You don’t build communities up by putting people down. Structural changes to the economy have resulted in entire communities being left without work and often without adequate social and economic infrastructure.

We see manufacturing jobs disappearing, the loss of jobs in some sectors due to privatisation, and the global quest for ever greater profits by using ever cheaper labour. We have seen a worrying trend towards casualisation and insecure employment and, on the latest ABS labour force figures, a decline in the total number of monthly hours worked in all jobs. Trends change rapidly and, as the prime minister is fond of reminding us, it is useful to be agile and innovative in a period of everlasting uncertainty and flux.

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Which is why it really is time we actually invested in people and communities instead of putting people down and blaming them for their own exclusion. Living in poverty is not a sickness. Nor is it a crime. Yet we continue to fall into the ideological trap of either pathologising or criminalising people who sin against the dominant moral code by not being “self-reliant” in the marketplace.

This is not new. The earlier McClure Report, tabled by Jocelyn Newman in 2000, began from the same premise; that we urgently needed to address the problem of “welfare dependency” because it, and people’s lives, are seemingly spiralling out of control.

It’s time we stopped disguising market failure as a personal failure to participate in the market. For this is where we are starting again, with the current offerings of “revolutionary” vision and “radical” change by social services minister, Christian Porter. By focusing on the supposed failings of the individual, we are missing the bleeding obvious: that there are not enough jobs (and more specifically, not enough hours!) for those who can work as well as a seriously inadequate level of income support for those who cannot.

In the same way, the persistence of homelessness is not a failure of individuals to “do the right thing” and buy a house (or get their parents to pitch in), but rather a failure of the housing market, which is structured in such a way as to be brilliant at providing choice for those at the top, and dazzling as a speculative sport, but lousy at ensuring access to affordable and appropriate accommodation for all.

The other trick that is used to mask the failures of the market is to blame social services. In this discursive sleight of hand, the persistence of unemployment and poverty is proof that the services are not working, and that their funding is a waste of public money because they have failed to end homelessness or unemployment or poverty.

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So, the endgame is not even the modest alleviation of poverty, let alone the arresting of inequality. It is the running down of what actually does work or would work as an investment in people and communities, like Gonski, a highly targeted investment in children’s education, focusing on student need rather than sector. Or like Tafe, a national treasure, that on the watch of governments of both sides of politics, has been systematically undermined and gutted. Likewise, community health programmes, community legal aid programmes, social services and justice reinvestment programmes have been either deliberately cut, like the highly successful Youth Connections, or decidedly ignored.

Australia does not have a welfare problem. We have a poverty problem and an inequality problem, but you know that these problems are going to be ignored when the dominant discourse focuses our attention on the “welfare problem.”

It is true that providing someone with income support and forgetting about them is not the solution to unemployment. But neither is it the cause of unemployment. In short, it is neither the solution nor the problem. And the problem of unemployment and underemployment, which is a structural rather than a behavioural problem, is not going to be addressed by forcing people to live below the poverty line, which is what we appear to be comfortable with allowing to remain as the status quo, even after the welfare revolution. And in the meantime, we are still eagerly being told that corporations need welfare assistance via tax cuts and concessions.

Poverty is not a personal choice. Being a full-time carer, or living with a disability or mental illness, or leaving a violent partner, or being residualised by the labour market, should not result in poverty in a prosperous and progressive country. We should certainly not begrudge the money we spend to make sure that no one is left out or pushed out; that no one is excluded from having a place to call home, a place to work for those who can work (and appropriate income support for those who cannot), a place to learn, and a place to heal. We should not be comfortable with the retrograde notion that charity should be the default mode of providing social security.

If we take as our starting point the supposed need to reduce social expenditure, we will not arrive at the goal of reducing poverty and inequality. If our efforts as a society are predicated on the alleged need to “get people off welfare” we will certainly go some way to cutting the welfare budget and getting people off the government ledger. But we will find that, even though, as in New Zealand, there will hopefully be some good news stories, there will also be entire cohorts of people who are thrown into the arms of loan sharks and predatory payday lenders and condemned to count on charity when all they long for is justice.

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It is time we actually invested in people and communities. It is time we invested in a jobs plan instead of fantasising about a putting-the-boot-into-the-unemployed plan (for example by forcing young people to live on fresh air and sunshine for a month of every year) or a cutting-penalty-rates-and-undermining-the-minimum-wage-plan (exemplified in the PaTH internship proposal).

The $96m “Try, test and learn fund”, will no doubt be used for some worthy ideas, but unless we see a comprehensive investment in people and communities, in jobs, education, social and affordable housing, public and community health, community legal centres, and social services, and unless we see the billions in cuts to these areas restored, and appropriately indexed and expanded, then instead of an investment in a more socially just Australia, we’ll be staring down the barrel of divestment and the divisiveness that follows.

And in the end, we’ll be going down the US path of building profitable prisons instead of investing in the common good, for being locked up follows hot on the heels of locked out.