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Reviewed by:
  • A Decent Provision: Australian Welfare Policy, 1870 to 1949
  • Alvin Finkel
John Murphy, A Decent Provision: Australian Welfare Policy, 1870 to 1949 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing 2011)

Australia’s social welfare provision is often categorized as occupying a special stratum outside the usual categorization of welfare states as either social-democratic, corporatist, or residual. The country’s social insurance programs lack sufficient universality or breadth for Australia to be grouped with the Scandinavian welfare states, and they are not based on corporatist social stratification as in Germany. But, while the modest social insurance provisions of Australia resemble North American programs in their reliance on means-tested help for those whom the state consider the deserving poor, social provision in Australia differs in important ways from American and Canadian provision.

In the early 20th century, in response to a labour movement with growing social and political influence, Australia set up a system of wage arbitration that encouraged unionism while dampening strikes and other forms of militancy. By the 1920s, wage tribunals were tasked with insuring that most full-time, continuously working semi-skilled and unskilled male wage workers received incomes sufficient to support a family without falling into poverty. This patriarchal model not only ignored women workers but also made no distinctions between single males, married males without children, and married males with children, and inherently privileged the childless. The introduction of a “child endowment” in 1941, much like the family allowance system introduced in Canada three years later, was meant as much to reduce inflationary demands for across-the-board wage increases as to help families. It also took for granted the morality and permanence of a family wage model.

Apart from its patriarchal assumptions, which it shared with all models of social provision in operation before the 1960s, Australia’s social model was an improvement upon the standard residual model of provision in that it gave a near-guarantee of an above-poverty income to households with a male income-earner with a continuous full-time job. But like all residual models, Australia’s did not work for individuals and households when physical or mental health issues for the working members of the household resulted in inability to work, at least full-time and continuously. Similarly if working members of the household had to care for non-working members, the model did not work for them. When the workings of the capitalist economy made it difficult for workers in a household to find or maintain full-time employment, poverty loomed. Comparisons of Australia’s “Gini coefficient” – drawn from the cia Factbook of 2011 with countries with residual and social-democratic social provision tell the story. The Gini is a measure of the distribution of wealth in countries. The higher the Gini, the greater the deviation of the incomes of the richest and the poorest from the median income (the scores are from 0 to 100, with 0 meaning perfect equality and 100 meaning that one individual holds all the income). In the United States, the Gini was 40.8 in 1997 when the economy performed sluggishly but actually fell to 45 in 2007 when the economy was, in macroeconomic terms, booming. Sweden had a Gini of 25 in 1992 during a period of economic recession and conservative [End Page 353] government, and 23 in 2005 when the economy performed well and the Social Democrats governed. Australia was in the middle, with an unimpressive Gini of 35.2 when unemployment was high in 1994 but distributing wealth somewhat better in 2006, when employment opportunities were greater. The Gini improved to 30.5 because of a continuing model of provision that assumed an always elusive full employment.

Murphy does an able job of tracing the introduction of various social programs. His analysis of resistance to universal programs focuses heavily on claims regarding popular opposition to the Poor Law, with its forced institutionalization of paupers. Workers and trade unions argued that decent wages were the best antidote to pauperization and pushed for mechanisms that would produce such wages. A frontier society mentality prevented them from examining more closely the many reasons why people might become jobless and destitute, and...

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