Words are bullets. Seekers of refuge become boat people before being weaponised as illegals. Softened up, Australians accept the creation of distant gulags. And then there are dole bludgers. When the words were used during the week on a morning TV show to prop up figures purporting to show massive numbers of Newstart recipients had transgressed to the point of being booted from the system, we shouldn’t have been surprised, even if the show later issued an apology. Those of us who have watched at close quarters for decades the rhetoric about the wretched knew something like this was most likely in the works. There’s a decades-long ritual to it. The Morrison government has been increasingly annoyed that forces from within and without are massing to try to increase the Newstart payment to a level that might allow recipients to live without starving.

When Prime Minister Scott Morrison failed to stop the rot by trying to fob off questions with cheery lines like “how good’s a job”, and referring to Australia’s welfare system as the world’s best safety net (even though researchers argue Newstart’s benefit actually sits at the bottom end of all OECD countries), he needed a catchier melody. And so he or his advisers came up with “unfunded empathy”. Newstart payments were “certainly modest”, he accepted modestly, but he would “not engage in the unfunded empathy of the Labor Party”. Loading This might seem a bit rich at a time when the government hands out more than $5 billion a year in franking credit cash rebates to people who don’t pay tax. But, hey, it’s about choice, and the government had chosen: empathy for well-off retirees, not the jobless who live on two-minute noodles. Labor, having lost the election partly by allowing the recipients of franking credits to be scared witless at losing their good fortune, wasn’t in a strong place to argue effectively.

The weary word around Labor offices, anyway, is that empathy for the unemployed is not much of a vote-winner these days. This should be no surprise. Successive governments have carefully schooled Australians to harden their hearts against significant sectors of those without jobs, all the way back to the pitiful and grudging “susso” (sustenance) handouts during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The term dole bludger, however, didn’t get any head of steam until the mid-1970s. That’s when unemployment began to rise from postwar levels of around 2 per cent, driven by an oil shock, leading to economic stagnation and a sudden rise in inflation: “stagflation”. Someone had to be blamed. Initially, it was all those layabout hippies and surfers heading to Byron Bay.

Problem is, Australia’s unemployment rate has only edged once below 5 per cent ever since 1975 – during the mining boom just before the global financial crisis. Paul Keating, frustrated by stubborn joblessness, had hissed at a demonstrator to “get a job”. The Labor Party of the '80s and '90s had flirted with the ideas of “mutual obligation” or “work for the dole”. John Howard’s government embraced those ideas enthusiastically. Loading It took the hard-nosed Queensland Liberal Mal Brough, making his bones as Minister for Employment Participation in the Howard government during the early 2000s, to show how to weaponise the issue. Using tailored market research he announced, through leaks to The Daily Telegraph and the Queensland Courier-Mail, that for the first time, a large group of unemployed could be identified as “dole cruisers”. Up to 16 per cent of dole recipients had been identified as happy to live on their employment benefits.

The newspapers did their sums and screamed that 100,000 people were cruising on the dole. Brough didn’t need to use the term ''dole bludgers'': everybody else did. A new crackdown was under way. Brough’s figures turned out to be wrong. The marketers had counted several forms of welfare recipients in their survey, not just those on Newstart. The quantum of “dole cruisers” was inflated. The cock-up was not leaked to anyone: it was reported later by Gareth Robinson on Radio National’s Background Briefing. Loading Two decades on, just as a new government comes under pressure, new figures found their way to the Daily Telegraph last week: almost 80 per cent of Newstart recipients had had their payments suspended at least once over the last year. The rules, you might judge, had become so inflexible it was almost impossible not to get suspended – for being five minutes late for a job appointment, for instance.

Channel 7’s Sunrise, however, had a different take. “New figures have been released showing just how many dole bludgers are trying to take advantage of the welfare system," it bludgeoned. Fancy that. Ugly word, bludger. Tony Wright is the associate editor and special writer for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.