An unpleasant business – let’s hope they wear gloves – but it is for the social good. We have already had the debate over the drug testing of welfare recipients – back in 2017, when the government first introduced the policy, before dropping it quietly and walking casually away. Illustration: Reg Lynch Credit: At the time it had other, more pressing matters to deal with, like its own party room implosions over energy policy and marriage equality. Now the plan looks like it might pass the Senate – Jacquie Lambie-depending – and so it’s back on.

Under the trial, 5000 new recipients of Newstart and Youth Allowance will be urine tested for two years. Loading They will be tested for various illicit drugs, including opiates, cannabis, methamphetamine and ecstasy. The drug that causes the most social harm – alcohol – goes unmentioned. But that’s okay, because it’s possible to do a job while drunk, or half drunk, right?

After all, Barnaby Joyce has admitted he was either drinking heavily or hungover for a good chunk of his deputy prime ministership. And in 2009 Tony Abbott got so drunk at work he passed out on a couch and missed the vote on the Rudd government’s $42 billion stimulus response to the global financial crisis. As Malcolm Turnbull said later: “I can't remember anyone else missing a vote because they were too drunk to get in the chamber.” Apparently it’s only a higher class of person who can function while under the influence, and still draw on their taxpayer-funded income. The three sites chosen for the trial were singled out because, we are told, they have a higher proportion of people on working-age payments, higher rates of drug-related presentations at hospital, and higher police involvement in drug-related incidents.

The government gave the same justification in 2017, but an SBS report on Logan, situated between Brisbane and the Gold Coast, quoted the local mayor as saying the drug-related crime statistics quoted by government were “flimsy”. The same report stated figures from the Queensland police showed drug-related offences had fallen to below the state average. Loading But perhaps there has been a drug-related crime spree in the area since then, and certainly there is no denying the socio-economic disadvantage of Logan, and the other places chosen for the trial. The poverty, troubles and heart of the Logan community are brilliantly captured in a 2013 Walkley award-winning essay by recent Miles Franklin winner and former Logan local, Melissa Lucashenko.

It should be compulsory reading for every politician who dares to use the term “compassionate conservative”. The Prime Minister says he is “puzzled” by the widespread opposition to the trial, which is only his effort to get people off welfare and into work, and to help them overcome their addictions. It would be easy to pick apart those claims based on what welfare groups and addiction experts have said about the trial, or by pointing out that employment opportunities tend to be much thinner in economically depressed areas like, well, exactly the ones chosen for the trial. Prime Minister Scott Morrison is puzzled by opposition to his drug-testing welfare polity. Credit:SMH It’s tempting but I won’t do it, nor will I point out the plainest of all truths when it comes to addiction: that an addict will never, ever get clean because they’re willed by someone else to do so.

The entire drug testing issue is a distraction, and it’s working well. It has been successfully rolled into a mutual-obligation-melange along with talk of a national rollout of cashless welfare cards and, implicitly, the campaign to raise Newstart. It won’t matter how many welfare recipients test positive for drugs, even less how many are successfully treated afterwards. All that matters is the linking, in the public mind, of drug-taking and welfare recipients. The rest is a useful blur for a public that doesn’t follow politics in detail, but is broadly supportive of the idea that taxpayer funds should not be used to buy drugs. Once you’ve made the drugs-n-dole bludgers link, you can go on to make all sorts of cuts to the welfare budget, either openly, or through onerous “compliance” provisions that achieve the same effect. You can easily fend off calls to increase Newstart.

The outrage from the left, from Twitter, from everyone but the people who Morrison calls “Quiet Australians”, will aid your cause. It will also serve to sponge attention away from other issues – like the nation’s total lack of an energy or emissions policy, or the recent national accounts figures which show the economy is itself operating with some impairments. Pass the urine jar. Twitter: @JacquelineMaley Follow Jacqueline Maley on Facebook