Standing writes about 'the precariat' and provides a template for the Australian Budget

Guy Standing wrote about the
 'precariat' in 2011 and provided,
 unintentionally, a template for
Australia's 2014 budget.

Guy Standing unintentionally provided a template for the first budget of the Tony Abbot-led Coalition Government.

The British professor of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London wrote about “The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class”.

Most everything the professor discussed in his 2011 book as damaging to society has been embraced through the intricacies of this year’s federal budget.

The “precariat” arises when people find themselves in precarious life positions; that it become increasingly difficult to find work and frequently they can only find lower-skilled, temporary positions that are inevitably poorly paid.
Our market-driven consumer society demands a regular and substantial income, something that is missing when people find themselves in casual, temporary and poorly paid work.

Those living in and operating on the fringes of society – that so-called “fringe” is now creeping into the fabled middle-class” - have long been the prime users of a societal welfare infrastructure that is now being eroded by a government that has declared an end to the “age of entitlement”.

Utilitarianism, much discussed and criticised by Standing, has been wildly embraced by the present government that believes all are equal and in applying its ideological strait-jacket expects all people, whatever their skills, talents or intellectual adaptation to the market system, to survive unaided.

Nice thought, but it is clearly wrong for not all have the necessary aptitudes to prosper in a society whose emphasis is on profit and has little regard for the welfare of people.

A market-driven society in which everything is a commodity, including people, and has no respect for idleness and leisure, both attributes upon which innovation is reliant, as they make no obvious contribution to the balance sheet.

This rude push to put an economic value on everything robs people of reflection, leaving them with no time to contemplate, ponder and simple wonder about a better way.

The agenda of our relatively new Coalition Government has seeped into every crevice of Australian society and nothing appears sacrosanct in its bid to make repairs to the country’s budget; repairs that disinterested economists argue are not needed and are little more than a fabrication.

Everything, even our intergenerational responsibilities, are being discounted as our government rails against everyone who finds comfort in renaissance-like values of literature, philosophy, art, music, politics, science, religion, and other aspects of intellectual inquiry.

The ideological neoliberal-driven agenda has the government muddling about in the past and pandering to populism; a populism fuelled by a fallacious fear of the other, a distorted sense of security and a misunderstanding of risk.

Standing explains how those any many other matters are giving rise to the “precariat”. His book is unsettling, but worth reading.