As we begin to contemplate the end of one century and imagine the next, the need for major renovations to settled policies and institutions is increasingly apparent. This is so especially given the longstanding and implicit links between employment and citizenship within the discursive traditions of twentieth century liberalism.

In common with most OECD nation-states, Australia's social policy and citizenship regimes between 1945-75 assumed a certain relationship between full-time [male] wage labour, income taxation and the social security system. "Full employment" was the effective cornerstone both of the "national welfare state" erected after 1945, and of a regime of citizenship rights. Underneath the labour market was strung a "safety net" of social security benefits presumed to be only necessary on a short term or emergency basis. That system which in turn assumed as a given, a powerfully gendered division of labour and a corresponding set of differential citizen rights and responsibilities for the "citizen worker" and the "citizen mother" (Shaver 1992).

Yet that that discursive tradition now struggles to maintain its legitimacy in a context marked since 1975 alike by mounting unemployment and precarious employment.

We confront several questions.

• Firstly, can and should a regime of full-employment be restored?
• Secondly, what are the implications for a regime of citizenship if the answer, as traditionally defined, is no?

In particular given the normative underpinning to our ideas of citizenship historically provided by the pursuit of paid employment, how should we fill the idea of citizenship with new content and new values in a social context shaped increasingly by the draining away of full-time paid employment, where 'market income inequality is increasing' (Neville 1996, p. iii).

[Or to put it another way what are the implications for renovating our conception of citizenship within a context in which "the future of work'' has become the central social and policy problematic of our era?]

Secondly, given this context how is social and economic security to be provided when the labour market is no longer able to provide the basis of personal welfare and social security? Can we envisage a new relationship between wage income and the social security system? How should those currently excluded from full-time paid employment, and those likely to be so excluded in the first decades of the twenty first century, be dealt with? Can categories like "client" or "customer" currently deployed by the DSS be replaced by a meaningful category like "citizenship"?

[Or to put it another way, what are the prospects for transforming the culture of key organisations like the Department of Social Security that play a frontline role in addressing the social and economic needs of our unemployed in ways that are more consistent with some practice of citizenship worth having?]

Writing in 1984 Michael Barratt Brown first raised as possibility what we now confront as reality:

... the possibility that all men between 16 and sixty five will have full-time jobs for forty hours a week in the future can safely be regarded as nil ... It is not however, only that unemployment rates are unlikely, short of a major social change in economic organisation, to be reduced. More than this, technologically advanced society ... will itself simply not need such long hours of work -either in each week or in each lifetime even after major social changes have been effected. A new social order will imply a new model of work and leisure and a new distribution of each between men and women (Barratt Brown 1984, p.258).

In a spirit of provocation of which I am sure Barratt Brown would approve, I suggest we also invert his last line and agree that:

It is in the spirit of developing practical policy and political steps that will take us to that new model of society that this paper outlines a case for reconstituting what we generally call the 'welfare state' by introducing the principles of a universal basic income for all citizens in the twenty first century.

There is nothing new about the idea of basic income. It was extensively discussed in Britain from the 1920s through the 1940s. The Australian civil servant (Sir) Frederick Wheeler developed an argument for it in 1942 (Milner 1920; Watts 1984). It was extensively revived by Henderson in the 1970s -and by monetarists like Friedman (1977). It has been at the centre of an extensive process of policy research and discussion in Europe (van Trier 1990) since the establishment in 1986 of the Basic Income European Network (BIEN) chaired by Offe (Miller 1988). It has also become increasingly controverted in discussions and debates between postmodernist (Jones 1982; Gorz 1982,1988; Offe 1993; Mathews l989) and left progressives (Wright 1986; Berger 1986; Nove 1986; Frankel 1987). In Australia there has been cautious support for a severely attenuated version of basic income (Cass and McClelland 1989:21-28) and it has been contested strongly in a major intervention by Pixley (1993). Cass has subsequently moved to embrace a "participation income" which goes a good deal towards accepting the principles of a basic income model.

It has gone under any number of names in its short history as an idea whose time was yet to come. Pixley documents the Australian debates and discussion about basic income (Pixley 1993:98-123). In Australia, Ronald Henderson gave the idea currency in his 1975 Main Report for the Commission of Inquiry into Poverty (Henderson, 1975) when he argued for a Guaranteed Minimum Income (GMI). In Britain it has been called a 'universal grant' (Ashby, 1984), a 'social dividend', (Miller, 1983), and a 'citizens wage' (Purdy, 1989: 194). In America McGovern argued in 1972 for a 'Demogrant'. It has also been referred to as 'negative income tax', 'guaranteed adequate income', and 'social credit'. Here it is referred to in its simplest form as basic income (Purdy 1989:194; Cass and McClelland 1989: 21-28).

By basic income is meant an income paid unconditionally to all citizens on an individual basis, without means test or any work requirement or activity test. ¹ Offe sees it as 'an unconditional, subsistence-level, tax-financed right to income based upon citizenship rather than labour market participation (Offe 1993:73). It is a form of minimum income security that differs from those social security systems that are found in European countries and is different in kind and in scope from the programs which historically have come together in Australia's "welfare state' because:

• It is paid to individuals rather than households:
• It is paid irrespective of any income from other sources; and
• It is paid without any present or past work performance, or the willingness to accept a job or training program if offered.

