ABSTRACT
Certainly Menzies moved to extend many of the existing social security arrangements. The burden of this scholarship is simple: social welfare became, by and large, a support system for the middle classes. Residence qualifications were also lowered in response to a competing social policy category of high importance in the 1950s, namely migrants. In the early 1970s, in the days of the McMahon government, when declining political fortunes were allied to a heightened awareness of a variety of social needs, civilian widows again received a substantial relative improvement in their pensions. In the meantime we must examine the threads in the other large area of federal social security action during the Liberal regime, the area of health and medical care. The growth of this form of social welfare service, even if dominated by free-enterprise entrepreneurs, was evidence of the powerful concern about the prospect of old age that dominates the respectable middle classes of Australia.
