43 Social policy

Social policy is guided by questions of distributive justice: who gets what in society, under what circumstances, and how.^[1] Social policy is generally considered to be synonymous with the ‘welfare state’, which sees government as a direct provider or regulator of private and not-for-profit social welfare services including education, health, community services, social housing, occupational welfare and income support. These forms of welfare are usually underwritten by social insurance schemes, which redistribute funds accumulated through taxes and levies to those in need of support. They can also take other forms, like the provision of tax expenditures and informal care provided through civil society.^[2]

The various forms of welfare, provided through a combination of direct government service delivery, markets, non-profits and civil society, are referred to as a mixed economy of welfare. Social policies tend to interact and intersect in a number of different ways, forming a complex web of enabling and disabling structures and systems. The right to access and engage in meaningful education, for example, is deeply linked with other areas of social policy, because policy structures can either establish the architecture that enables or denies this access and engagement (like promoting access to quality early childhood care).^[3]

Social policy can, therefore, have direct and substantial impacts on how people live their lives, the choices available to them, and their overall standard of living. Social policy decisions are also often highly politicised and deeply contested as the meeting of human needs has both a moral and material dimension.

This chapter explores some fundamental characteristics of social policy including a brief history of social policy in Australia, how it is made, by whom, and key debates. As you will see, social policy plays a powerful role in shaping how society operates, simultaneously redistributing wealth while providing tax breaks to affluent Australians, and both caring for and controlling society’s most disadvantaged members. Summing up the role of the conflicted welfare state in an essay titled ‘What is social policy?’, the pioneering scholar of social administration Richard Titmuss wrote that ‘what is “welfare” for some groups may be “illfare” for others’.^[4] In this chapter we seek to draw out these dilemmas and contradictions.

Social policy in Australia: recent history

Prior to Federation in 1901, social welfare in Australia was largely the purview of non-government charitable organisations. Smyth described Australian colonial society as being ‘cool’ when it came to government-provided welfare, but ‘hot’ on promoting equal opportunity.^[5] The focus was on supporting citizens to be self-sufficient rather than looking to government for poverty relief. This represented a contrast to the (often stigmatised) provision of state welfare under the Poor Laws in Britain.^[6]

Dickey described the years following Federation as being characterised by a transition away from an age of charity to an age of rights.^[7] The Harvester Judgement, handed down by Justice Higgins of the Court of Conciliation and Arbitration in 1907, established the first minimum ‘living wage’ for Australian workers.^[8] In 1908, the new Australian government also introduced a fixed-rate old-age pension, though this was not universal. For example, only those who passed the means test qualified and some groups, like Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, were explicitly excluded.

Thereafter, around the Second World War, Australia’s welfare system was dramatically redefined and expenditure increased exponentially.^[9] As Shaver explained, ‘Australia entered World War II with only fragmentary welfare provision: by the end of the war it had constructed a “welfare state”’.^[10] This was partly prompted by the formation in 1941 of a Joint Parliamentary Committee on Social Security by the Menzies government (1939–41), which reviewed existing social policies and recommended new measures to improve post-war life.^[11]

A series of new social policies were introduced during and in the aftermath of the Second World War, including widows’ pensions, uniform income tax in 1942, and the National Welfare Fund in 1943–44, which funded the national unemployment benefit.^[12] The provision of national unemployment benefits was, at least in part, a response to the anticipated demobilisation of military personnel in the post–Second World War period.^[13] However, the benefits were means-tested rather than universal – a contrast to the approach then taken in Britain.^[14]

In 1945, then-Treasurer (and later prime minister from 1945–49) Ben Chifley referred to Australia’s growing social security system as a safety net much like that used by a trapeze artist: ‘The net is not, of course, part of the main show … The more competent the performer, the less the net will be used’.^[15] The underpinning belief was that the best form of welfare was a job and, thus, the emphasis was on ensuring equal access to fair employment. The social security system was perceived as a ‘fall-back’ measure only, while little attention was given to how meritocratic ‘work first’ policies failed to account for the ways that deep social inequalities – including along lines of gender, race, and class – affected peoples’ chances at achieving economic security via paid work. It is for this reason that Australia’s postwar welfare state came to be characterised in the literature as ‘a wage earner’s welfare state’, or more precisely given the nature of the labour market during this period ‘a white, male wage earner’s welfare state’.^[16]

