Welfare 'reform' in Australia, 1975 to 2004: from entitlement to obligation

Since the mid 1970s, under conditions of vast economic changes associated with the globalisation of production and financial markets, governments internationally have attacked the core elements of the welfare state: full employment, progressive taxation, income support, education, health, and housing. This paper examines retrenchment of income support, a central element of the Australia welfare state. Dominating more than 25 years of sustained attempts to cut expenditure on income support and welfare rights, is the inexorable drive to reintegrate all working age recipients into the labour force to compete for increasingly precarious employment by 'renegotiating' the social contract between the government and individuals that constituted a central component of the welfare state.