The Nordic Connection: The impact of the Finnish basic income pilot on the Australian basic income debate

Introduction

Basic income (BI) experiments have played a central role in informing BI research and animating BI debate in recent years. In Australia, discussion of BI is growing, but remains relatively marginal in mainstream policy circles. This article considers how BI experiments have informed this emerging Australian discussion, highlighting the role played by the Finnish BI pilot (2017–2018) in catalysing policy interest. Australian policy communities have traditionally had relatively weak connections to continental Europe, with policymakers looking to the Anglophone countries, especially the United Kingdom and the United States, for policy models. While the trade union movement and the Australian Labor Party (ALP) did look to Scandinavia in the 1970s and 1980s, these engagements primarily focused on Sweden and had minimal concrete policy impact.

We identity a shift in Australian policy links to the Nordic countries, which increasingly run through academic and social policy communities, rather than unions and political parties, and look more broadly than the left's traditional focus on Sweden. This shift informed interpersonal connections between those interested in the Finnish experiment and those interested in BI, which both centred Finland and framed the experiment more positively. Similar connections were not as strong with other countries engaging in experimentation, placing the Finnish experiment at the centre of Australian social policy concern, despite it having less impact elsewhere. As BI debates have broadened in Australia, and as BI experiments in US cities and potential experiments within the UK and Ireland develop, we anticipate Australian debates are likely to refocus on the Anglosphere. However, the initial influence of Finland's experiment points to shifting dynamics within Australia's progressive policy networks that may have longer term implications.

The article begins by situating the history and structures of Australia's welfare state and employment policies within OECD norms. It provides a brief account of the limited engagement with BI prior to the last decade before charting the rise of interest amongst academics, the media and policy actors in recent years. There is relatively little evidence of significant connections between these Australian actors and the budding experimentation in Europe. The exception we identify is Finland, where academic communities, led by leading Australian social policy scholar Peter Saunders, engaged substantively with those running the trial, informing both social policy debates and emerging BI institutions in Australia. We go on to place these connections in the context of a longer history of policy engagements with Nordic countries, arguing that the BI example indicates a shift in the organisation of these connections that is mirrored in divisions amongst progressives over the merits of BI itself. We end by reflecting on the implications of our analysis for the prospects of BI in Australia, acknowledging the complex history of social policy experimentation.

The Australian polity

Australia is typically categorised as a liberal welfare state (Esping-Andersen, 1990). Taxation and social spending are well below the OECD average. Social policy commonly employs means-testing, as opposed to universal or contributory social insurance schemes. However, Australia has also been identified as atypical of other liberal models. A strong history of working-class political organisation and centralised wage setting provided relatively inclusive forms of social protection through employment, rather than social spending. More recently, labour market reforms and growing workfare have challenged that assessment, moving Australia closer to other liberalised economies. Alternatively, in other areas social spending has expanded, including more inclusive forms of flat-rate benefit schemes that potentially echo elements of a BI. These recent trends appear consistent with developments in other liberal welfare states (see Clasen and Clegg, 2012).

Australian social spending, 16.7% of GDP in 2019, remains well below the OECD average (OECD, 2020: 2). This reflects unusually targeted and marketised social provision, but also belies relatively inclusive and generous elements alongside residualisation. Social spending, for example, only includes a flat-rate public pension, excluding a sizeable compulsory private pension scheme, superannuation, introduced as the result of union pressure and funded by employer contributions (Sharp, 1992). Government payments are the most targeted in the OECD (Whiteford, 2017: 28–29). These flat-rate and means-tested benefits include both highly residualised and stigmatised workfare for the unemployed alongside more generous and inclusive payments targeted at families with children and older people. Support for private alternatives also remains through tax concessions and subsidies (Stebbing and Spies-Butcher, 2010), and through the use of marketised social policy models that expand systems similar to tax and spend welfare, but in forms defined as private provision and excluded from most official statistics (Stebbing and Spies-Butcher, 2010: 597; Bryant and Spies-Butcher, 2020).