It can and has been proposed in radically divergent forms and by writers from both the left - like Offe and van Parijs - and the right - like Friedman (1966).

Some of the recent European discussion of basic income has situated it in the larger question of the transition from capitalism to socialism. Van der Veen and van Parijs for example argue for basic income as a pathway leaping from capitalism to communism bypassing a socialist stage (van der Veen and van Parijs 1986: 635-655; Berger 1986). This paper advances a more modest set of arguments for the constitution of a basic income welfare state that rely on an affinity between basic income and the kinds of social transformation and with the forms of social life most likely to characterise the first decades of the twenty first century. It also addresses the arguments directed against basic income by those concerned about the impact of basic income on employment. It does not attempt to address questions of detail or fiscal feasibility. (For discussion of possible program elements of an Australian basic income scheme with associated costs, see Watts 1994).

There are two arguments for the renovations proposed here:

• an argument to obsolescence,
• an argument to citizenship-as-agency

The argument to obsolescence is the prolegomena to making basic income the foundations of a new conception of citizenship in a society undergoing profound transformation.

The first argument in favour of basic income is the capacity of basic income to deal with the problems which have arisen since the 1960s consequent upon the partial de-linkage of wage work and income. The second, no less significant, argument in its favour is its capacity to further enhance and promote the elements of citizenship operationalised here in terms of agency.

It is plain that basic income will not by itself issue in some new non-wage or egalitarian utopia. As ever the linkages between other elements of policy including taxation and labour market policies will be crucial to achieving a range of policy and social outcomes.

• income security achieved through the Arbitration Court and its auspices of national 'basic wage and -later minimum wage- judgements;
• labour market security, achieved through formal government support for full employment, a high tariff wall for manufacturing industries and a racist 'white Australia' immigration program which determined an 'acceptable' level and composition of immigration into Australia;

• employment security, including work security in the form of health and safety regulations, award conditions regarding hours and overtime, regulations re redundancy and restrictions on unfair dismissal, support for the closed shop principle and procedures to deal with demarcation disputes.

• Total population = 17,843,000
• Population aged 15-65 = 11,896,000
• Labour force = 8,696,000

• unemployed = 915,500
• part time workers = 1,851,000 plus
• Discouraged workers = 106,500
• Those fully employed in Labour force = 5,920,000

In an age or permanent underemployment and precarious employment, basic income offers one policy response capable of renovating an older model of citizenship dependent on participation in the labour market, and underwriting a commitment to a robust regime of citizenship rights offering social security as a right.

Since the mid-1970s, some Australians have "re-discovered" the virtues of citizenship. "Citizenship" has perhaps consolidated its status as the "spray-on" word of the 1990s rivalling its predecessor of the 1980s, "community" for ubiquity. Apart from the work of an increasing number of academics (Kymlicka & Norman 1994), citizenship has enjoyed increasing popular attention especially in the course of the "republic" debate. Late in November 1994, the Civics Expert Group released its report on Civics and Citizenship Education (Civics Expert Group, 1994). The Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee too, is inquiring into "a system of national citizenship indicators" (1995; 1996).

At the same time as Wyn points out, "The idea of citizenship is controversial" (1995, p.45).

In part this is because of the actual practices partly practical and partly discursive which have excluded large numbers of Australians from the category of "citizen" like women, young people and aboriginal people (See Pateman 1988; Pascall 1993;Wyn 1995). In part this is also the case because there has been a movement over the last decade or so to "rediscover" citizenship and to re-write the history of the "welfare state" as a history of citizenship discourse triumphing over unrestrained capitalism. The wave of new arguments about citizenship from Hindess (1987), Barbalet (1988), Andrews (1991) and Turner (1991), and Yeatman, (1994) often take Marshall as their point of departure. Pixley (1992; 1993) in particular for example has constructed a powerful set of arguments for linking citizenship to full employment in an attempt to make explicit what she takes to be implicit in Marshall's work.

Inevitably much of the discussion about citizenship returns to the classic work of the British sociologist, T.H. Marshall.

T.H. Marshall (1950) always acknowledged that citizenship and a regime of social rights were going to be a problem in a radically unequal capitalist social formation. Nowhere is the problem of that relationship more apparent than in the claim that citizenship depends on access to the labour market.

This claim has been explicitly defended and developed by Australian writers like Cass and McClelland (1989), Pixley (1992; 1993) and Cass and Cappo (1994). If much of the current citizenship debate has relied on notions of "participation" and "exclusion" grounded in older assumptions about the "natural" linkages between citizenship and employment (Pixley 1993), Pixley in particular has recently drawn on Marshall's account of social citizenship and turned it into a highly articulate and seductive argument for linking paid employment and citizenship.

