Abstract
A Decent Provision is a lovely book, an original history of the first formative period of the Australian welfare state that is at once scholarly and a good read. Deeply versed in literature across several disciplines, it engages with traditional questions about origins and influences but also with contemporary debates about Australian welfare exceptionalism and path dependency in its development. It does all this with admirable fairness among contending perspectives and political allegiances.
Australia’s brief period as a ‘social laboratory’ at the turn of the 20th century was followed by the political stasis of the 1920s and 1930s, during which time Australia fell from leadership in social innovation to a determined laggardliness. It did not catch up with the nations of Europe and North America until the Second World War, when it established a social security system of means-tested benefits covering old age, disability, unemployment and sickness, and maternity and child allowances without means tests. Funded from general revenues, all benefits were noncontributory. These pre-modern principles were a deliberate and hard won political choice that most Australian social policy advocates continue to defend.
In the first period its founders had defined the social boundaries of the settler nation, including women and excluding racial groups unsuited to its imagined whiteness. The people of this nation would be the beneficiaries of tariff protection, judicial wage arbitration, a socially defined minimum wage and an old age pension. The workers’ paradise gave the foundations of the ‘wage earners’ welfare state’ (Castles 1985), where social protection was to be delivered not through welfare as in Europe but through the male wage on a family basis supporting wifely dependency. Murphy fills in further areas of the picture too often left blank in state-centric accounts, tracing the parallel roles of those other institutions that filled the many voids in social care: the friendly societies of the provident working class, the churches and charities looking after the sick, aged, widowed, and especially children, and the church missions given charge of Indigenous settlements.
Political debates about the age pension had considered and rejected social insurance, canvassing the tricky trade-offs between universality and stigma, the rightfulness of eligibility as citizen and contributor, and the institutional practicalities of enforcing contractual obligation. The means-tested pension that resulted was a pragmatic rather than a principled resolution but it gave a mould for welfare state development that arguably could join redistributive equity with minimal public expenditure.
The move to modernize came from the parties of business, capital and moral rectitude, who attempted to instigate contributory social insurance first in the 1920s and more determinedly in the 1930s. In palely Bismarckian imitation they saw virtue in an expanded social security system whose contributory form would teach providence and reward thrift. In the course of these debates the Labor Party settled its own position in opposition, favouring the established framework even at the cost of increased taxes on workers. It was discredited when the Scullin government responded to the Depression with a vicious austerity program. The anti-Labor parties then succeeded in legislating for a social insurance program providing pensions, unemployment benefits and health services. Why they never implemented this program has never been explained satisfactorily, and Murphy sifts the evidence interestingly without finding an answer.
It fell to Labor and the opportunities of wartime government to flesh out social security on its own terms and imbue it with the Keynesian commitment to full employment. The male breadwinner family model was carried forward into social security, going unchallenged until the 1970s. The impetus to health reform was lost, its moment not to recur for more than 25 years. In the process the social boundaries of the nation were widened, with eligibility for benefits nominally extended to Indigenous peoples and citizens of Asian background. Full inclusion was a larger project, with the renunciation of the White Australia policy and the effective inclusion of Indigenous people still far in the future. Exhausted and discredited by the Depression, the welfare roles of churches and charities faded in importance. The failure of health reform left a clear field for the friendly societies to become health insurers and major beneficiaries of public subsidy in the 1950s.
Murphy retells this history with renewed appreciation of the classic accounts as well as more recent work. As an historian he is concerned to understand the making of Australian welfare institutions as a process that might have turned out otherwise than it did, not a story of the forward march to the present but an assessment weighing contexts, contingencies and human agency. Drawing on the rich comparative literature on welfare state development, Murphy uses these assessments to test the thesis of path dependency, which argues that early policy choices shape future opportunities and constraints and so do much to shape future policy development. In the Australian case it has been argued that Labor’s elaboration of welfare institutions in the 1940s followed the path set 40 years earlier. Looking in careful detail, Murphy finds that the established architecture of wage arbitration did indeed set up institutional barriers to innovation in welfare policy, facilitating continuities that Labor then exploited. In this case at least, Murphy’s careful and considered analysis shows that path dependent development may be likely, but it isn’t easy or automatic.
In this retelling Murphy takes particular care to recognize the multiple dimensions of social inequality implicated in welfare and welfare institutions – class, gender and race and ethnicity, and the shaping of the state and third sector agencies, are threaded through the historical chapter. This presentation of welfare politics as social politics is a strength of the book. These threads might have been tied together in the final chapter, a disappointingly undeveloped sketch of the way that the developments of the first half of the 20th century figure in the ideas and institutions of the 21st.
A Decent Provision gives us a history that synthesizes the various perspectives that have informed social policy argument over several decades – functionalist modernization, class interest and party mobilization, gender politics – with admirable dispassion. The result is a rounded history recognizing the diverse forces at play in shaping welfare institutions and staging the path to present-day welfare politics. There is a cost to such even-handedness, evident in much present discussion of welfare states and welfare politics. However old-fashioned they may seem to us today, the theoretical approaches of an earlier period asked questions that contemporary discussion often leaves in the background. Think of T.H. Marshall’s account of citizenship and social class, Marxist work such as that by Frances Piven and Richard Cloward or Ian Gough, or Elizabeth Wilson’s unmasking of welfare’s gendered assumptions. Whether from radical or conservative perspectives, these arguments addressed the relations between welfare institutions and capitalist society and their consequences for economic development, class conflict and mobilization, social equality and personal autonomy. In a more pessimistic era these consequences, and capitalism itself, seem to be taken for granted. Thus at the very time that welfare states are being rolled back, too much scholarly discussion seems to have lost sight of why it matters.
The market for books on Australian subjects is small and Australian publishers hesitant. Ashgate deserve credit for publishing A Decent Provision in an attractive hardbound edition. The book deserves a wide readership, of students and general readers as well as social policy experts, but it is unfortunately expensive for those who will gain most from it. It may be available as an electronic book, but I was unable to find it in that form.