Social Policy and the Welfare State A FAREWELL TO AUSTRALIA’S WELFARE STATE

For much of the postwar period, the Australian welfare state has been mis-understood by overseas social policy commentators. The lack of generosity of welfare payments has been substantially compensated for by a system of wage regulation that has prevented waged poverty and delivered a reduced disparity of incomes. The strong emphasis on means-testing of benefits has not had the stigmatizing effects of benefit selectivity elsewhere, since Australian means tests are designed to exclude the well-off rather than focus benefits exclusively on the very poor and Australian means-testing has been nondiscretionary in character. Policy changes in the 1980s and 1990s, and most particularly under the present Liberal Coalition government, have under-mined these distinctive aspects of welfare Australian-style, and it is no longer possible to defend the Australian welfare state from its critics. When I first took up academic residence in Australia in the early 1980s, I was a fully paid-up adherent of welfare Scandinavian-style. In a book entitled The Social Democratic Image of Society (1), I had shown that the massive extension of state programs of social welfare was an achievement of almost five decades of social democratic dominance in such countries as Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Coming to Australia, with almost the lowest spending on welfare of any nation in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and with a history in which the Australian Labor Party (generally known as the ALP or Labor) was only exceptionally in control of the national government, I drew what seemed to me the obvious conclusion, that the emergence of a proper welfare state in Australia required a long period of hegemonic ALP rule. This was at the beginning of the Hawke/Keating era and, while there was no real hegemony, the ALP did at least have five successive election victories and Australia experienced a duration of Labor rule unequaled in the English-speakin