During the 1950s and 1960s, there was only incremental social policy reform, perhaps in part because of very strong employment throughout the period.^[17] This preceded further widespread expansion of the welfare state during the 1970s, when unemployment rates began to increase with the 1974 global recession.^[18] A series of inquiries was also initiated to examine social welfare, including the Commission of Inquiry into Poverty in Australia, or the ‘Henderson Inquiry’, established by the McMahon Coalition government (1971–72) and whose terms of reference were later expanded under the Whitlam Labor government (1972–75). Following this (and other) public inquiries, a raft of changes were implemented, which had the effect of moving welfare from being viewed as residual, as per Chifley’s description, to becoming a fundamental aspect of citizenship.^[19]

The Whitlam government’s wide-reaching reforms were undertaken on the basis that domestic social policy should focus on achieving a more ‘just’ and ‘liveable’ Australia.^[20] They involved an extensive program, including increased expenditure on public housing, a revision of school funding rules to recognise level of need, the removal of all fees for tertiary students, introduction of supports for single mothers (and later, expanded to all single parents), and the introduction of the country’s first universal health care, Medibank.^[21] Whitlam also established an Indigenous land rights scheme in the Northern Territory (NT) and announced an explicit shift in social policy focus for Indigenous peoples from ‘protection’ to self-determination.^[22]

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Australia experienced some further fundamental social policy shifts, including major pension reforms and the introduction of the Working Nation policy, signalling a transition away from the public provision of unemployment support services to a quasi-market model.^[23] This was coupled with the introduction of ‘active labour’ policies from 1986 onwards, which placed increased conditions on unemployment benefits.^[24] Social policy under recent Australian governments has been comparatively conservative and routinely underpinned by neoliberal arguments about reciprocity, the benefits of market provision and individual responsibility.^[25] The COVID-19 pandemic, however, prompted unprecedented changes.

In response to COVID-19, the government:

• temporarily doubled the unemployment benefit (previously named ‘Newstart’ and changed during COVID-19 to ‘JobSeeker Payment’) through a $550 fortnightly Coronavirus Supplement;
• suspended mutual obligation requirements for those receiving social security, so that people could comply with stay-at-home orders to reduce the risk of viral transmission; and
• for those with paid employment, but whose employers needed to temporarily close, established a temporary ‘JobKeeper Payment’—a wage subsidy of $1,500 per fortnight delivered to eligible businesses and designed to be passed onto their employees, and also available to individuals who were self-employed.

Together, these measures represented a significant temporary shift in the path dependent approach of Australian social security policy, with incredibly positive benefits, including to poverty rates. After-housing poverty for those on unemployment benefits and/or Youth Allowance reduced from 67 per cent to 7 per cent while poverty for single-parent households dropped from a pre-COVID rate of 20.2 per cent to a low of 7.6 per cent.^[26] Poverty and inequality across all Australians also reduced dramatically, reaching a 17-year record low of 12 per cent in the June quarter of 2020^[27] and demonstrating the transformative potential of adequate payments.

The suspension of coercive mutual obligation conditions also produced significant positive changes, giving people more agency over how they spent their time. Research into the effects of these changes showed that people reported improved physical and emotional wellbeing, as well as increased engagement in the labour market and other forms of unpaid productive labour. The changes also removed stigma that has been long associated with Australia’s targeted social security system, meaning people subject to the changes reported feeling ‘worthy’ and like they had ‘more dignity’.^[28]

However, the temporary nature was emphasised from the outset, with payments progressively reduced through 2020–21 and returning to pre-pandemic levels by April 2021, reinstating the previous approach that treats welfare as a deterrent rather than a safety net. Accordingly, poverty rose again after these COVID-19 measures were removed^[29] and, by 2025, about 35 per cent of Australian adults found it ‘difficult or very difficult getting by on their current income’^[30] with renters and single parents being at highest risk of experiencing financial stress.