Until the 1980s, Australia's model of social protection was better understood as a form of ‘welfare by other means’ (Castles, 1985). Australia's colonies developed a labourist model of social protection for white workers, built on strong unions and equally strong racial exclusion and gendered division of labour. Australia led the world in expanding the franchise to white men and women, achieving an eight-hour day and relatively high wages, creating a ‘worker's paradise’ by the early 1900s (Beilharz, 2004: 433–434). Unions entered parliamentary politics in the 1890s and the Australian Labor Party (ALP) became the first of its kind to form government (McMullin, 2005). Labor used its early success to create a distinctive system of wage arbitration, which dominated wage setting (Fenna, 2012). Arbitration established a link between wage levels and social protection by setting wages with reference to the reasonable needs of workers (Castles, 1994). Post-War, another Labor Government committed to full employment, supported by Keynesian macroeconomic policy and public sector employment (Cass and Freeland, 1994). The combination of arbitration and full employment led Australian scholars such as Francis Castles (1985) to distinguish Australia's ‘wage earners’ welfare state’ from more minimalist liberal models.

Arbitration was combined with modest spending on targeted social payments. Early success established an age pension, built on what would become a distinct flat-rate and means-tested model. Labor built on this model post-War, creating a range of flat-rate benefits for those out of paid work. Unlike means-testing elsewhere, most of these benefits were relatively inclusive, with minimal conditionality beyond an income test, which in practice made payments categorical (Castles, 1985). The flat-rate model tended to suit blue collar workers, for whom the benefit provided a higher replacement rate of income. Wages were also set to facilitate home ownership and fund private health insurance. The modest scale of social spending, however, was not simply the result of a focus on wages, it also reflected conservative political dominance across the twentieth century, which frustrated efforts to expand public health and housing, with public health insurance only becoming entrenched in the 1980s (Boxall and Gillespie, 2013).

Economic liberalisation fundamentally challenged Australia's model. The core elements of wage earners welfare—full employment, wage arbitration and non-stigmatising benefits—have largely been dismantled (Castles, 2001). After a brief experiment with more social democratic social policy in the 1970s, Australian Governments uniformly embraced economic competition and fiscal constraint. During the 1980s, the Labor Party helped pioneer what would later become known as the Third Way, informing Blair's UK Labour strategy (Pierson and Castles, 2002). Keynesian macroeconomic policy gave way to floating exchange rates, deregulated finance, and eventually decentralised wage setting. Income inequality increased steadily from the 1980s, driven primarily by increased inequality in market incomes (Fenna and Tapper, 2015). Casualisation and contract employment have both increased significantly, with less than half of the workforce now employed according to the old standard employment contract (Carney and Stanford, 2018). For those outside stable employment, unemployment benefits have become the second lowest in the OECD, just above Greece (Whiteford and Bradbury, 2021). Claimants are subject to significant activity and work requirements, invasive surveillance and even restrictions on how income is to be spent (McDonald and Marston, 2005).

Changes to social spending, however, have not been uniform. Overall social spending increased significantly as liberalisation advanced (Whiteford, 2017: 5). Much of the increase supported marketised social provision, especially in childcare and pension schemes. However, social payments for families also expanded significantly. Family benefits, paid to families with children, and a default parental leave scheme mirror the earlier commitment to flat-rate benefits. Unlike unemployment benefits, these payments are combined with more generous means tests to expand access with little other conditionality, a model that both mimics elements of basic Finnish benefits (Halmetoja et al., 2019) and elements of a BI (Spies-Butcher, 2020: 599–600).

During the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), the federal government provided one-off flat-rate payments to most households as a form a stimulus, limited only by an income test set well above average full-time wages. The model was expanded into regular payments during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns (see Chen and Langwasser, 2021: 5–6 for comparison). The COVID experience created what many, including ourselves, consider a natural experiment with a quasi-basic income as income tests were significantly relaxed, payments doubled and other conditionality suspended (Wade, 2021). Workfare was briefly transformed into a modest but sufficient income for a significant part of the population. Thus, while the historic focus on achieving social protection via work has created resistance to BI within Australia's unions and the ALP, growing precarious employment and welfare conditionality have led others to see more universal flat-rate entitlements, like a BI, as a solution.

