John Murphy, An Unlikely Survival: The Politics of Welfare in Australia Since 1950 (2024) Melbourne University Press
This book picks up from where Murphy’s earlier history of the Australian welfare state, A Decent Provision, left off—with the ascendancy of the Menzies government in 1949. Within the category of ‘welfare’, Murphy includes direct cash transfers to households—what we now call social security—along with less direct transfers: the revenue that governments forego by way of tax deductions and rebates. He’s also interested in health services and specific policies directed at First Nations people, such as the Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) scheme, as well as more general governance structures regarding consultation and self-determination.
The notion of ‘survival’ in the title refers to a welfare state being refashioned through the interplay of changing demographics, moral panics and culture wars, and fads in public policy, but not completely undone. Menzies and the Liberals, for example, went into the 1949 election spruiking forms of contributory social insurance, but the government ended up leaving pretty much untouched the system of flat-rate, means-tested benefits paid out of general revenue that had been consolidated by the Chifley Labor government. Instead, debates about the means-testing of the aged pension and government subsidy for private health insurance became a kind of proxy war for social insurance.
Tax deductions, the favoured form of income assistance in the Menzies era, were regressive in two ways. First, they subsidised the kind of things that the middle and upper classes, rather than the working class, spent their money on: private education, university fees, health and life-insurance premiums, and superannuation. Second, by their very nature, deductions from taxable income are worth more in dollar terms to those earners in the higher tax brackets. Whereas direct, means-tested social payments redistributed money down the income scale (which they still do, to a greater or lesser degree, via a kind of Robin Hood principle), taxation-based welfare countered this by redistributing money up the income scale.
So tax breaks operated as an invisible welfare state, favouring the rich. They were a kind of social insurance scheme by stealth. Social insurance—and, by extension, tax deductions—appealed to the Menzian liberals as much as a moral exhortation as a financial one. Contributory schemes weren’t simply a means of addressing a technical problem in financing. They also embodied a particular societal model based on prudence, what Pat O’Malley has termed the alliance ‘of labour with frugality and thrift’. Here, benefits appeared as a legal right linked to contributions, ‘an exchange between equals that did not vitiate independence’. For Menzies’ ‘forgotten’ people, the best form of welfare was savings, sobriety and an early night.
Liberal Party animosity to Medibank—later Medicare—suggests how much Liberals adhered to this model of private, contributory insurance, subsidised by government in a way that largely benefited high-income earners.
Alongside the continual recalibration of government subsidy for private health insurance, the other preoccupation of the Menzies era was the aged pension and the liberality of its means test. Remarkably, this preoccupation carried through to the Whitlam government. By that time, Ronald Henderson had defined a poverty line and reported on Australians living in poverty. Yet despite Henderson’s finding that single mums and their kids were the group most in poverty, the aged pensioner remained the focus of policy debate in the late 1960s and throughout the Whitlam period, suggesting that a populist moral economy of retirement could trump actual measures of need.Whitlam stands somewhat separate from the dominant laborist Australian welfare tradition. He favoured the provision of services and public goods over cash transfers as the route to equality, and he explored contributory schemes in the field of superannuation and no-fault accident compensation. Only Medibank saw the light of day, again, a system of cash transfers rather than a nationalised health system on the UK model.
Murphy highlights Henderson’s misfortune in delivering his report in April 1975 and its tabling in August that year. The Whitlam government had moved on: its 1975 budget embraced austerity. Unemployment had ballooned; and the government itself, mired in confected scandal and the conservative forces’ political skulduggery, simply ran out of time.
Children in poverty did get more attention from the Hawke government, especially with Hawke’s famous pledge in the lead up to the 1987 election. ‘No child need live in poverty’ were the original Graham Freudenberg lines that Hawke fluffed. Family payments were increasingly targeted at low-income households, whether on benefits or in low-wage work. The Howard government fiddled with things, Howard gesturing to his own class of ‘forgotten’—and rapidly diminishing—people in single-earner couple families, but the system of redistribution to low-income families put in place by Hawke stayed put. Sole parents got a better deal, too, under Hawke and Keating. Howard launched a larger assault here, one completed by Gillard. If Howard thought stay-at-home mums in couple-based households needed extra support, stay-at-home mums in single-parent households apparently did not.
An Unlikely Survival is a readable book, rigorous and quietly critical. It is informed, I think, by a deep sense of equity and compassion. It is subtitled the ‘politics of welfare’. Murphy’s main source is Cabinet papers, so this tends to be politics with a capital ‘P’. Lobby groups such as ACOSS, the Brotherhood of St Laurence, and the Council for Single Mothers and Children come to figure, particularly when the Hawke and Keating governments incorporate them more into policy making and consultative bodies. The book’s preoccupation with policy-makers and politicians can usefully be supplemented by Murphy’s co-authored social histories, including those of welfare recipients (Half A Citizen, 2011) and, most recently, fathers (Fathering, 2025).
It is also the politics of welfare, not need. That is, categories of ‘need’ are largely taken for granted, that there’s some sort of established catalogue of needs and claims that, depending on the degree of influence of various political actors and lobby groups, may lead to legislative entitlement. Instead, it can be useful to think of ‘need’ as constructed. Categories such as ‘the unemployed’, ‘the widow’, the ‘retiree’, have their own genealogy, a mix of people in power and communities of expertise working from above and people pressing from below.