Despite these temporary changes being rolled back, the overall size of Australia’s welfare expenditure envelope has continued to increase.

Recent social welfare expenditure in Australia

Australia’s total government welfare expenditure increased from $129.9 billion in 2006–7 to $212.5 billion in 2021–22, with a sharp spike during the COVID-19 pandemic before settling back into steady growth.^[31] Simultaneously, total expenditure on health increased from $61.0 billion in 2012-13 to $101.5 billion in 2022–23.^[32]In 2023–24, the Australian government also lost more than $200.0 billion in tax expenditures.^[33] Finally, the sheer number of people involved in delivering welfare services has also increased, with the ‘welfare workforce’ growing by 65 per cent since 2012 and representing 4.9 per cent of the total Australian workforce in 2022.^[34]

Klapdor and Arthur frame these increases as being largely a result of ‘population growth, population ageing, labour market changes and economic circumstances as well as policy changes relating to eligibility requirements’.^[35] They are also partially due to the addition of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), whose costs had reached $41.8 billion in the 2023–24 financial year.^[36]

Notwithstanding these overall increases, Australia’s social welfare expenditure as a percentage of GDP continues to be comparatively lower than most other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), with it ranking 23rd out of 38 OECD nations in 2022—behind Aotearoa/New Zealand (ranked 20th) the United States of America (ranked 15th) and the UK (ranked 16th ).^[37] Welfare in Australia, in the form of income support payments, is also highly targeted, with most spending on cash welfare benefits being means tested.

Against this backdrop, Australia’s income and wealth inequalities remain large. In 2019, the incomes of the top 10 per cent richest households were seven times higher than the lowest 20 per cent of households.^[38] In terms of wealth – that is, net value of owned assets like housing and superannuation savings – Australia’s top 10 per cent of wealthy households possessed about 44 per cent of all wealth in Australia (approx. $5.2m per household), with about 41 per cent of total wealth locked up in owner-occupied housing, ‘13 per cent in investment housing, 20 per cent in superannuation and 19 per cent in shares, financial and business investments’.^[39]

Incomes and wealth also tend to be distributed unevenly across the population, with younger people, women, and First Nations peoples overrepresented amongst those with lower incomes and wealth.^[40] This is, of course, connected to structural factors like theft of lands and stolen wages for First Nations peoples, and to the gender pay gap, which sees women still earning 11.5 per cent less than their male counterparts (or 88 cents to each dollar earned by men)^[41] and retiring with about 38.8 per cent less superannuation.^[42] Wealth also tends to be distributed unequally across geographical regions, with those in remote and very remote areas generally rating lower on the Index of Economic Resources.^[43]

Addressing these disparities requires political and policy change. Ongoing policy debates about the means and ends of welfare are underpinned by competing moral arguments, as the following section illustrates.

How is social policy made, and by whom?

The question of who is involved in making social policy is important, because different policy actors will have different worldviews, moral beliefs, experiences and agendas. This is particularly apparent when thinking about the different goals and objectives of state actors (i.e. bureaucrats and elected politicians) and non-state actors (e.g. individuals, collectives, not-for-profit and private-sector organisations).

State actors shape social policy through their direct role in the policy-making process. Policy advisers in the public service or in ministerial offices have the role of exploring social policy ‘problems’ or ‘issues’ as they arise, gathering research and evidence around different options, undertaking consultation, and providing information and advice to elected officials about possible courses of action. In Australia, elected officials then have the final decision-making power over government social policy; it is up to members of parliament and Cabinet to decide which policies are to be pursued, how, when and why.

