulnerable in a society where individualism, utilitarianism and hedonism reign. He made a huge contribution to people with disabilities. He was a visionary, a devastating analyst and honest critic.

......In 1999, seven major developmental disability organizations in the US proclaimed Dr Wolfensberger one of the 35 parties that had been the most impactful on "mental retardation" worldwide in the 20th century. Dr Wolfensberger's work was also recognised by the US magazine 'Exceptional Parent' as one of the great 7 contributions to the lives of people with disabilities, along with Salk and the polio vaccine, braille, Americans with Disabilities Act and the wheelchair.

.....He was perhaps best known for developing social role valorization theory from his, and Nirje's, concepts of normalisation. Social role valorization has been taught to many using and running disability services, and applied to various degrees, in government policies and service practice.

.........Dr Wolfensberger also developed the concept of citizen advocacy, facilitating long-term relationships between a person with disability (or other vulnerable people)and a volunteer citizen.

.............Many people who have disabilities have benefited from his work in a change in focus from disability as a medical issue, or captives of care to one where a good life means living with others and in settings that are normally valued in our society. His work was instrumental in the deinstitutionalisation of thousands of people with disabilities. It has informed disability advocacy. I am aware that in his own life he personally modeled compassionate service to 'needy people', a much used Wolfensberger phrase."

Report card on Australia's progress in adressing Aboriginal disadvantage

This week saw the the release of the Federal Government's Third Close the Gap Report on its efforts to address Aboriginal Disadvantage.

Despite important progress in some areas, the Report highlights the continual failure of Federal, State and Local Governments (and now the corporate sector) to "close the gap".

Unsurprisingly the report has quickly disappeared from public discourse and political and media media commentary.

Rather than acknowledge the failure of successive Governments to address Aboriginal disadvantage the Prime Minister pushed the responsibility back on Aboriginal people, demanding that they take greater responsibility for overcoming the problems their communities face.

As Greens Senator Rachel Siewart pointed out it was breathtakingly hypocritical of the Gillard Government to demand that Aboriginal people take greater responsibility, while simultaneously restricting how they spend their income.

Responding to the Report's release Eva Cox questions the evidence base upon which some of the Report's findings are based.

In this piece from the ABC Drum Unleashed Aboriginal leader Bev Manton offers a sustained critique of the Gillard Government Report Card:

So it is with heavy cynicism that I greet the third annual Closing the Gap report.

Rudd made the promise to deliver a statement on the government’s progress on closing the gap shortly after he won the election. The first two statements, both belated and both short of substance were a disappointment.

But Gillard’s latest delivery is even more of a let-down, and a continuation of the failures of Rudd’s unfinished business.

While she touches on “improvements” in many of the six targets federal Labor has set for eliminating Indigenous disadvantage - without providing a shred of evidence to back her claims - a key part of her statement was a call for “individual responsibility”.

“Closing the Gap means change in people’s lives. And Indigenous people know that when the child starts attending school… when the drinker stops abusing alcohol… when the adult takes the job that is there… then change begins,” she said.

“And Indigenous people know these decisions are not made by governments. They are made by people. The job of government, of communities is to support decisions.”

This is an old cliché. A dangerous and outrageous cliché, made even more dangerous and outrageous by the fact it was uttered by our nation’s leader.

It does not reflect the barriers that have been placed on generations upon generations of Indigenous people and undermines the willpower of thousands of Aboriginal Australians who battle against these barriers.

It also does not reflect the reality of life for many Aboriginal people.

The child will start attending school, when the school is built. And when the lessons are relevant, and delivered in a language they understand.

The drinkers will always abuse alcohol, just like white drinkers do. They’ll stop the drinking when they have the support in place to do so, and for the record, Aboriginal people are more likely to be tee-totallers than non Aboriginal people.

And Aboriginal people will take jobs when there are jobs to take. Prime Minister Gillard might like to explain to the nation how her party destroyed the economies of many communities when they pulled apart CDEP.

These barriers - and more - are wholly government-constructed.

A key example of this is the blanket coverage of income management on Aboriginal residents living in prescribed areas under the Northern Territory intervention.

There is scant evidence that this compulsory form of welfare quarantining is working. In fact, there is a growing body of research showing the precise opposite - that it is undermining the Government’s attempts to close the gap. It is having an adverse effect on nutrition and demonises Aboriginal people who largely spend their money wisely.

Yet this Labor Government has committed to rolling out this dog of a policy across the nation. It will be in NSW soon.

Another example is the disastrous Strategic Indigenous Housing Infrastructure Program (SIHIP), which has blown hundreds of millions of dollars on administration and still continues to waste money while communities cry out for more houses.

