A Farewell to Australia’s welfare state

Abstract

For much of the post-war period, the Australian welfare state has been misunderstood by overseas social policy commentators. The lack of generosity of welfare payments has been substantially compensated for by a system of wages regulation which has prevented waged poverty and delivered a reduced dispersion of incomes. The strong emphasis on means-testing of benefits has not had the stigmatising 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 because Australian means-testing has been non-discretionary in character. The paper notes that policy changes in the 1980s and 1990s, and, most particularly, under the present Liberal Coalition government, have undermined these distinctive aspects of welfare Australian-style and argues that it is no longer possible to defend the Australian welfare state from its critics.