T.H. Marshall's exemplary social liberal-welfarist statement about citizenship was fabricated in the immediate post-1945. Those years were dominated by a belief that Keynesian macro-economic 'technique' gave governments the capacity to deliver "full employment". Marshall claimed that "true citizenship" required 'a direct sense of community membership based on loyalty to a civilisation which is a common possession'. (Marshall, 1950, p.56) "Full employment" provided one of the essential elements of that matrix of "community membership" and its reciprocal obligations and rights out of which a social-liberal regime of citizenship might be built.

Marshall's argument presupposed citizenship as a formal status:

Citizenship is a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community. All who possess the status are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed. There is no universal principle that determines what those rights and duties shall be but societies in which citizenship is a developing institution create an image of an ideal citizenship against which achievement can be measured and towards which aspiration can be directed [my emphasis] (Marshall, 1950, p.87).

Forty years after Marshall, Pixley has reworked an identity between (full) employment and citizenship. She denounces post-industrial and "workless" utopias as she advocates for full employment (1992; 1993). Her claim is that "full membership" [of a society] depends on access to the labour market.

Pixley unlike Marshall, makes much of a distinction (inadequately differentiated in Marshall), between citizenship "duties" and "obligations".

An adequate form of citizenship depends upon full civil and political rights being extended to all and enhanced by welfare rights ... Democratic citizenship [also] concerns obligations as well and there is a sharp difference between the obligations freely taken on by citizens, and the duties prescribed by the welfare state for everyone else, the marginal citizens [my emphasis] (Pixley 1992, p.217).

Pixley argues that an "active and inclusive conception of citizenship" requires "independent participation" by citizens in both government and in the labour market (Pixley 1993, p.269).

Much seems to hang on the distinction between "citizens" and "marginal citizens" and on being able to "participate fully in society", a resonant yet curious notion. These are not casual notions for as Pixley puts it [my emphasis]:

Much of Pixley's discussion of citizenship and its appeal to "common sense" relies on the authority of older assumptions about "natural" linkages between citizenship and access to the labour market. These have been positioned in a moral discourse centring on the idea of "self respect". This as Bessant (1995) argues, is a discourse central to the reinvention of the "underclass" myth and activated from time to time as recently occurred with the media hype that targeted the hapless Paxton family.

In this moral economy, "self-respect" is identical with "independence" and "activity"; only self respecting persons are "independent" and "active" while people without "self-respect" are "dependent" and "passive", categories that belong to the ''work ethic" of the past century and famously celebrated by Samuel Smiles' Self Help (1861) and used to construct a demonology about the "pauper" class, now the "underclass". This moral economy functions as a very broad Church indeed sheltering both left and right programs.

"Economic rationalists" like Murray (1984) and Novack (1987) for example argue for a normative model of personhood defined in terms of being "independent" (or self-reliant), earning a living, being resourceful and self-motivating and discharging one's social obligations. This is a durable view which sees in labour market activity the moral basis for independence and self-respect. Thus James:

... the market tends to promote additional virtues that increase the individuals ability to benefit in the long term ... These virtues include prudence, thrift, conscientiousness and alertness (James 1993 p.63). ⁴

These arguments are barely distinguishable from the Stakhanovite order invented in the USSR m the 1930s to make heroic work the source of incentive and pride in the collectivist economy.

The first problem is the assumption that wage work is a source of autonomous sociability, opening up access to creativity, independence, social participation, or opportunities for personal expressivity let alone the opportunity to act democratically. I don't doubt that some paid employment can and does offer important opportunities for social interaction, personal satisfaction, the use of old skills or the development of new ones, and that it can enhance feelings of self-esteem.

But it may also do none of these things.

As Fryer (1995) has suggested recently, these positives of employment may be sought by many workers and for some may even be achieved. But the normative status accorded wage work by those who would equate citizenship and labour market activity with "participation" and "independence" is considerably qualified, even invalidated by the considerable research evidence about the actual circumstances of much wage work.

Demeaning work processes, authoritarian management practices, isolation and the rest can all contribute to a "toxic job syndrome" with stress, ill-health and depression the likely consequences. Winefield has suggested recently a powerful connection between the emergence of precarious employment and these experiences for those still in work (Winefield 1995).

There are other substantial problems about the equation on the one hand of "social participation" and "independence" with paid work, and "dependence" and "social exclusion" with being unemployed and poor on the other.

Granting that "the poor are worse off than others. but for the most part, they are members of society, not outcasts", and given the insistence of all those who currently speak of "the underclass" as "marginal" or "excluded" (Bessant 1995), we need to ask simply, how is it possible to be excluded from 'society'?

Some see "participation" on the part of the unemployed and/or the poor as a problem because poverty is said to restrict participation. There is some truth in this since it takes money to travel to see friends or relatives, or to transport children to community or sporting activities. But there is no evidence to suggest a correlation between level of income and level of participation in a wide range of community, social or political activities or interactions including interactions with friends and relatives, local community or even forms of participation in the national community. Indeed there is countermanding evidence to suggest that paid employment and high levels of material comfort go with increasingly privatised and home/family centred activities inimical to certain notions of participation.

