Professor Mary Murphy:

I thank Senator Higgins. The idea of reimagining care is an important one. I have been focused on the idea that we really need to grow our welfare imagination. We are very caught in the practice of tweaking or making small incremental changes to our present welfare system. We often get ourselves into knots because it is very complicated to fix a broken system. It is a sticking-plaster kind of approach. On going back to basics, as it were, and trying to address both the historical injustices and some of the contemporary injustices being imposed at the moment, such as the changes made in relation to lone parents, the Senator mentioned pensions and equal and individual access to social welfare. To my mind, there are two key principles that we need to move forward in that area. One is decoupling the relationship between welfare and work, as in the record of paid work that a person has. Right now, a principle of our contributory system is to recognise the contribution made primarily through paid work in the form of paid contributions, but some form of credited form of contributions, recognising a limited form of care work. I think that is probably a wrong starting point for the recognition of some of the pensions. I would look towards a system such as that in New Zealand, for example, which has a residency-based universal pension right, which does not look at the relationship between work and welfare. That is a really important principle not only in relation to the entitlement, but also in relation to not forcing people down a very narrow road of getting a welfare payment on condition that they orientate their life towards paid productive employment. I think decoupling that allows for more types of participation. That is where participation income can be quite imaginative. It tells people that we value social activity and paid work is one form that we value, which is fine, but we also value many other activities, such as democratic activity, ecological activity and care activity, in particular. Participation income decouples the welfare payment from the requirement to work in the paid economy and recognises a much broader range of socially valued work. In that sense, it is not basic income because it is looking for reciprocity back from the person. It is looking for participation and engagement in society and some form of socially valued activity but involves really widening out the basis of what we can do.

The second principle is about universality, which has to be about an individual right, moving away from the household-testing of income, which is very hard to do when we are dealing with a limited set of resources and we are trying to tackle poverty issues as well. It is about getting the balance right in respect of whether we want some level of categorical targeting. It is about whether we want the system to be universal but with some aspect of targeting within the universality. There are mechanisms to do it. Various countries have experimented with the different ways of really getting nearer to a universal entitlement to the payment. There are some interesting proposals from Anna Coote in the UK, for example, on a minimum income guarantee.

Instead of screening in only the poorest, using the income test rather than a means test works to screen out only the wealthiest. You are trying to pitch the payment at a very high level of distribution of households, as an individualised payment, yet are not trying to get it to everybody. Therefore, you might screen out the top 20%, for example, as being eligible. That would be a start in trying to reconfigure towards a more individualised and more universal type of approach to who is entitled to income support. There are ways and means to do so but we should imbed in the system the fundamental principle of an individualised approach. We could start with the present system and it is imbedded. For example, administrative individualisation is one way to sneak it into the system. We really need to get there in terms of our approach to means testing, which is really mean, versus income testing with which one can be much more imaginative and pitch it higher up the income levels that households might have. In that way, then, you can begin to individualise the income that people get when the household is entitled.