ABSTRACT
The stamp Labor had placed on welfare policy by 1945 was consistent with the path forged half a century earlier. In one sense, Labor’s achievement was to add more floors to the existing architecture whilst seeing off the challenge of a contributory system. In the interwar years, Labor had groped towards an argument against contributory insurance and had clarified why they thought it would be inequitable. Means-tested benefits financed from taxation could work as a model of redistribution. Yet the confused debates about the National Welfare Fund and its ‘social services contribution’ showed that once Chifley had also begun to tax lower-income workers the argument about redistribution started to fall away. What was then left was a proposition that the recipients of welfare had paid taxes and thus earned a right to benefits. Implicitly, Labor was hoping that this sense of a contract eradicated any residue of stigma attaching to the means test and positioned benefits as a right rather than charity. The counter was put by liberals in the debate on unemployment benefits; they would be ‘a charitable dole’ and were ‘making the worker pay for the waster’, and these are persistent claims that can still be heard today.
