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A Decent Provision

DOI link for A Decent Provision

A Decent Provision book

Australian Welfare Policy, 1870 to 1949

A Decent Provision

DOI link for A Decent Provision

A Decent Provision book

Australian Welfare Policy, 1870 to 1949
ByJohn Murphy
Edition 1st Edition
First Published 2011
eBook Published 16 March 2016
Pub. location London
Imprint Routledge
DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315564647
Pages 294 pages
eBook ISBN 9781315564647
SubjectsArea Studies, Humanities, Law, Social Sciences
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Murphy, J. (2011). A Decent Provision. London: Routledge, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315564647

A Decent Provision is a narrative history of how and why Australia built a distinctive welfare regime in the period from the 1870s to 1949. At the beginning of this period, the Australian colonies were belligerently insisting they must not have a Poor Law, yet had reproduced many of the systems of charitable provision in Britain. By the start of the twentieth century, a combination of extended suffrage, basic wage regulation and the aged pension had led to a reputation as a 'social laboratory'. And yet half a century later, Australia was a 'welfare laggard' and the Labor Party's welfare state of the mid-1940s was a relatively modest and parsimonious construction. Models of welfare based on social insurance had been vigorously rejected, and the Australian system continued on a path of highly residual, targeted welfare payments. The book explains this curious and halting trajectory, showing how choices made in earlier decades constrained what could be done, and what could be imagined. Based on extensive new research from a variety of primary sources it makes a significant contribution to general historical debates, as well as to the field of comparative social policy.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

chapter |6 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|22 pages

The Pauper in the New World: On Not Having a Poor Law

chapter 2|26 pages

The Mixed Economy of Colonial Welfare

ByFaith, Self-help and Charity

chapter 3|26 pages

The Veterans of Labour: Old-age Pensions

chapter 4|26 pages

The Commonwealth Laboratory

chapter 5|22 pages

‘The duty of the nation’: A Parallel Welfare State for Veterans

chapter 6|28 pages

The Failures of the 1920s: Maternalism and National Insurance

chapter 7|26 pages

The Depression

chapter 8|20 pages

National Insurance, 1938–1939

chapter 9|24 pages

Unfinished Business: Labor’s Welfare State, 1941–1949

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