It is no surprise that social workers are completely unmoved by Joe Hockey’s call to end the age of entitlement. Through their peak body, ACOSS, they are opposing the government’s plans to limit the dole to six months in 12 for young people. The young are entitled to welfare, say the social workers.

What would happen if a social worker’s own child declared that they were not bothering with school any more because they could go on the dole at 18? The social worker, true to her ‘non-directive’ training, might say: ‘Good thinking: of course you are entitled to the dole; I am so glad that nasty Mr Abbott failed in his attempt to limit it.’ More likely the social-worker parent would use every power of persuasion and threat to keep the child at school and discourage dole-taking.

As social workers well know, there are some families where dole-taking is the norm. Mark Latham writes in Not Dead Yet that in his time representing an outer Sydney electorate, school principals told him that when asked about their career plans children would often say: ‘I’m going to do what my dad and granddad do — go on the dole’.

It is a pity that Mark Latham did not have the character to lead the Labor party or the country because his thinking on welfare is far ahead of his colleagues. The thinking began with the recognition that there is an underclass, people who share ‘the same ethos of irresponsibility and hopelessness’. The Left, says Latham, thinks that these people if given more assistance will make a good life for themselves. Actually they are beyond that. No matter what benefits are available, they will go on making the bad choices that lock them into their present mode of life.

The Labor government under Julia Gillard made a move to disrupt this pattern of life in stay-at-home single mothers. When their youngest child reached eight, they lost their single-parent benefit and were eligible only for Newstart, the unemployment benefit. This was in part a cost-saving measure, but its better rationale was to get out of the house and into work those single mothers who do not so much live on welfare as vegetate on it. Of course not all single mothers are like this. Those who are induct their children into welfare dependency and are great breeders of inequality. As all the surveys show, their children are highly likely to be abused and neglected and grow up poorly equipped to succeed in the world.

The Labor party now says it made a mistake on the single-parent benefit. Single mums are doing it hard and deserve a higher benefit. That is, their thinking has returned to what Latham criticised. And Labor is opposing the plan the Abbott government has for young people and the dole, which encourages them to accept that they should either be working or studying. That was also Latham’s policy.

A better way to send this message would be to leave existing arrangements in place and declare that, say, by the beginning of 2016 the dole would not be paid to anyone under 25. What a disturbance that would cause in school playgrounds and the hang-out joints! ‘Earn or learn’ would suddenly be for real. The talk might be of fruit-picking rather than how to con Centrelink.

The weakness of ‘earn or learn’ is that some young people are not equipped to study and for a variety of reasons the private sector is taking fewer young people into work. Something might be done to alleviate the latter, but if we want the ‘earn or learn’ mantra to stick, work has always to be available for those not taking the study option. If the private sector is not providing sufficient work, the government should take up the slack.

The government would be running a civics work programme for young people, paying a little less than the minimum wage. It would expand and contract according to demand. This would be administratively costly, but consider the savings from not having to process young people on and off the dole and police their job searching record.

Consider not the cost but the new ethos that this would create. No young person would start life with a welfare payment or a string of job applications gone unanswered. Intergenerational welfare would be broken. Joe Hockey’s project would have legs.

These would be the rules until young people reached 25. As insurance companies have long known, that’s the true age of maturity, not 18. Eighteen-year olds need direction and opportunity, not social workers talking of entitlement to welfare.