Finally, there is the use made of these kinds of arguments over a very long time to say that people "need" to earn their own living and that the community is unwise to consider giving people "something for nothing" like an expensive "welfare state". There is a longstanding liberal economic view that giving people welfare benefits will create massive disincentives for people to work and anyway we simply cannot afford to extend unlimited social rights.

In this way is constituted a major gap between "economic ' capacity and "social" rights. ⁵

In the 1980s and 1990s this has typically been rendered by welfare economists as an inherent tension between "equity" and "efficiency" (Okun 1975). This is a tension that implicates the Australian "welfare state" and one of its frontline agencies, the Department of Social Security. It is to the role of DSS and contemporary context of debates about citizenship and employment that I now turn.

If we look at the way the Department of Social Security has operationalised a conception of social security and citizenship rights we will see a profound problem of governance.

If we look to the social character of the DSS and its impact on its "client's" lives we see a regime of governance which I argue today is profoundly at odds with a normative idea of citizenship as agency.

While the DSS as a social system has not received the kind of attention it deserves, some have commented on its actual social role. Feminists have long insisted that the welfare state is a system for the regulation of gender relations. Travers and Richardson (1993) draw attention to the more general social effects of social security as a system of regulation when they insist that:

... an income maintenance system is itself a system of stratification - that is, it orders social relations in a particular way (Travers & Richardson 1993 p.210).

Weatherley too reminds us of the "materiality" of social security as a social order when he writes apropos his research on client compliance:

Because of the high rate of unemployment claims, the regional offices were taxed to the limit ... Waiting times of two hours or more were common. The offices were noisy, had limited seating and most lacked play areas for children or toilet facilities. At peak times, queues in some offices extended out the doors (Weatherley 1993 p.28).

While the current social security regime and its apologists speak of its commitment to equity, poverty amelioration, income smoothing (or alternately bemoan the lack of incentives and the rigidities it imposes on the labour market), its actual practices achieve a whole range of social outcomes in the daily life-world of DSS "clients".

Our social security system is mode of governance that uses a categorial system of entitlement (Carney 1994). Currently there are some twenty or so categories of benefit and allowance tied to a host of categorial markers. In effect our social security system insists that it is our identity not as "citizen" but as "elderly person", "unemployed person" or "single mother" that confers any right we might think we have to social security. These categories are built on top of a mean means-test which helps preserve our status as one of the world's "welfare state laggards".

As Australia moved into the age of precarious employment the DSS intensified its surveillance. As Weatherley rightly notes the Labor government since 1986 stressed increased compliance and better targeting partly to:

... contain costs, restore public confidence in the integrity of social security and to restructure entitlements in keeping with changing economic conditions and demographic trends (Weatherley 1993: 21).

Since 1986 this has meant using:

What the Compliance, Fraud and Teleservice Division of DSS rather benignly refers to as its "risk management strategy" is a far-reaching system of surveillance and monitoring that many international intelligence and security services would be proud to claim for their own. 93 Mobile Review Teams (established in 1986) and internal review staff routinely surveyed the 5 million clients of DSS in 1994-5 and claimed to save DSS some $200m. 3000 clients were prosecuted for fraud with a total of $28m in "overpayments". (So much for right-wing and populist claims of far reaching social security rorting!!) Some 187,525 clients had cancellations or reduced payments arising from reviews of the 2.1 clients who were monitored, producing further savings of $964m (Nolan 1996).

But it seems that there is more to this than an increase in surveillance.

In common with most other international social security systems, Australian governments have historically privileged access to the labour market as the preferred means of securing "individual" and "family" welfare. ⁶

The agents of the social security system and the beneficiaries of that system relate within a frame of action that is at once oriented to governance and assumes as given a certain 'moral economy'.

Australia's social security system continues to "embody' the older 'moral-economic" prescriptions associated with the primal phase in the evolution of the industrial labour market (Digby 1975). In particular the moral economy of the old (male wage) work-centred order sustained a particular conception of "individual independence", "autonomy", and "self-respect" which was used to wean agricultural and industrial workers away from the elaborate system of wage subsidies and "out-door" (ie. cash) relief which had evolved through the eighteenth century (Blaug 1963).

To this basic model would be added later ideas of reciprocal obligations embedded in a regime of citizenship rights. This became the model of the "worker citizen" to which was added even later the idea of the "citizen mother" where for services rendered to men and to children of a domestic kind, women were given the right to vote (Shaver 1993; Bryson 1994). In the regime of liberal governance evolving through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries if rights were conferred on ordinary people, these rights also presupposed a set of obligations, fundamentally grounded in obligations to work and later to offer military service.

From the beginning the liberal model of citizenship was grounded for men in an identity between work and citizenship. This identity established a culture of shame around the figure of the "pauper" and around the idea of "getting something for nothing". Likewise there was a positive culture of approval around the themes of independence and being a good provider (Thompson 1971). [Later we would add extra quasi-sociological ideas about social integration and the idea of social participation achieved through the labour market]. This regime of citizenship rights presupposed a particular moral economy grounded in a discourse about freedom and "self respect" This discourse focussed on a conception of what can for our purposes be called, one of the fundamental axioms of the Liberal policy regime, namely the principle of "less eligibility" (Poynter 1969).

