Social Security and Full Employment in Australia: The Rise and Fall of the Keynesian Welfare State, and the Search for a Post-Keynesian Settlement

Abstract

Abstract In 1944 William Beveridge’s Full Employment in A Free Society was published, setting out the broad economic policy and supporting labour market policy on which his plan for a comprehensive social security system for Britain, published in I942, was predicated. He held that ‘full employment’ was essential to the implementation of an adequate and comprehensive system of social protection (see Chapter 2). His definition of ‘full employ ment’, ‘having always more vacant jobs than unemployed men’, and in addition, ‘jobs at fair wages of such a kind and so located that unemployed men can reasonably be expected to take them’, reflected his view that ‘society exists for the individual’ and that the imposition on persons of anything more than short periods of unemployment was one of the greatest social evils. In 1945 the White Paper, Full Employment in Australia, was published, attributable primarily to the work of Dr H. C. Coombs, articulating the economic and labour market policies underpinning the consolidation of the social security system implemented by the wartime Curtin/Chiftey Labor Governments, and continuing to provide the frame work of social and economic policy during the years of the Liberal/Country Party coalition governments until the late 1960s (Macintyre 1985; Smyth 1991).