Testing the limits of the metaphor: fordist and post-fordist life cycles in Australia and New Zealand.

Abstract

.. the fact that Australia and New Zealand are atypical in the way they deliver social policy outcomes does not mean that they are necessarily weakly developed welfare states. On the contrary, for much of this century, these countries have had strong claims to be welfare states, but welfare states built on institutional foundations in many ways quite different from those of Western Europe and Scandinavia. They have been, moreover, welfare states which matured rather earlier than was the case in Europe. It is the different form taken by the welfare state in the Antipodes that justifies our attention here; a form which, as we shall see subsequently, rested far less than was the case in Europe on the use of public expenditure and the apparatus of the tax state as the primary means of income redistribution. Clearly, the identification of diverse institutional strategies designed to achieve rather similar goals of social amelioration raises issues of intrinsic interest for comparative research. Such issues are, moreover, of practical policy relevance in so far as they permit speculation as to whether certain kinds of welfare state strategies have been more successful than others as means of coping with the tasks of social protection in advanced capitalist societies, both in the early post-war heyday of the welfare state and now in an era where, seemingly, all welfare strategies have become more vulnerable. Show more