ABSTRACT
The commitment to reconstruction planning, begun during the early 1940s in Australia, came from four distinct sources: the legacy of the depression, an experience that many groups in the community but particularly the labour movement were determined would not be repeated; social reform movements of the late 1930s, usually middle-class led, which had seen the growth in New South Wales and Victoria of slum abolition groups and the mammoth investigatory work of the Federal Government’s Joint Committee on Social Security; the military need for morale on the home front; and the practicalities of planning for demobilisation after war which was intimately tied to the reassertion of women’s traditional role as unpaid housekeepers and baby-minders. The reconstruction debate, spearheaded by the Commonwealth Government’s Department of Post-War Reconstruction and paralleled by State Government departments and a plethora of community groups, did review almost all aspects of economic and social life within the context of the growing acceptance of central government planning. The canvas was indeed wide. Yet the planning of national policies was complicated by the international negotiations concerning full employment, tariff reductions and international monetary stabilisation, and the assertion of economic superiority by the United States. Not the least troublesome was the thorny question of Commonwealth-State functions and relations.
