A case study in the politics of retrenchment: the 1997 Coalition Residential Aged Care Structural Reform Package

Abstract

This paper examines the policy process involved in the development and implementation of the 1997 Aged Care Structural Reform Package in Australia by the Liberal-National Coalition Government. It will be argued that the process used to implement the Reforms and the convoluted path it took is best explained using Paul Pierson’s theory of the politics of welfare retrenchment. The strategies Pierson identifies as important to programmatic and systematic retrenchment were used with varying degrees of success by the Coalition to implement the Aged Care Reforms and include obfuscation, division and compensation. The effectiveness of these strategies in implementing the Aged Care Reforms was dependent on the political context of aged care policy inherited by the Coalition from the previous Labor administration. The political context is defined in terms of the formal political institutions, the design of aged care policy and the degree to which this has supported the development and maintenance of interest groups. The 1997 Reforms themselves have fundamentally altered the political context and the implications for future administrations are discussed.