Basic income in Australia

BI has occupied a marginal nook in the history of Australian social security debate and policy development. As described in the previous section, economic security in Australia has traditionally rested on the twin pillars of full employment and high levels of home ownership, with narrowly targeted welfare benefits, as opposed to more universalistic social insurance schemes. These pillars have been substantially eroded since the 1970s, while social spending remains modest and many payments are highly stigmatised. The two periods of enhanced policy and political interest in BI occurred at inflection points in Australian history. The first episode occurred during the turbulent 1970s, a period that saw Australia's full employment protectionist economy progressively supplanted by a more open, less stable economy; one characterised by an increasing prevalence of insecure work and major structural change. The second episode took place in a post-GFC context of heightened concern regarding economic inequality and insecurity. This section focuses on the latter period, due to its greater relevance to the impact of the European experiments on the Australian BI debate.

BI attracted some political and civil society support in 1970s during the social democratic Whitlam Labor Government (1972–1975) (Arthur, 2016). The most developed proposal for a guaranteed minimum income (GMI) during this period was published as a key recommendation of the First Main Report of the national Commission of Inquiry into Poverty in 1975 (Commission of Inquiry in Poverty, 1976). Other similar proposals, micro-trials of the policy, and some civil society organisation support for GMI occurred during the period but the reform never secured a firm foothold in mainstream policy debate (Tomlinson, 2012; Arthur, 2016). This early flirtation with BI had no practical policy impact and was soon overwhelmed by Australia's political and policymaker class’ rapid embrace of neoliberal policy logics and priorities throughout the 1980s (Pusey, 1991).

The global BI debate has experienced a dramatic upsurge and diversification of interest in the post-GFC era that has only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Australian debate has followed this general arc, particularly since 2016. Prior to this point, it is no exaggeration to state that the work of three or four academics ¹ comprised the entirety of the Australian BI discussion. Over the last five years, however, the (re)discovery of BI is evident in many forms. These include greater Australian participation in international BI scholarly networks; the formation of local BI networks and institutions; a substantial increase in BI-focused scholarship; significant civil society organisations adopting formal pro-BI policy positions; widespread media coverage of BI; and high levels of public support for some form of BI.

Australian academics have participated in international networks and dialogues, including the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) congresses, the North American Basic Income Guarantee conference, and the Korea Basic Income Fair. During the same period, international BI scholars Karl Widerquist, Guy Standing, Rutger Bregman and Olli Kangas ² visited Australia for academic conferences, public lectures, and other events, the latter visiting more than once to discuss the Finnish trial. In 2021, the Australian Basic Income Lab (ABI) was launched, a research collaboration between the University of Sydney, Macquarie University and the Australian National University (Wade, 2021). The 21^st BIEN Congress ³ will be held in Brisbane in 2022, co-hosted by the University of Queensland and the Australian Basic Income Lab. BI has also become part of the research agenda for many of Australia's leading economic and social policy scholars. Examples include the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia (ASSA) UBI Workshop convened by Elise Klein in 2017 that culminated in the book Implementing a Basic Income in Australia: pathways forward (Klein et al., 2019) and the Henderson Anniversary Project ⁴ convened by leading poverty researcher Peter Saunders, culminating in the publication of Revisiting Henderson: Poverty, social security and basic income (Saunders, 2019).

