Australian Welfare Reform: From Citizenship to Supervision

This paper examines the implications of welfare reform for the meaning of social citizenship in Australia. Australian welfare reform has been under way since the late 1980s, and reflects the themes of activity and participation that are shaping social policy in many advanced industrial nations. The paper suggests that Australian welfare reform is following a liberal trajectory of change which places a continuing emphasis on market and family as the preferred institutions for social support with a newly salient appeal to moral ideas about the responsibility of citizens to be self-sustaining. The paper argues that welfare is being transformed from a limited social right to support provided on condition, and from treating the claimant as a sovereign individual to a subject of paternalistic supervision. Together, these changes are redefining the meaning of equality in Australian social citizenship.     

Radical change or more of the same? Public attitudes towards social citizenship in New Zealand since neoliberal reform

International empirical evidence, including that from Australia, suggests that neoliberal reform has not changed public attitudes towards the social rights of citizenship as much as one might predict. But do these international findings hold true for New Zealand, whose institutions were more rapidly transformed by neoliberal reform than similar countries? Drawing upon public opinion data regarding economic protectionism and the welfare state over the past two decades, this paper argues that while some significant changes have emerged there is no overwhelming evidence of a paradigmatic shift in public attitudes towards social citizenship rights as a result of New Zealand's neoliberal reform. Indeed, New Zealand's experience appears as ambiguous and ambivalent as that of Australia, albeit different policy and historical settings have produced some differences in public attitudes.     

Social Policy in Greece: Rhetoric versus Reform

This paper reviews the major social policy developments in Greece during the 1980s and 1990s, focusing on social security, health and employment policies. It argues that the concept of social policy and the practice of politics have been distorted in this country. Social policy reflects the legacy of a heavily politicized and centralized policy‐making system, an impoverished administrative infrastructure and poorly developed social services. Its emergence is characterized by the pursuit of late and ineffective policies. It lacks continuity, planning and coordination, being oriented towards short‐term political expediency. It is largely insurance‐based, reproducing huge inequalities and institutional arrangements which are behind the times. It provides mainly cash benefits, low‐quality but rather expensive health services and marginal social welfare protection. Moreover, the lack of a minimum income safety net confirms the country's weak culture of universalism and social citizenship. By implication, complex policy and interlocking interest linkages have tarnished the “system” with a reputation for strong resistance to progressive change. At the same time, sources of change such as globalization, demographic developments, new household and family/gender patterns, unstable economic growth, fiscal imperatives, programme maturation, as well as persisting unemployment, changing labour markets and rising health care costs, have produced mounting pressures for welfare reform.     

Beyond poverty reduction: Conditional cash transfers and citizenship in Ghana

Ghana's Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme provides conditional cash transfers to poor households in deprived communities. Beyond the potentiality of the LEAP programme to reduce poverty, its implications for shaping state–citizen relations and inclusive citizenship have been largely ignored. This study explored the implications of the programme on notions of citizenship among cash recipients. The findings indicate that the programme generates interfaces that strengthen state–citizen interaction and serves as a promising avenue for reintegration. However, it is also characterised by undue delay in cash payment and weak institutional capacity to mediate interactive processes and grievances, which suggests that the contractual relationship and the state's accountability are weak. Furthermore, the programme has negatively influenced community social relations, limiting the forms of agency beneficiaries exercised. The study concludes that although LEAP represents a landmark in Ghana's quest for inclusive citizenship, it undermines social relations and citizens’ rights to hold the state accountable, which unavoidably limits effective state building.     

Rise of the Regulatory Welfare State? Social Regulation in Utilities in Israel

This article explores the relation between economic liberalization, regulation and welfare. It asks how the state regulates, delays or prevents service disconnection due to debt and arrears, and what this kind of policy implies regarding the use of regulation as a form of social policy. This is done through a comparative study of the electricity and water sectors in Israel after liberalization. It finds that after initial economic reform, both sectors saw a growth in regulation intended to compensate for the social effects of reform, in what may be termed the ‘regulatory welfare state’. However, this form of social protection has been residual and incoherent. The article argues that trying to separate economic reform from its social consequences is unrealistic and may lead to adverse social and economic results. Second, findings raise concerns regarding the potential of the regulatory welfare state to deliver effective and fair social policy.     

The Social Security Act: Just Another Act or a Blueprint for Social Justice?