This is the fundamental principle of most social policy regimes of the past century or more from which can be deduced almost such practices as the work test, the income and assets test, and more recent "activity" and training tests. These all rest on an idea couched almost invariably as a moral or normative idea that you do not - or ought not to - get something for nothing. A lot of work has been put into persuading us that it is both immoral and demeaning to accept something for nothing. In the discursive campaign that gave rise to the New Poor Law of 1834 workers who came to expect something for nothing had by definition become "demoralised" and hence a "pauper" (Poynter 1969). Self-respect rested on a free man choosing to work for his own living; a person who refused to do this had lost "self-respect".

On this basis the fundamental principle of "less eligibility" was articulated by Bentham and other "poor law" reformers which in turn became the basis for the 1834 Poor Law regime (Poynter 1969). This basically prescribed the principle that any relief whether as "outdoor relief' (ie. wage or income supplementation or "indoor relief' (ie. meals and beds offered institutionally inside poor houses) should always be pitched at a level way lower than that obtaining for free men in the world of the marketplace. Bentham's principle of "less eligibility" held that it should always be less pleasant or utility-conferring. On this basis institutional or indoor relief had to be made more onerous and less pleasant than could be achieved through working for one's living, while outdoor relief had to be pitched at a level lower than the lowest incomes offered in the labour market (Digby 1978; Crowther 1982).

Correlating with the fundamentals of poverty and unemployment is the business of becoming a client of social security. Here there is impressive international and local evidence that state financial support is offered in ways that are stigmatising or experienced as deviant (compared with earned income) (see Marsden & Duff 1975: Fryer & Fagan 1994; McGhee & Fryer 1989; Trethewey 1989; Federation of Community Legal Centres; 1992). Worse, far from offering 'income security' the whole system with its shifting modes of targeting those in most need, changing regulations and so on is also experienced as insecure-making. Effectively these systems repudiate and obliterate most people's agency. The very process of claiming benefits is reported as stressful, with reports of distress at the poor conditions of social security offices, perceived invasion of privacy, a sense of being passively processed, of humiliation and degradation. (See Kay 1985; Trethewey 1989).

Many of the clients of the social security system experience harm and feel anxiety and what Fryer calls a loss of agency as a basic and daily quality in their interactions with DSS.

A small but useful body of Australian research has documented what happens to people's self esteem and confidence -or their "agency"- when dealing with the Department of Social Security (Penman 1986; Kidney, Whitehead & Threlfall 1987; Federation of Community Legal Centres 1991; McCaughey 1992; Weatherley 1993).

What is at issue here is not just claims of rudeness or lack of compassion on the part of this or that official or local office. It matters as Weatherley's research suggests that some 30% of the 186 DSS clients he interviewed expressed some dissatisfaction with DSS, "citing payment delays, long queues, rude treatment, lost documents and inaccurate information" (1993 :21). (62% of the interviewees were receiving unemployment benefits, "reflecting the fact that unemployed persons are required to report to social security offices much more frequently than other claimants" (1993:26) .

The DSS operates in a context where the old moral economy still functions where it was designed to be most effective, in the culture and in the consciousness of many ordinary people.

People who become unemployed join many in the community who are employed in blaming themselves for their situation. As Weatherley noted in 1993, many of the clients he interviewed felt both shame at being unemployed and guilt about coming onto the "social security". As clients he spoke to said about the experience of coming to the social security office:

'Sometimes it's a oft degrading, especially at my age (52).' 'I hate it, it's degrading, the whole idea of being unemployed.' 'It's terrible, it makes me feel bad, I'd rather be a working person' (Weatherley 1993:31).

And for these people being under surveillance and reporting to the DSS office made it all seem a bit better:

'It's not too bad; it's their way of keeping track if you're a bludger.' 'It's alright, it's a good idea to keep tabs on us, we've got to keep trying.' 'It has to be done, otherwise people would take advantage of the system.' 'It makes you do what you are supposed to be doing ... It's the least I could do.' (Weatherley 1993:30)

The system of social security we have constructed interacts with an older moral economy that is still potent; the result is a system grounded in the decision to not make a regime of citizenship rights available to all without question. This point is made obliquely by Weatherley when he remarks from within the current commonsense that;

There is always some tension in the provision of income support between securing the system against abuse and serving those in need (Weatherley 1993: 38).

The reference to "abuse" points to the continuation of the discursive claim that some people are not genuinely in need of social security because in some way they transgress the boundaries between the "deserving" and "undeserving" client and thereby continue to defeat the very logic of an inclusive conception of social citizenship rights.

Such a conception of citizenship I now argue needs to be grounded in the idea of agency.

If the idea of social agency is fundamental to any useful concept of citizenship what is meant by "agency".

Agency is the idea that people are socially embedded in real relationships actively striving for purposeful self-determination, attempting to make sense of, as well as to initiate, influence and cope with events in line with their values, goals and expectations where they confront these as a mixture of pre-given and yet to be made elements (Fryer 1995 p.39). If Taylor is right to insist that this is expressed in our capacity to act as self-reflecting moral agents, then this raises the question of what social conditions can best underwrite this capacity (1985).

