Risk Shifts in Australia: Implications of the Financial Crisis

‘Risk’ has become a central theme in 21st-century policy thinking. In particular, there has been considerable discussion of the ‘Great Risk Shift’, that is, the process by which the burden of risk has been shifted away from governments and employers and on to workers and households. The financial crisis that began in 2007 has fundamentally transformed the problem of social and economic risk management. The outcomes remain hard to discern, but the central ideas of economic liberalism, dominant since the mid-1970s have clearly failed