This paper takes the opportunity of the Social Security Review to reflect on the meaning of social security reform. It argues that traditional conceptions of the welfare state are unduly narrow and atomistic, concentrating on vesting individuals with social security rights similar to private law notions of contract or properly, and the securing of those rights from depredations by the state. In contrast it contends that social security properly rests on a notion of social rights to participation in society. This is a positive, reciprocal relationship between citizen and state in which both sides have rights and obligations in furthering participation in core social, economic and community activities. The article assays a preliminary statement of ‘social rights’ and considers how new legislation might better harmonize with it.     

Inadequate Policy or Operational Failure? The Potential Crisis of the Korean National Pension Programme

The Korean National Pension Programme is one of the main pillars of the Korean welfare state. From its introduction in 1988, the Programme had come to include 26.8 per cent of the economically active population and had accumulated a pension fund equal to 24 per cent of government expenditure by 1994. Behind such a promising facade, the Korean National Pension Programme is likely to face financial crisis without a major reform. This paper seeks to answer the question as to whether the crisis will arise due to inadequate policy design or to operational failure. The latter cause may require privatizing the Pension Fund in order to operate more efficiently, while the former one would demand rectifying the defects of policy design. This study argues that the crisis is strongly related to inadequate policy design, which promises generous pensions and at the same time requires only a small amount in contributions; although there have also been operational inefficiencies in running the programme. It also argues that inadequacy in policy design stemmed from developmentalism embedded in the Korean welfare state, which regards the National Pension Programme mainly as a measure for mobilizing cheap capital. In conclusion, this paper argues that the Korean welfare state, created in the era of economic development, is transient in nature and that it needs a major reform not only to contain the cost but also to meet the growing demand for social welfare.     

Investing in the Citizen-workers of the Future: Transformations in Citizenship and the State under New Labour

There is growing interest in the idea of the “social investment state”. This paper analyses the emergence of such a state in the UK, in the context of a brief account of the more general transformations of citizenship and the state under New Labour. It argues that, despite the iconic status of the child in the social investment state, it is the child as “citizen‐worker” of the future rather than “citizen‐child” of the present who is invoked by the future‐oriented discourse of social investment.     

Economic Policy and Social Policy: Policy-linkages in an Era of Globalisation

This article argues that changes in the role of the state in economic affairs will affect the process of social policy. Growing economic integration caused by globalisation now places a greater constraint upon the discretion of the nation state, bringing about a transformation into a more competitive state. States are increasingly having to compete against each other in order to promote competitiveness and attract foreign direct investment (FDI) from international capital markets. This competition influences in turn the social policy formation requiring the redesigning of social policy. Thus, welfare states may need to reform their social policy towards a "business-friendly social policy". The analysis of social policy inputs and outputs presented here suggests that there are common trends in most welfare states towards: a market-conforming policy on business taxation, a reduction of the share of employer's contributions in social protection revenues, more limited income security programmes, an increased allocation of resources for active labour market programmes and less state intervention in the labour market. All these reforming trends in social policy can be understood as a response of welfare states to the evolving needs of business caused by structural change, notably globalisation.     

The normalisation of income management in Australia: analysis of the parliamentary debates of 2007 and 2009–10

Initially introduced as part of Australia's Northern Territory Intervention in 2007, Income Management (IM) explicitly targeted inhabitants of remote NT Indigenous communities. IM is a form of welfare conditionality that involves compulsorily ‘quarantining’ at least half of individuals' social security income. It has been heavily criticised for being racist, discriminatory, and a violation of individual rights. The introduction of New Income Management (NIM) in 2010 extended IM beyond Indigenous communities and introduced a new set of eligibility criteria that shifted the focus of IM from Indigenous people to working age recipients of social security income. This in depth study of the early parliamentary debates on the compulsory IM programs traces the patterns of political discourse that led to IM coming to be seen by many policy makers as a normal and legitimate technique within Australian social policy. Situating the IM programs within neoliberal concerns about welfare dependency and active citizenship, this article argues that the introduction of NIM heralded a shift from a conception of IM as part of a focused social experiment targeted at remote Indigenous communities to a potentially mainstream social policy option.     

Public Opinion against Markets? Attitudes towards Market Distribution of Social Services – A Comparison of 17 Countries

This article studies how citizens view the appropriateness of market criteria for allocating services commonly associated with social citizenship rights and welfare state responsibility. The article focuses specifically on a potential role for the market in the provision of social services. The relationship between welfare policy institutions, socio‐economic class and attitudes is explored by comparing attitudes across 17 countries of the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development, using multilevel modelling and data from the 2009 International Social Survey Programme. Results show that public support for market distribution of services is relatively weak in most countries, a result suggesting that public opinion is unlikely to pose a driving force within ongoing processes of welfare marketization. Still, attitudes are found to vary a lot across countries in tandem with between‐country variation in welfare policy design. First, aggregate public support for market distribution of services is stronger in countries with more private spending on services. Second, class differences in attitudes are larger in countries with more extensive state‐led delivery of services. Together, these results point to the operation of normative feedback‐effects flowing from existing welfare policy arrangements. The theoretical arguments and the empirical results presented in this article suggest that future research exploring the relationship between welfare policy and public opinion from a country‐comparative perspective is well advised to place greater focus on the market institutions that, to varying extents in different countries, act as complements to the state in the administration of social welfare.     