Key civil society organisations have increasingly engaged on both sides of the BI debate. Reflecting broader media coverage (Carroll and Engel, 2021), support is concentrated within the social services sector and green politics, with scepticism across the political right and labour politics. The Australian Greens, Australia's third largest political party, have adopted BI as a formal policy at a national level. ⁵ At the state level, the NSW Greens proposed a Universal Wellbeing Payment and a BI trial in a disadvantaged regional town. Alternatively, senior Labor Party figures, including Cabinet Minister Chris Bowen and Assistant Minister Andrew Leigh, have participated in the BI debate, but remain staunch critics. The Greens Institute, a think tank formally linked to the Australian Greens, and the Australia Institute, a leading left-wing think tank led by former Greens parliamentary staff, have both presented thoughtful analyses of BI, as has social service provider and research institute, the Brotherhood of St Laurence. The free market Centre for Independent Studies and left-aligned trade union think tank Per Capita have put forward trenchant critiques of the idea. Breaking with a long tradition of labour movement opposition to BI, the United Workers Union, a large hybrid blue-collar-white-collar union, proposed a generous ‘Income Guarantee’ as part of a COVID-19 response package, although it remains more sceptical of BI outside the pandemic context. (Henderson, 2021). More recently, Anglicare Australia, one of the country's largest social service providers, formally adopted a position in favour of a ‘permanent basic income’ (Azize, 2021).

There was no public opinion polling of Australian attitudes towards BI prior to 2020. Internationally, polls have found substantial levels of support for BI in North America, Europe, Japan, the UK and South Korea, with support generally higher in countries with less generous welfare states. The introduction of tracking questions on BI in the European Survey of Social Attitudes (ESSA) has provided a useful corrective to the very different ways in which BI has been defined and framed in various polls (Henderson, 2021). Recent academic analysis of the ESS polling suggests that, despite ideological diversity of BI advocates, supporters of the reform tend to lean left on the political spectrum. Vlandas’ (2020) analysis of the ESS data found, ‘Respondents who identify as right wing are more opposed to the scheme and the effect is substantial: the predicted probability of support is below 41% for the most right-wing respondent compared to above 61% among the most left wing’.

In 2020 the same ESSA questions on BI were included in the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (AuSSA). Some 51% of respondents supported the ESSA/AuSSA definition of BI, placing Australia in the middle of the pack when compared to European countries. Of interest to our argument, Finland stands out as the Nordic country with the highest level of support for BI in Europe, while the comprehensive social democratic welfare state countries of Sweden and Norway have among the lowest levels of support (Patulny and Spies-Butcher, 2022). Finnish exceptionalism potentially reflects not only the impact of the country's trial, but also its distinctive welfare state model and discourse (Andersson and Kangas 2005) In late 2020, a Greens Institute-commissioned YouGov poll that 58% of respondents supported a ‘a Guaranteed Living Wage or a Universal Basic Income’ and 50% supported ‘unconditional income support to those out of work’ (Hutchens, 2020). In 2021, Anglicare Australia-commissioned polling found 77% of respondents agreed that all Australians ‘should receive a liveable income above the poverty line’ (Janda, 2021). The AuSSA survey found higher levels of support for BI among women, non-retired persons, university graduates, and younger people (Patulnyand Spies-Butcher, 2022). Consistent with analysis of the European survey data, progressive voters were more likely to favour BI with close to 80% of Greens voters and 60% of Labor Party voters supporting the policy (Patulny and Spies-Butcher, 2022).

The absence of longitudinal survey data makes it impossible to attribute the current high levels of support for BI in Australia to any discrete causal factors. However, it would be reasonable to expect that the COVID-19 experience, including Australia's ‘natural experiment’ with a quasi-BI, ⁶ exerted some influence on these survey results. The impact of other international developments on the Australian BI movement—such as the Swiss UBI referendum, Andrew Yang's US presidential nomination campaign, various BI experiments and extensive media coverage of the issue—is similarly difficult to quantify. Turning to the European experiments, the Finnish pilot stands out as providing a direct link between BI as a policy option and the broader social security debate in Australia.

The Finnish pilot attracted considerable media attention in Australia, including from mainstream outlets generally hostile to the idea. From the outset, Ollie Kangas, then the Head of the Research Department at the Finnish Social Security Institution (KELA), was presented as the central figure in media narratives regarding the pilot. In ‘The basic income experiment that could revolutionise welfare’, an article published in May 2016 in a Murdoch tabloid, Kangas is the objective social scientist without ‘any agenda either for or against basic income’ (Kangas in Jolly, 2016). Media coverage of the pilot continued over the two-year period, from the interim findings up to the experiment's conclusion. In 2018, Kangas was quoted as lamenting that ‘two years is too short a time frame to be able to draw extensive conclusions from such a vast experiment’ (Kangas in Olli-Nilsson, 2018) and stated that it was ‘a pity that it will end like this’ (Goodman, 2018). There was no similar media attention paid to the Dutch and B-Mincome experiments.