Agency can be empowered in specific social relations or by specific institutions, just as agency can also be undermined, restricted and frustrated by those relations or institutions.

Citizenship if it is ever to be truly understood and grounded must be understood as a social category oriented to a range of logics that have little to do with competition, let alone exclusion and stigmatisation and have much more to do with such logics of social action as co-operation, participation and community as embodiments of agency

Kenny has recently succinctly summarised the elements of a notion of agency worth pursuing and using as a check list to assess institutional capabilities in both the market sector and in the public sector to assist people to assert their agency. Among her criteria (Kenny 1994 pp. 121122). for what I call "agency" are the following;

• people have access to open and democratic structures and have a real choice about their lifestyle
• people have access to reliable information
• people can work collectively with those who matter in their lives to prioritise and make decisions
• people can believe in and have the right to control their own destinies
• people have the right to participate - and not to participate - in community decision-making
• people have self-esteem and are listened to and treated with dignity, respect and mutuality
• people work and live in a non-authoritarian environment

What all of these capabilities assume is a set of social relationships in a wide range of social institutions which can either facilitate or obstruct the experience of agency. (See also Austin 1995 for an attempt to spell out some benchmarks for organisational renovation to enhance agency).

As David Fryer has argued eloquently, being poor and being unemployed in the 1990s, is frequently experienced as destructive of agency (Fryer 1995) As Oakley put it sixty years ago, the specific relationships and experiences that attend poverty and unemployment restrict, baffle and discourage people with an overwhelming "yet indeterminate feeling of being thwarted" (Oakley 1936 p. 396).

Being either unemployed and/or poor has two effects.

It makes planning and forward thinking difficult because there is fundamental uncertainty and insecurity in these states and is thereby destructive of agency .

Secondly, being poor is basically to experience corrosive stress and anxiety about all the effects of loss of income, or inadequate income, effects like debt, utility disconnections and worries about food and clothing. Relative deprivation says Fryer is real: it does not take place in regard to some social scientist's construction of a scale of normal consumption, but is evaluated and experienced against quite real self-selected reference groups of friends and neighbours. Within families relative poverty translates into tortuous budgeting strategies, painful prioritising of differing family members needs, conflict prone domestic division of financial responsibility and coping behaviour (McGhee & Fryer 1989; Fryer 1995 p. 39).

There is nothing novel about these insights. Being unemployed or being poor have always been attended by anxiety and worry about not having enough money to meet normal consumption and material needs.

The important point is this: the distinction insisted upon by those who promote the idea of citizenship as participation in the labour market ignores the very real similarities between all low-income persons whether they are in the labour market or in the social security system.

Both are in the current regime of conditional citizenship rights to social security destructive of agency

• We should make no assumptions about the normal tendencies of any institutions or relationships like those found in the labour market or those found in "welfare state" agencies to promote "agency".

As Fryer insists all low-income persons experience persistently restricted agency, whether by virtue of adverse labour market experience or unemployment, or via labour market programs, and the subsequent experience of relative deprivation and economic insecurity. Fryer puts this case well:

All are social relationships between parties involving psychological contracts in which work determined by one party is done in exchange for income another party in a context of mutual rights and obligations and regulated by powerful social, community, organisational and institutional forces. In an interesting sense unemployed persons can be regarded as essentially poorly paid, low status insecure public sector workers with virtually no negotiating rights whose work (persistent near hopeless job search, humiliating benefit related rituals, management of households on inadequate resources, etc) carries a high risk of occupational strain (Fryer 1995 p. 40) [my stress].

These observations if they have any force surely entail a major rethinking of what we mean by citizenship and how we can secure the right institutional supports for achieving citizenship understood as facilitating agency.

In the late twentieth century some institutions promote citizenship-as--agency and others do not.

Think of the difference between the activities of two central agencies of late twentieth century government, one oriented to the idea of citizenship as participation, the other the very model of an institution committed to disempowerment, stigmatisation and exclusion.

The first is the Commonwealth Electoral Commission which since 1983 has quietly, and without fuss, worked to guarantee the formal opportunities for all citizens to engage in the electoral and political process by securing their right to exercise their right to universal suffrage. They deploy the modern technologies to remind people to notify the Commission of changes of address, maintain the basic data base enabling all who vote to do so, and then when the great electoral process winds up, run the machinery of political processes without fuss, or fear and favour and do so by beginning with the premise that all citizens have the right to vote. They even advertise to remind people of the civic values of voting and participating.

[When did we last see a similar major TV campaign on behalf of DSS encouraging the unemployed to apply for social security?]

For most citizens the Electoral Commission is seen as a nearly invisible supportive agency that secures a basic right and does so without actual or implied stigma. No one seriously doubts that this agency underwrites and secures what we all take to be a fundamental right. (I would hasten to add that the recent furore over the Albert Langer matter suggests that even the best of schemes can "stuff up").