Resources for Social Policy

The paper attempts the difficult task of identifying and exploring key resource factors which may influence social policy in the next millennium. It begins by critically examining the impact of demographic trends upon finance and demand for welfare in Europe. The possible impact of this is then examined in relation to the role of the family as a primary welfare resource and upon the supply of professional services. The implications of diminishing environmental resources are then examined and green social policy proposals are briefly outlined. However, the paper argues that the key resource is public goodwill and support for a range of social policy interventions. "The public" has been regarded as homogeneous in many surveys, but this paper argues that trends in middle-class welfare support and welfare activity pose concerns for the future of welfare provision.     

Patterns of Governance: The Curious Case of Non-profit Community Services in Australia

"Community" has taken on a new significance in Australian social policy discourse. Seemingly sound and morally justifiable, in the context of neo-liberalism the language of community positions non-profit delivery of services as superior to state-provided services. As a consequence, non-profit community services are being centrally positioned to mediate the relationship between the state and citizen subjects. In the first part of this paper we trace some of the key historical developments in Australia's welfare state and patterns of governance that are propelling the non-profit sector from the margins to the centre. The second section examines the relationship between Australia's shifting political landscape and the emerging welfare regime. One key feature of this new regime is the attempt to relocate citizenship away from the domain of the state and into that of civil society. The article concludes by sketching out some research themes, focusing, for example, on the impact of devolution of governance in terms of client rights and public accountability.     

Welfare Reform's Chilling Effects on Noncitizens: Changes in Noncitizen Welfare Recipiency or Shifts in Citizenship Status?*

Objective. In the mid‐1990s, welfare usage declined disproportionately among noncitizens, prompting some policy analysts to argue that the 1996 Welfare Reform Act (PRWORA) had a “chilling” effect on welfare receipt among eligible non‐citizens. However, naturalization among noncitizen welfare recipients could account for the disproportionate decline. This article evaluates the role of naturalizations in producing the so‐called chilling effect. Methods. The research uses longitudinal data (the Survey of Program Dynamics) to decompose changes in citizen and noncitizen welfare receipt into parts due to shifts in citizenship status and shifts in welfare receipt. Results. A substantial portion of the relative decline in welfare usage among noncitizens can be explained by shifts in naturalization. Conclusions. A more cautious interpretation of results about the effects of welfare reform on immigrants is called for, particularly results of analyses that use cross‐sectional data and disaggregate the change in welfare receipt by citizenship status.     

A Comparative Discussion of the Gendered Implications of Cash-for-Care Schemes: Markets, Independence and Social Citizenship in Crisis?

There are moves across many countries away from state-led provision of services for disabled people towards cash-based systems, which have been welcomed by disabled people as increasing choice and control over services and support, and increasing independence and social participation. However, feminist scholars have long warned about the implications of commodifying care for women, and the possible consequences of substituting cash for services for social citizenship have remained underexplored, for both disabled people generally, disabled women and mothers more particularly, and for personal assistants/care workers. This article will attempt to address that gap by carrying out a comparative literature review and policy analysis of the role of policy development and outcomes in cash-for-care schemes, looking comparatively across policy developments in several countries, as well as developed welfare states beyond Europe to examine: (a) the impact of the tensions between various governance levels, particularly local and national government; (b) the gendered impact of such policies on (for example) gendered divisions of paid and unpaid work, citizenship and social participation; (c) the impact such policies have, or are likely to have, on different groups of men and women across the life course and across different social and economic groups; and (d) how such policies can contribute to the well-being and/or detriment of different groups of women (and men) within different social, political, economic and historical contexts.     