More important than the media coverage, the Finnish pilot provided the vehicle for simultaneously introducing BI into the wider social security debate and affording Australian BI income scholars a more prominent role in social policy discussion. Here again, Ollie Kangas, played a central role. Kangas took part in a panel discussion on the Australian National University's Policy Forum Pod ⁷ in June 2016 with Guy Standing, Charles Murray and leading Australian social policy scholar Peter Whiteford. ⁸ Kangas was interviewed a second time by Sharon Bessell ⁹ in June 2018, reflecting on the decision not to extend the experiment and the ‘valuable insights’ the pilot had provided to social policy researchers that will ‘shape the global conversation around the future of Universal Basic Income’. ¹⁰

Personal and institutional ties with Australian academics played an important role in centring the Finnish experience. Kangas was a recurrent visitor to the government-funded Social Policy Research Centre in Sydney, and developed strong ties to the centre's long-term Director, Peter Saunders. Saunders invited Kangas to deliver the opening plenary ¹¹ at the 2019 Australian Social Policy Conference (ASPC) focusing on the Finnish BI experiment. Saunders is a pivotal figure providing a link between the Australian social policy community, the historical tradition of the Henderson Poverty Inquiry in the 1970s, and the Finnish BI pilot. Co-incidentally, the conference also featured a special session exploring ‘Basic income, policy experiments and the competition state’, organised by leading University of Sydney sociologist Lisa Adkins, who held an Academy of Finland Distinguished Professorship (2015–19); her Finnish collaborators and the soon-to-be-founders of the Australian Basic Income Lab (ABI), who began their collaboration at the BIEN congress in Tampere. ¹² As with the media coverage, the impact of the Finnish pilot on Australian social policy scholars is not mirrored whatsoever in relation to the Netherlands and Barcelona experiments.

Policy experimentation & the Nordic connection in Australia

Understanding the role of BI experiments in catalysing the Australian BI debate is interesting in two respects. First, within BI scholarship and policy circles, excitement regarding the initial promise of the Finnish pilot has been supplanted by criticism of its narrow focus on the long-term unemployed and employment outcomes, unremarkable findings, and premature conclusion (Hiilamo, 2019). The pilot could reasonably be judged a failure in terms of generating ongoing momentum of BI policy experimentation or consolidating political and social support for the reform in Finland (O’Donnell, 2019). Second, there is little to immediately suggest why the European BI trials should have impacted the BI discussion in a very different polity in the Antipodes. Finnish, Dutch, and Spanish migrant communities are not significant in demographic or political terms within Australian society. Australia's political institutions, parties, think tanks and civil society actors are all embedded in Anglo-American networks that reflect its British colonial history and geographic position in the Pacific. While Australian Governments have become increasingly interested in policy experimentation, this has overwhelmingly followed the liberalised model of ‘fast policy’ dominant in the US and UK (see Peck and Theodore, 2015). With the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s Australia developed a number of influential free market think tanks modelled on UK and US examples (Cahill, 2008). The influence was not only one way. The successful Labor Government of the 1980s was a key influence on the development of New Labour in the UK, including specifically its focus on targeted social assistance (Pierson and Castles, 2002; Pierson, 2003). More recently, Australia's distinctive migration system has become a model for much of the British right (Sumption, 2019).

The influence of policy experimentation in Australia has, by and large, reflected these institutional and cultural legacies. Australia's embrace of behavioural economics, for example, follows an Anglo-American template (John, 2019). Taking a lead from the UK, a number of Australian Governments established ‘nudge’ units to inform social policymaking (Ball, 2021). Similarly, Australia is the jurisdiction with the largest number of experiments in ‘social impact bonds’ outside the UK and US. Concentrated at state level, which administers most social programmes, the policy architecture for social impact bonds was also copied from the UK (Broom, 2021). More local examples of pseudo-experimentation, such as the trials and evaluations that flowed from the Northern Territory Emergency Intervention (see Altman and Hinkson, 2007), reflect the dynamics of often overtly racist ‘wedge politics’ targeting Indigenous and other marginalised populations and advancing workfare (Wilson and Turnbull, 2001). It is therefore unsurprising that BI trials in general have had little impact on mainstream policymaking in Australia.

