A Decent Provision: Australian Welfare Policy, 1870 to 1949 by John Murphy (review)

This is an impressive book. It is both an excellent history of the Australian welfare system and an insightful reflection on the relation between that history and the welfare system today. It is a book that you recognize has been written by an expert in the field—presenting its description of the main contours of history and bringing out its main themes with a clarity that can only come from detailed research and extensive thinking.

A chronological ordering of the description of welfare policy in Australia is followed. Chapters 1 and 2 summarize prevailing attitudes to, and institutions for, provision of welfare in Australia in the late nineteenth century. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 describe the development of state and national policy in the early twentieth century—focusing on the old age pension; the role of wages policy in welfare; and pensions for war veterans and their families. Chapters 6 and 8 are about the path not followed in Australia—the unsuccessful attempts to introduce contributory-based insurance type welfare schemes in the 1920s and 1930s. Chapter 7 describes the slow and faltering attempts to provide welfare in the Great Depression, and chapter 9 presents what might be regarded as the consequence—the introduction of unemployment and sickness benefits and the widows’s pension by the Labor government in the 1940s.

This description of the history of welfare policy is well done. The narrative is effectively organized into major episodes; and the balance of historical detail and analysis maintains interest throughout. What I most enjoyed and where I learned the greatest amount were the sections of the book that make a case for the relevance of the history of welfare policy in Australia. This case is made convincingly—and it is two-fold. First, it is suggested that the debates we continue to have about welfare policy are often repeating debates from the past. Second, it is argued that many features of the present welfare system have come from the historical origins of the system.

Many of the issues that have been influential in welfare policy-making in Australia are recurring. At the end of the book John Murphy (230) describes how: “Contemporary discourses about income support speak of ‘capacity’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘welfare dependency’, but we still tend to answer some old questions about who is entitled to what, about who should be the judge, in ways that our forebears would recognise.” Being familiar with history can therefore assist in establishing patterns in welfare policy making in Australia. I would say that one example of a pattern is that: There will be debate. Welfare policy in Australia has always involved major debate about tradeoffs. For instance, in discussions of support to the unemployed Murphy describes a tradeoff between distributional objectives and ideas of entitlement and pauperization. Another example of a pattern is to understand that the evolution of policy has not been unidirectional; that the influence of competing arguments has varied across time. At present, policy on support for the unemployed has introduced an obligation of the unemployed to contribute to society. This is a departure from the system that existed from the 1940s to early 1990s; yet is more consistent with views on providing support to the unemployed in the 1930s. A final example of a pattern is how full employment has been seen since the 1940s as the primary mechanism to ensure widespread well-being in Australian society; with welfare policy acting as a corrective device when the employment mechanism failed.

History does not only teach us about patterns in welfare policy. It is also embedded in the policies that exist today. Partly this reflects how past events affected the development of welfare policy. Here the main example is the Great Depression. Murphy describes (180) how this episode “… would feed into the desire to build a welfare state”; and established to many that the state needed to replace the old...