Non-state actors also have an important role to play in shaping, delivering and sometimes also designing social policy. For instance, they may:

• seek to influence the focus and development of government social policy through advocacy, lobbying, and participation in consultation
• deliver government-led/designed social policy, particularly through new public management (NPM) contracting arrangements
• initiate and develop social policy themselves, either with or without the involvement of the state.

Processes for making social policy will inevitably differ between these groups. There are, however, recognised standard processes for policy making in the public sector – often articulated through the concept of policy ‘cycles’.^[44] Althaus, Bridgman and Davis’ Australian ‘policy cycle’ proposes eight stages of policy development: (1) issue identification, (2) policy analysis, (3) policy instruments, (4) consultation, (5) co-ordination, (6) decision making, (7) implementation, and (8) evaluation. The authors argue that policy makers do not necessarily step through these stages consecutively, but that the policy process may instead be haphazard: a kind of ‘policy dance’.^[45]

Others have critiqued the Australian ‘policy cycle’ on the basis that it represents an overly technocratic view of policy making and does not adequately grapple with the complexities of real life, including political dimensions and other constraints.^[46] Indeed, the process of identifying and framing social policy ‘issues’, choosing which issues demand a response (and which do not), identifying and interpreting evidence, and making recommendations is inevitably political, demanding a series of subjective and collective value judgements. Below, we turn to two aspects of this process – the role of evidence, and the cyclical and iterative nature of policy making – to illustrate its somewhat messy nature.

Evidence-informed social policy

As indicated by the ‘analysis’ and ‘evaluation’ steps of the Australian policy cycle, social policy is not merely the end product of a contest between different ideological perspectives. It is also influenced and informed by empirical evidence. Although this is not a new concept, it gained prominence with the growth of the ‘evidence-based policy’ movement in the 1990s and early 2000s.^[47] The movement grew out of the UK and was also taken up in Australian policy circles, supported primarily on the basis that it provides a foundation for improved public policy decision making grounded in objective ‘truth’ rather than ideology, and can also improve efficiencies and outcomes.^[48] However, what this commitment means in practice remains somewhat murky. For instance, evidence-based policy raises questions about which types of evidence should be relied upon, how well they approximate ‘truth’, whose truth they approximate, how they should be used, and to what extent they can or should influence policy outcomes.^[49]

There is a great deal of contestability regarding the value of various types of evidence for policy development. For instance, there continues to be much debate regarding the utility of ‘evidence hierarchies’, which generally place greater value on evidence produced through experimental and quasi-experimental quantitative studies^[50] over evidence produced through qualitative inquiry.^[51] This preference for particular research methods over others, however, shapes and moulds the types of knowledge that can be produced, often favouring positivist ontologies (that is, those that perceive the world as objectively ‘knowable’ and ‘measurable’, typically through rational scientific means). As Marston and Watts argued:

There are many arguments for the inclusion of richer forms of knowledge in social policy inquiry and design: forms of knowledge that do not necessarily appear at the top of evidence hierarchies. This is particularly the case in the social sciences, because despite common assumptions that particular policies or programs can directly produce certain anticipated outcomes, trajectories of change are rarely simple or linear when dealing with humans’ lived experiences.^[53] Any change in an individual’s life is more likely to be the result of the intricate interplay of personal and environmental factors rather than any policy or program alone.^[54] Thick qualitative description can be particularly useful in teasing out these complexities and providing fuller accounts of the impacts of different policies, particularly when individuals are exposed to and affected by multiple policies and programs at once.

The process of developing and framing research studies also involves implicit assumptions that inevitably influence subsequent findings. For instance, the types of research questions being asked in a study permit the researchers to ‘discover’ some forms of evidence, but ignore (or fail to discover) others. Furthermore, social constructivists argue that all ‘truths’ are not necessarily discoverable or knowable. Thus, there is inevitably an implicit bias in the types of knowledge that are able to be produced through common and accepted research methodologies, regardless of their specific methodological leanings.