Here, we seek to explain the impact of the Finnish pilot on the Australian BI debate. First, we link the impact of the Finnish pilot to an established tendency among Anglosphere policy communities and institutional actors to look to Nordic countries for inspiration. Australia's liberal welfare capitalist state sits at the opposite pole to the social democratic welfare states in Esping-Andersen's (1990) typology. Since at least the 1970s, however, the Nordic countries have served as a ‘North Star’ for sections of the Australian Left. In his book Northern Lights, Australian social policy scholar Andrew Scott (2014: 1) situates this tendency within a broader Anglosphere orientation of looking ‘to Sweden and its neighbours as offering a policy approach which combines economic prosperity with comparative social equality’. Scott goes further in suggesting that the Nordic model may hold particular appeal to Australians ‘because Australia has traditionally had a stronger trade union movement and labour party, and a stronger ethos of being a fair and egalitarian nation, than the US, Britain and Canada’ (Scott, 2014: 3). The Nordic connection has taken the form of interpersonal, institutional, and interstate relations. These thick relations have served to represent the unfulfilled ambition of transforming Australia into the ‘Sweden of the south’. The connection was developed in the 1970s and achieved peak institutional recognition in the 1980s, but it remains embodied in think tanks and the work of particular industrial relations and social policy groups. Ironically, this represents a period when the Nordic countries themselves shifted away from traditional social democracy. Despite this, the institutional ties developed within academia have framed the Nordic world as an alternative model of social democratic capitalism that blends the benefits of efficiency and equity, develops innovative and effective progressive social policy worthy of study and emulation, and remains largely ignored by the political right.

In 1946, Australia's full employment and CDEP architect H.C. Coombs travelled to Sweden as a representative of the Chifley Labor Government, charged with learning from Sweden's response to the Great Depression. He forged a close relationship with Swedish economist and government minister Gunnar Myrdal (Scott, 2014: 26). The relationship developed dramatically through the late-1960s and 1970s, centred on connections between the institutions and representatives of organised labour, academia and government. Key union officials, such as the powerful metalworkers union leader Laurie Carmichael, increasingly looked to Sweden, in particular, as a political way forward due to ‘growing dissatisfaction with official Communism’ after 1968 (Scott, 2014: 39). In the 1970s, both the Commonwealth and South Australian Labor Governments negotiated reciprocal ‘exchange of industrial democracy personnel’ programmes between Australia and Sweden (Scott, 2014: 30–32; Lansbury, 2021: 73).

The high tide of this relationship came with the publication of the Australia Reconstructed report in 1987. The report was the product of a high-level Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) delegation, led by ACTU Assistant Secretary Laurie Carmichael, that visited Sweden, Norway, West Germany, Austria and the UK in 1986. The itinerary was facilitated by Swedish industrial relations scholar and trade union figure Olle Hammarström, who had participated in the Australia-Sweden industrial democracy exchange programme (Scott, 2014: 47–8). The report detailed an ambitious agenda in relation to macroeconomic policy and national development, wages policy, trade and industry policy, labour market and training policy and strategic unionism drawing heavily on Sweden's example. Opinion regarding the significance of Australia Reconstructed remains sharply divided. For Dow (1997: 123), the report ‘represents the most comprehensive and most principled attempt by Australia's labour movement to impose its prerogatives on the institutional, policy and economic development of the country’. For others, Australia Reconstructed was a well-intentioned failure that had little practical effect during a period of accelerating privatisation and deregulation (Jones, 1997). Halevi and Kriesler (1997: 116) characterise the report as an ill-judged attempt to transpose the ‘Swedish model’ onto an Australia polity in which, ‘Unlike the European countries, on which the corporatist experiment was modelled’ there existed no ‘strong dynamic business sector, capable of taking advantage of an increase in profit share’.