The second is the DSS dedicated -or so it seems to many of its clients -to not facilitating their access to social and economic security. For some there is humiliation, for others painful intrusion into matters that are essentially private, for many the stressful insistence on eligibility tests (relating variously to activity, income, assets and work) and for many long waiting periods before security is possible. Espionage and incitements to inform, coldness, stress, humiliation, long queues, uncertainty and insecurity all attend the workings of this major agency devoted -or so the state's rhetoric puts it- to "guaranteeing" social and economic security and citizenship. For some of its clients, the social security system is intrusive and unfriendly.

Ultimately DSS fails to operate on the fundamental logic of citizenship understood as the right to full participation and to underwriting the experience of agency in all the various levels and forms of social action. The existing social security system has been framed in terms that are distinctly at odds with the logic of full citizenship-as-agency.

Current DSS practices depend on an uncertain, even highly ambivalent relationship between early "economic liberal" norms about paid employment [which I will call the New Poor Law model of welfarism] and the "social liberal" model of the "worker citizen'' dependent on the achievement of "full [male] employment".

If nothing else we will need to do better in those of our institutions DSS, traditionally oriented to surveillance, monitoring and regulation of our worker-citizens and grounded in the older work-centred order. A model of social citizenship oriented to agency has major implications for current organisational practices in organisations like DSS. If we are to make the transition to the new social order that is emerging a new model of citizenship will have to be invented /sustained which will in part depend on the emergence of new "cultures of democracy" inside our institutions.

It is in the interest of promoting discussion through this provocation that I would suggest we look at linking our social security system, wage income system and the pattern of unpaid domestic and voluntary work to offer a fundamental guarantee of social citizenship rights to all Australians.

As this century ends we need to re-examine the fundamental moral and institutional arrangements which are being rendered obsolescent in the wake of unprecedented social, economic and cultural change. Now is not the time for a retreat into nostalgia for a "world we have lost."

At the heart of this renovation will be those fundamental social and personal norms which have accreted around the institution of full-time paid [male] employment. On the horizon is a new pattern of social values and policies like basic income. "Basic income" delivers the promise of citizenship as a regime of substantive social rights.

Jordan (1985,1993) has argued for basic income as a framework for consolidating a conception of full citizenship for all.

That is universal suffrage did not and could not introduce a democratic, rational or harmonious utopia; it simply provided a mechanism whereby more people as citizens could for good or for bad influence the shaping of governance. Likewise basic income cannot and will not introduce a perfectly egalitarian, rational or harmonious utopia; it is merely another institutional framework which secures to more people the economic capacity to participate more fully and to do so in ways which are not dependent on their prior participation in the labour market.

Whether a society is a 'good society' depends above all else on the quality, density and richness of human relations. As Green, Hobhouse and Rawls have argued at various times, a society that prevents a significant number of its members from engaging with each other in terms that I have referred to as "agency" cannot be a "good society". In particular is this a problem because (i) of the impoverished life it imposes on those who are marginalised and (ii) because of the more general climate of fear and insecurity which even the fortunate live under as a consequence of threatened social disorder.

If one is to be a full citizen, one must enjoy agency. To have agency requires that material subsistence is secured and is secured in ways that do not humiliate, oppress or demean, in a way that does not discourage efforts to escape poverty or disparage efforts to obtain training opportunities or employment.

The current terms upon which social security is offered or obtained is consequential (i) upon exclusion from the labour market and (ii) entails that they are frequently barred from the main arenas of social cooperation by the teens upon which their social security benefits are conferred. These forms of exclusion also arguably weaken the community as a whole by driving a wedge between the waged majority and the sizeable minority of unemployed and the larger numbers of people in precarious employment. Those in work are encouraged and sustained in their view that the social security claimants are a threat to order, are "dole-bludgers", are criminal and deviant, introducing further restraints and legal controls on their existence (like curfews for teenagers in certain economically depressed suburbs of Melbourne).

Jordan's account of a new theory of justice which brings together traditional liberal concerns with promoting individual autonomy and interests and a collectivist concern with community wellbeing rests on his search for a:

... theory which combines the liberal egalitarian's concern with distributions which allow equal autonomy, and the Aristotelian view of justice as 'what tends to promote the common interest' because it allows 'each to attain a share in the good life' (Jordan 1993:163).

For Jordan, basic income offers a democratic-liberal and just-communitarian framework which will include all those whose absence from the labour market and reliance on a conditional and often punitive social security framework has excluded them, as citizens with full participatory rights and capacities in the common life of the community. Whether or not we have an 'underclass' or whether or not we accept the reinvention of deficit theory/blaming the victim elements associated with 'underclass theory' it is plain that Australia now has a large and increasing community or excluded persons. There are these 'excluded ones' currently include people - and their dependants-with low earning power, whose actual or potential earning incomes fall below their subsistence needs, many of whom are unemployed or underemployed; there are also many young people and women who live alone, single parents, handicapped people and the people who care for them, aboriginal people whose capacity to participate is considerably reduced.