‘A Common Sense of the Times’? Neo‐liberalism and Changing Public Opinion in New Zealand and the UK

Neo‐liberalism represents a significant and enduring shift in the politics shaping social policy. Although frequently ascribed a hegemonic, all‐powerful status that focuses our attention on the coherence found in neo‐liberal policies, this article builds on scholarly work highlighting variegation in the neo‐liberal project across different policy areas, national settings and time periods. Specifically, it employs Peck's and Tickell's (2002) view that neo‐liberalism has gone through multiple phases in response to both external and internal crises as an entry point for studying neo‐liberalism's impact on public support for the welfare state. Drawing upon New Zealand and British attitudinal data, the article argues that public reactions to an early period of retrenchment (‘roll‐back’ neo‐liberalism) differ from those reported in the ‘roll‐out’ or embedding phase of neo‐liberalism implemented by Third Way Labour Governments in both countries. Indeed, continuing public support in many policy areas arguably contributed to the internal crisis that provoked an adaptation to the neo‐liberal project. The article further explores public support for the welfare state following the external crisis provoked by the financial meltdown of 2008–09 asking whether New Zealand and British attitudes showed signs of resisting austerity measures or whether they, instead, indicated a third, ‘roll‐over’ period of neo‐liberalism where the public accepted not only a neo‐liberal economic agenda but also the need for further retrenchment of the welfare state. Conclusions about the politics of social policy at the level of public opinion offer both good and bad news for welfare state advocates.     

Industrial Relations as a Source of Social Policy: A Typology of the Institutional Conditions for Industrial Agreements on Social Benefits

The article's starting point is that the now‐conventional conceptualization of welfare state retrenchment as a shift from state provision of income support to market processes is misleading. Rather, state provision may be replaced by benefits negotiated collectively by trade unions and employers. As a first step to further investigate this development the article suggests a typology of institutional contexts within which industrial agreements on social benefits emerge. This typology is based on Thomas H. Marshall's distinction between political and industrial citizenship. Following the comparative method of the ‘parallel demonstration of theory’, the typology is applied to four countries where collective agreements on social benefits have recently been concluded, namely Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Germany. It is argued that, on the one hand, the state's activity or passivity in labour relations and, on the other hand, the timing of the institutionalization of political and industrial citizenship is decisive for the development of collectively negotiated benefits. The conclusion for comparative welfare state research is that, when viewing policies of welfare state retrenchment, the research should systematically include industrial relations and their historical trajectories in its frame of reference.     

Australia's disabling income support system: tracing the history of the disability pension from 1908 to today

This article is based on a historical‐comparative policy and discourse analysis of the principles underpinning the Australian disability income support system. It determines that these principles rely on a conception of disability that sustains a system of coercion and paternalism that perpetuates disability; this is referred to as disablism. The article examines the construction of disability in Australian income support across four major historical epochs spanning the period 1908–2007. Contextualisation of the policy trajectory and discourses of the contemporary disability pension regime for the time period 2008–now is also provided. The system was found to have perpetuated disablism through the generation of disability categories on the basis of normalcy and ableness as a condition of citizenship. Two major themes were found to have interacted with the ideology of disablism. The first theme – Commonwealth authority – set the tone for legitimising the regulation of disabled citizens. The second theme – conservative sanctioned paternalism and coercion – reflected the tensions between the paternalistic concern for income support provision while attempting to prevent idleness and welfare dependency. This article argues that a non‐disabling provision based on social citizenship, rather than responsible or productive citizenship, counters the tendency for authoritarian and paternal approaches.     

Increasing Choice and Control for Older and Disabled People: A Critical Review of New Developments in England

This paper critically examines new policies currently being implemented in England aimed at increasing the choice and control that disabled and older people can exercise over the social care support and services they receive. The development of these policies, and their elaboration in three policy documents published during 2005, are summarized. The paper then discusses two issues underpinning these proposals: the role of quasi‐markets within publicly funded social care services; and the political and policy discourses of consumerism and choice within the welfare state. Despite powerful critiques of welfare consumerism, the paper argues that there are nevertheless very important reasons for taking choice seriously when considering how best to organize and deliver support and other services for disabled and older people. A policy discourse on consumerism, however, combined with the use of market mechanisms for implementing this, may be highly problematic as the means of creating opportunities for increased choice and, on its own, risks introducing new forms of disadvantage and social exclusion.     

Common paths,divergent patterns: The social protection by other means approach in Australia and Japan

This article reports on a study of the welfare reform trajectories of two countries that are often identified in the literature as having institutional patterns of the ‘social protection by the other means’ approach. It is questioned in the article whether these two countries have undergone a converging reform trajectory against the increasing forces of economic liberalisation and whether their distinct ways of doing social policy have now come to an end. It argues that while both Australia and Japan have followed a similar neoliberal path in their social policy reform direction, the forms and patterns they have taken to follow have been distinct, largely aligned with the existing structure of social protection in each. Distinctive strategies of welfare adopted by each country have led to a divergent pattern in their way of doing social policy.