The Domain Of Pain

Striking a Balance: How much unnecessary suffering must our fellow citizens endure before we can be persuaded to take action on their behalf?

"THE DISTINCTION between necessary and unnecessary suffering defines the limits of political rationality", writes Dr Maurice Glasman, Director of the London Metropolitan University’s Faith & Citizenship Programme. "In delineating a domain of pain which is amenable to concerted amelioration from a sphere of grief that is immutable, it defines the power of society to respond to the miseries of life."

Ah, yes, Dr Glasman, but where does "the domain of pain" end and "the sphere of grief" begin? At what point, exactly, does it become politically irrational to attempt to ameliorate the pain of one’s fellow citizens? How immutable does a person’s situation have to be before we’re willing to consign her to that hopeless "sphere of grief"?

These were the sort of questions I wrestled with for most of last Friday at a public forum jointly organised by the University of Auckland and the Child Poverty Action Group.

"Rethinking Welfare For The 21st Century" attracted some pretty heavy hitters – most notably two, top-flight Australian academics, Professor Paul Smyth and Dr Peter Saunders, who’d crossed the ditch to add their intellectual firepower to the artillery of the CPAG angels in what is becoming an increasingly bitter social policy debate.

In addition to being Professor of Social Policy at the University of Melbourne, Peter Smyth is also the General Manager of the Research & Policy Centre of the Brotherhood of St Laurence (a Christian socialist outfit founded by the radical Anglican priest, Father G.K Tucker, in the 1930s).

The work of Paul Saunders – former Director of the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales – has been focused on the non-monetary indicators of social disadvantage. His research has pushed the concept of "adequacy" to the forefront of contemporary academic discussion about poverty relief.

The visitors’ contributions, like their country of origin, were large and sprawling. Information and statistics were applied impasto to a succession of broad canvasses. Indeed, the aptly named Peter and Paul turned out to be a couple of academic evangelists: "big picture" men, engagingly keen on wrenching the welfare debate from the clutches of the Right and "re-framing" it. They came at their Kiwi audience like Aussie pace-bowlers with a new ball.

It took the presentation of another Australian, Eve Bodsworth, to remind us that in spite of the fact that the "Lucky Country" has so much more wealth to distribute, its success in reducing the quantum of unnecessary suffering is really no greater than our own.

Eve had recorded the experiences of Australian solo mums struggling to navigate their way through the labyrinthine cruelties of state and federal welfare bureaucracies. In the plain speech of these institutionally battered women, the "domain of pain" and the "sphere of grief" were brought vividly and heart-wrenchingly to life.

Their words, and those used later by Kay Brereton of the Wellington People’s Centre, was Reality’s answer to the mumbled neoliberal liturgy of Paula Rebstock with which the forum began.

I suppose it was gutsy of the Chair of the Government’s hand-picked Welfare Working Group to show up at all. Certainly it was valuable to learn exactly how vast is the gulf between the world of the Government’s advisers – and its victims.

Ultimately, of course, the Government’s principal advisers are the people themselves, and it was that singularly inconvenient truth that kept breaking through the presentations of Susan St John, Paul Callister, Keith Rankin, Louise Humpage, Cindy Kiro, Manuka Henare, Mike O’Brien and Sue Bradford.

Seventy years ago, New Zealanders won international acclaim for their "concerted amelioration" of unnecessary suffering. The Welfare State decisively re-defined our society’s capacity to "respond to the miseries of life".

Seventy years after Savage & Fraser, and aided by a quarter-century of neoliberal social-policy, New Zealanders’ "pain threshold" has risen dramatically. And though the good people gathered at last Friday’s forum would be loathe to admit it, the "political rationality" of 21st Century capitalism is much less compromised by social sadism than social justice.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 17 September 2010.