has the royal commission killed the ‘dole bludger’ myth?

Michel Foucault’s Self-discipline and Punish, a e book drummed right into a technology of sociology college students, begins with a protracted description of a public execution in Paris in 1757. Such public celebrations of torture had been fading, he thought, changed by the chilly, clipped hand of paperwork. As a substitute of public executions, the nineteenth century noticed governments create jail techniques with standardised cells and sentencing tips, professionalised jail wardens and schemes to “right” the incarcerated. 

However whereas we now not see the condemned damaged on wheels within the city sq., Foucault warned {that a} subtler violence remained. State bureaucracies turned extra highly effective. Methods of administrative justice had been no much less damaging to these of their grasp, even when they now not left bodily marks on felons’ our bodies. “In consequence,” Foucault wrote, “justice now not takes public duty for the violence that’s sure up with its observe.”

I used to be reminded of Foucault’s warnings concerning the unaccountable energy of presidency bureaucracies when studying Catherine Holmes’ eloquent remaining report of the robodebt royal fee. Lengthy however gripping, written in crisp and mordant prose, the report lays out the gory particulars of one of many worst episodes within the historical past of Australian public administration.