Many of these communities are not eligible for SIHIP funding. None of my communities in NSW - many of which are desperate for housing - qualify either.

Last year, I visited the remote communities of Irrultja, east of Alice Springs. Despite the billion-dollar NT intervention, the people of Irrultja still live in tin humpies.

They are strong people. They are courageous people. They are people who are proud in their culture and tied to their homelands.

But the Rudd government didn’t commit funds to build houses. Instead, they were given funds for electricity meters, to ensure their humpies are powered. They were denied the opportunity by the government of a first-world nation to lift their conditions from third world.

Should the people of Irrultja take responsibility for the failure of government, like Julia Gillard seems to be suggesting?

And should those affected by income management take responsibility for the failure of an evidence-light policy?

NGO's: the trojan horse for market, corporate and state power?

 David Harvey in his book A Short History of Neoliberalism:

The rise of advocacy groups and NGOs has...accompanied the neoliberal turn and increased spectacularly since 1980 or so. The NGOs have in many instances stepped into the vacuum in social provision left by the withdrawal of the state from such activities. This amounts to privatization by NGO. In some instances, this has helped accelerate further state withdrawal from social provision. NGOs thereby function as "Trojan horses for neoliberal globalization."

 Mike Davis in The Planet of Slums:

Third World NGOs have proven brilliant at co-opting local leadership as well as hegemonizing the social space traditionally occupied by the Left. Even if there are some celebrated exceptions--such as the militant NGOs so instrumental in creating the World Social Forums--the broad impact of the NGO/"civil society revolution"...has been to bureaucratize and deradicalize urban social movements.

Honoring those who work for a better world

French film Director Bertrand Tavernier's  film It All Starts Today  is a beautiful testament to the commitment and humanity of teachers (and other front line workers) who work with families and children suffering the consequences of neo-liberal market  and economic "reform". 

Like Pierre Bourdieu's  book The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society  Tavernier's film documents the new forms of social suffering that characterize not just French society, but the economies and societies of the western world.

Tavernier's deeply moving film tells the story of a kindergarten teacher in an impoverished region of France struggling to educate children of families devastated by unemployment, grinding poverty, deprivation, depression and economic hardship. These are children whose families are the casualties of neo-liberal market reform and economic and corporate restructuring.

The film shows the heroics and dedication of teachers, education aides, volunteers, health workers and social welfare workers who give themselves fully and devote their lives to improving the well being of the children and families in their care. They do this despite poor pay and appalling conditions, budget cutbacks and hostility, indifference and neglect from elected officials, politicians, some government agencies and workers, business groups and those who hold power.

 In Australia we accord little respect and honor to those front line workers and volunteers who work for a better world. We forget and ignore the teachers, child care workers, teachers aides, carers, aged care and disability workers, social welfare workers, aboriginal health workers, volunteers, family support workers, refuge workers, domestic violence counselors and millions of  other front line welfare and community workers who dedicate themselves to the care and well being of others, and who through their efforts make our society and communities better places.


Instead they are poorly paid and usually berated and stigmatized, labeled as do-gooders and bleeding hearts, or dismissed as rent seeking, vested interests who breed dependency and a welfare mentality in people.

No, in Australia we honor soldiers who fight in imperial wars, celebrities caught in the glare of their own importance, sportsmen who are paid exorbitantly and businessmen and corporations who pursue and accumulate wealth and power at the expense of the common good.

Jim Johnson has taken up a similar theme in a recent post on his excellent blog Notes on Politics, Theory and Biography and I thank him for his insights:

"I find it obsequious and cloying to hear the radio show hosts and politicians offering a "Thank you for your service" whenever they encounter a veteran or military personnel. What about the social workers and parole officers and teachers and, yes, scientists and artists, who work in underpaid professions for years and decades in order to contribute to a better world? After all, they could be out there peddling sub-prime mortgages (or some other form of snake oil) and making real money. When was the last time you heard someone - anyone - publicly thank those folks for their service? No, instead we are taking aim at them (the teachers and parole officers are, after all members of those dastardly public sector unions) in the misguided quest for fiscal responsibility"

Why we should be skeptical about "social enterprise"

The concept of social enterprise has found its way into the centre of debates about the future of the not- for-profit sector in Australia and is viewed as a policy panacea for the sector.

Here in West Australia, the Barnett Government's Economic Audit Committee, which has been accepted and endorsed by large segments of the WA not-for-profit sector, has a vision to make all not-for-profits into social enterprises.

A UK study by the Third Sector Research Centre shows why we should be deeply skeptical of claims about social enterprise. The UK study found that social enterprise approaches are poorly defined, and they exclude black and ethnic minority groups as well as small not for profits that serve disadvantaged groups and communities.