Basic income has the capacity to reintegrate the practice of citizenship and economic security which the long term privileging of wage labour has for so long sundered. In essence basic income rests on four relatively modest claims:

• citizenship (and not class, occupational status, gender, earnings or employment record) will be the basis for entitlement to transfers and services;
• useful activities including activities performed outside the labour market and employment become more possible and can provide the moral justification of the claim to benefits;
• coverage of basic needs will be the criterion of justice and not the rewarding of desert or the protection of (relative) status;
• a sustainable level of risk and the maintenance of autonomous options concerning the citizen's responsible conduct of his or her life will be the key normative value and not the promotion of some egalitarian utopia (Offe 1993:70).

It is clear that especially since the long term global-crisis began to affect the most "advanced" economies that the traditional assumptions about a formal, stable labour contract existing over a (male) worker's lifetime enabling that worker to sustain a family of dependents have had to be revised, as the practice of that assumption has been abridged. Changes to women's labour market participation, experiments in cooperative and other institutional forms of non-wage work and new forms of working, (outwork, sub-contracting, temporary hiring, short-term contracts, flexi-time, and part-time work) have all been part of a major revision of wage labour processes as it was traditionally understood and defined in the twentieth century (Ford, 1987). These experiments deserve to be extended in the interests of all.

Basic income becomes a fundamental institutional means to underwrite new social relations and new forms of social creativity in the transformation and humanisation of work. It can for example provide people with the opportunity to 'opt out' temporarily, or permanently, of formal employment to develop their skills and their potential for useful activities, in a way that formal employment and unemployment alike currently often denies, and to do so on a modest basis of state supported subsistence.

1. The italicised text is the definition adopted by the Basic Income European Network (BIEN) in 1986. (Cited in van Parijs 1993:3)  [back]
2. Whether this be a crisis in the usual neo-Marxist sense. or simply the emergence of new forms of social life and social creativity (MacDonald 1990), is not a point that should detain us here.  [back]
3. The BCA insist that 'tine economic' underpins 'the social'.
   ...Government must ensure that the economy is able to provide and sustain paid employment of the working-age population and substantially reduce unemployment. It must ensure that the transfer system is sustainable in the long run; that is does not undermine the incentives to work and save and that transfers do not take place on such a scale as to undermine national savings and reduce the capacity of Australian society to invest and provide for jobs and rising standards of living (BCA 1995, p.32). In the spirit of developing a "national vision", the BCA argues that Australia pays too much by way of its social security system, too much by way of the 'social wage and too much income tax, noting ea. that the social security system chews up 95.6% of personal income tax (BCA 1995, p.32)
   Those who work in the social sciences need to remind the community that economic modes of social action are simply one of the elements or logics of social action and interaction.  [back]
4. These arguments appeal to a moral argument about the relationship of obligations and rights, which lead to the conclusion that citizen's rights are only worthwhile and legitimate when they are coupled with, and made conditional upon the discharge of obligations. On the left, Pixley (1993) holds that citizen's rights should protect the achievement of "self-respect" which is shaped and defined in a particular society where people aim "to live in accord with the norms and standards of human excellence".  [back]
5. One of the chief consequences of the welfare economic model has been the aid and comfort given to the proposition that welfare rights to an adequate income or a minimum standard of living are untenable because they assert a right to resources which are in fact scarce. Such arguments (see Fried 1978: 110) presume or construct a difference between civil rights (to vote or the right to freedom from assault or unjust imprisonment) which are 'costless', while rights to positive freedoms always presuppose a cost because the means of securing those rights are usually quite scarce or else there is said to be a limitless quality to someone claiming a right to good health care.
      Plant has argued recently that the distinction between costless civic rights (which rely on a forbearance from action) and infinitely costly social rights (which presuppose a positive action to achieve something) is spurious (Plant 1993). He says it is a nonsense to say that there is a distinction between civic rights, which aren't scarce and costless, and economic rights which are constrained by scarce resources and carry a high price. Surely it costs to uphold fundamental civic rights because to secure freedom from assault, or the right to vote costs us when we set up courts, police systems or Electoral Commissions just as it costs to uphold social and economic rights. Worse the very critics of welfare rights frequently defend civic rights but do not make access to these rights dependent on some prior participation, activity or work test.
      What should we make of this given that the critics of unrestricted welfare rights do not wish to make the granting of unrestricted civil rights (like the right to vote or freedom from discrimination) dependent on the prior discharge of work obligations or any other activity or participation tests? Murray and others respond by saying that giving people the right to vote will not make them dependent, but unlimited access to basic welfare rights it is claimed will render the beneficiaries of such largesse dependent and demoralised, just like it is said today's long term unemployed who slide down the Slope to become an 'underclass'. So we are returned to the same old territory; work = independence and welfare = dependence.  [back]
6. Many local writers have followed Castles (1985) down a strange primrose path imagining that we invented some strange entity called the "wage-earners welfare state". What we have, whilst it has some peculiarities is not so different from other welfare states -unless it be the commitment absent in most other "insurance-based" systems to not impose a definite time limit over which benefits are paid (Watts 1996).  [back]

© 1996 Rob Watts

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