A Farewell to Australia's Welfare State

Abstract

For much of the postwar 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 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 undermined these distinctive aspects of welfare Australian-style, and it is no longer possible to defend the Australian welfare state from its critics.

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