A Decent Provision: Australian Welfare Policy, 1870–1949, by John Murphy

Abstract

At first glance, the history of Australian welfare policy seems a rather niche field. It rarely features in comparative studies of the welfare state and only occasionally crops up in typological surveys of the various ‘worlds’, ‘families’ and ‘regimes’ of social policy. When it makes an appearance in these master narratives of taxonomical development, Australia is usually overshadowed by its two big brothers in that house of ‘liberal’ welfare states: the United Kingdom and the United States. As Frances Castles and Julia O’Connor, Ann Orloff and Sheila Shaver have demonstrated, however, Australia deserves a moment at centre stage, casting aside its overbearing kin in order to show off its unique colours. John Murphy’s new book builds on their important contributions, convincingly outlining how Australian social policy was predicated, above all, on the model of a (white) male breadwinner. Indeed, as Murphy points out, ‘unlike other “liberal” regimes in [Gøsta] Esping-Andersen’s schema, Australasia did not develop compulsory social insurance models of benefits, in which workers, employers and the state contribute to build up a fund’. Nor did it lean towards a universal, social-democratic welfare model that maximised redistribution across social strata according to a philosophy of social rights based on citizenship. Instead, the Australian welfare state was based on protecting jobs and salaries through a system of tariffs, ‘delivering wage justice rather than social redistribution’ (p. 3). In this light, welfare policy was an item of last resort, so that benefits were means-tested and targeted at only those who went without the support of a male wage.