The institutional influence of Sweden and other Nordic countries on the Australian Labor Party has waned since the 1980s, however it has continued through academic and policy networks. Higgins and Dow's (2013) Politics against pessimism: Social democratic possibilities since Ernst Wigforss, Scott’s (2014) Northern Lights – The Positive Policy Example of Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway, Scott and Campbell’s (2021)The Nordic Edge: Policy Possibilities for Australia and Lansbury’s (2021) Crossing Boundaries: Work and Industrial Relations in Perspective are recent examples of this scholarship. At the institutional level, the Universities of Sydney and Copenhagen have a formal research partnership ‘to undertake a multi-level study of The Future of National Systems of Work and Employment Relations in Australia and Denmark’ (Lansbury 2021, 151). Unsurprisingly, the policy communities that have formed in support of Nordic experimentation have focused on industrial relations and social policy, the cornerstones of the social democratic welfare state.

Policy interest in Scandinavia has continued through two institutional connections in particular, which have focused attention on social policy and beyond the initial preoccupation with Sweden. The most explicit links have come through the Australian Institute, now possibly the most influential progressive think tank, which was established in the 1980s in response to the rise of neoliberalism. More recently, the Institute has established the Nordic Centre in collaboration with Deakin University. As the Centre's Director, Andrew Scott (2014: 1) writes, ‘The interest this time has come not so much from unionists and industrial relations scholars, as from social policy activists and educationalists’. Scott's own work explicitly moves beyond Sweden, looking to different policy lessons from across Nordic countries, including from Finland. In 2018 the Australia Institute also established the Carmichael Centre, in honour of the trade unionist who led the 1987 Australia Reconstructed delegation, within its Centre for Future Work.

Alongside this interest from progressive think tanks, Australia's academic social policy community, particularly through the Social Policy and Research Centre (SPRC) at the University of New South Wales, has maintained strong links to Nordic countries, which tangibly connect Australia's BI debate to the Finnish experience. The SPRC ¹³ was established in 1980, when progressive policy interest in Scandinavia was peaking, and remains an influential component of Australia's social policy community, hosting the Australian Journal of Social Issues and the biennial Australian Social Policy Conference. The significance of the Finnish pilot in the Australian context is not whether it ‘succeeded’ or failed’ but that it provided a means for inserting BI into mainstream social security debate through an epistemic community that connected Australian and Finnish policy scholars. Finally, there is the potential that some of the Australian interest in the Finnish pilot reflects common policy dynamics and challenges, particularly as these pertain to flat-rate benefits and similar fiscal politics (Brenton, 2016).

Our second, more speculative, argument returns to the issue of experimentation itself. BI has a complex and somewhat curious relationship with policy experimentation. Trials and pilots can be framed as a way of providing empirical evidence regarding the personal, social, and economic effects of BI. Without these experiments, the case for BI rests on abstract ethical argument, political demands, analysis of BI proxies, and modelling using microsimulation tools. BI experiments hold out the tantalising promise of providing concrete answers to some of the key questions regarding this reform. At the same time, experimentation also fits the ‘fast policy’, neoliberal model, which frames problems as both generic and technical, leading to the diffusion of technocratic policy models like the ‘nudge’ units and behavioural economics discussed above. However, the diffusion of policies in practice often reflects ‘mutations’ to unique geographies and histories (Temenos and McCann, 2013). BI experiments can be framed and evaluated as examples of this technocratic policymaking, including the specific example of Finland's BI pilot. Adkins and Ylöstalo (2021: 374) situate the ‘Finnish BI experiment’ as ‘part of a broad programme of government-led reform in Finland that involved two linked aspects: the intensification of strategies aiming at a restructuring of a labour supply and the promotion of the experiment as a preferred mode of policymaking.’ This technocratic, Third Way tradition resonates strongly with the shift within Australian Labor to embrace market models since the 1980s (Spies-Butcher 2012), and reinforces the stronger epistemic relations between Australian and Finnish social policy scholars.

Our final point relates to a likely barrier to effective policy transfer in the case of BI experiments, such as the Finnish pilot, to the Australian polity. As detailed above, the ‘Nordic reflex’ among substantial numbers of Australian social policy scholars provides a reasonable explanation for the interest in the Finnish BI pilot, and its role in mainstreaming BI discussion in broader Australian social security debate. However, the Finnish experiment has not led to surge in scholarly proposals for similar large-scale BI trials in Australia, or advocacy of such experiments by the parties of government. The long, complex and often bitter experience of Indigenous Australians being subjected to far less scientific and more overtly ideological social policy experiments, goes a long way towards explaining the reluctance of many social policy scholars and social justice advocates to push for additional social policy experiments. Without a treaty or constitutional recognition of First Nations sovereignty, efforts towards universalism in welfare are problematic (Altman and Klein, 2018). The universal subject of such policies is rarely Indigenous. The ongoing claims of hundreds of Indigenous communities to sovereignty militates in favour of policy diversity and experimentation, reflecting local experiences and concerns. In principle, this might be seen to make place Indigenous communities at the centre of future BI experimentation. Indeed, there have been calls from prominent social policy commentators for exactly that (see Cox, 2017). However, Australia's more recent policy history significantly complicates the politics of experimentation.

The devolution that informed policy experimentation in Community Development Employment Program ¹⁴ in the 1970s has given way to technocratic and opportunistic forms of experimentation as a means to advance workfare. Many of the most punitive aspects of Australia's welfare system developed through a process of experimentation, often targeting Indigenous people and communities. The most egregious shift in policymaking was led by ‘the intervention’, in which the Racial Discrimination Act was suspended, and the army deployed in Indigenous communities within the Northern Territory, ostensibly to address issues of child sexual abuse. The intervention saw the initial use of quarantining measures to control how welfare beneficiaries spent their money, a model now extended across much of the benefit system through a series of trials that mimic social policy experiments. As protections against discrimination were reintroduced, policies were expanded to non-Indigenous communities, framed as trials. Despite the experiments producing little compelling evidence of success, Governments continued to expand the scope of these policies across the community (Altman and Markham, 2019). The coercive legacy of the Intervention is still being felt by many, complicating any proposal for BI trials in Indigenous communities, and perhaps BI experiments more broadly.

Conclusion

This article centred on an investigation of the impact of the Finnish basic income pilot on the Australian basic income debate. We began by situating the Australian polity as a liberal welfare state that has lost much of its earlier distinctive character during the neoliberal period. We described the main elements of the (re)-emergence of basic income in Australian political and policy debate in recent years, emphasising both the considerable strides made and simultaneous marginalisation of basic income in mainstream political debate. While we could identify no obvious impact of the Netherlands and Barcelona experiments on Australian developments, the connection between the Finnish basic income pilot and Australian policy communities was both clear and significant. We argued that the effect of the Finnish pilot on discussion of BI in Australian social policy communities can likely be attributed to a historical tendency among Australian scholars on the Left to look to the Nordic countries for policy models and policy inspiration. This Nordic connection may have changed in terms of orientation and actors, from industrial policy and trade unions to social policy and academics, but it remains embedded in epistemic communities and institutional relationships that are increasingly shaping broader policy debates via think tanks, non-government organisations and Green Party politics. We went on to suggest that a more general shift towards ‘evidence-based’ policy, ‘nudges’, and policy experimentation may have added to Australian interest in the Finnish pilot. In relation to basic income, the pilot's principal significance was in providing the conduit through which this reform proposal was inserted into the broader social security debate and research agenda in Australia. The putative failure of the pilot was less significant than might have been expected if the object had been to identify a Nordic policy model ripe for Antipodean transplantation. Nordic policy continues to serve as a source of inspiration and insight within segments of Australia's policy community, while actual policy transfer is more likely to take place among the liberal welfare states. The troubled legacy of social policy experimentation in Indigenous communities constitutes another considerable obstacle to basic income experimentation in Australia.