The extent to which evidence influences policy outcomes is also a cause for debate. As Colebatch and others have discussed, the policy development process is inevitably a contest between different types of knowledge, different ideologies and diverse ideas.^[55] It is not driven by evidence alone. Thus, it is unclear what role evidence does and should play within this contest, and whether this depends on changing contexts and circumstances (e.g. evidence availability).

In response to the potential shortcomings of evidence-based policy, some have advocated a shift to the more pragmatic aspiration of being evidence informed.^[56] This involves an acknowledgement that there are various forms of evidence, that evidence is not neutral, and that policy making is also guided by factors other than evidence alone.

Social policy as an ongoing, iterative process, rather than an end ‘product’

There is an often-held misconception that once social policies are designed, they move along the policy conveyer belt to be implemented in an apolitical and exacting manner. However, this view treats social policy as an end ‘product’, which arguably overemphasises the linearity of the relationship between agenda setting, policy design and implementation. Ewig and Palmucci stated:

Most social policies continue to be iteratively designed and redesigned, even if only in an incremental sense, during their implementation and throughout their delivery – a sort of continual moulding and reshaping to suit different local circumstances, match different stakeholders’ needs, respond to changing contexts, and/or to align with the views and needs of those responsible for social policy delivery. This can happen in a bottom-up way, where those delivering social policy – the ‘street-level bureaucracy’ of social workers and other human service professionals – adapt policies to suit local needs.^[58] It may also occur through top-down changes as a result of feedback loops in the policy cycle (e.g. in response to policy evaluation findings) or in response to other changes in context and circumstances.

Moran and Elvin argued that ‘bottom-up’ policy adaptation can hold strengths insofar as it nurtures feedback between social policy designers and the lived experiences of those at the grassroots level.^[59] This can be helpful in democratising the delivery of social policy, empowering social workers and other professionals to redefine policy goals in a way that suits local circumstances, and lessening the overall distance between high-level policy objectives and ground-level policy experiences. However, local-level decision making can also shift the ways and means of social policy in a manner that is less transparent and accountable, which can lead to discrepancies and inequities across different jurisdictions. The increased reliance on not-for-profit organisations to deliver social policy in Australia can also serve to deflect political risk and responsibility away from governments.^[60]

Debates and non-agenda issues

Social policy is often highly contested. Debates regularly invoke questions about who is deserving of different forms of welfare, and the overall size of Australia’s welfare funding envelope. There is also widespread debate about the nature and strategy behind welfare in Australia, including disagreement concerning the ‘social engineering’ objectives of some social policies in line with behavioural economics. This is particularly apparent in unemployment policies, which embed productivist assumptions about the pre-eminence of paid work over all other forms of work, such as informal care and unpaid domestic labour. An ethics of care is marginalised, while the paid work ethic is eulogised in these debates.

Who are the ‘deserving’ beneficiaries of social policy?

Social policy is an avenue through which goods and services, both tangible and intangible, can be provided to some members of society, while simultaneously being denied to others. Decisions about the distribution of government-funded welfare resources frequently require governments to draw boundaries around identities and social groups, labelling some as deserving and others as less so. These boundaries are sometimes arbitrary and are often fraught.

The concept of legal citizenship provides an example, as it opens the door for individuals to access a range of social resources that are otherwise unavailable to non-citizens. Whether this is always fair or just is debateable. For example, before being recognised as citizens in the 1967 constitutional referendum, First Nations Australians were largely denied basic rights based on their non-citizen status. This included being denied access to many forms of social welfare that were enjoyed by settler Australians. Instead, Indigenous Australians were (and still are) subject to domestic policies and practices that problematised them as requiring heavy modification and intervention to conform to the standards of settler society.^[61]

Who is deemed to be deserving of social welfare thus depends on how social policy ‘problems’ are framed, and which individuals or groups are problematised because of that framing. Bacchi’s ‘What’s the problem?’ approach recognises that policy ‘problems’ are not objective truths, but are instead socially and discursively constructed and reproduced.^[62] According to Bacchi’s approach, social policy responds to ‘problems’ that, just as they have been socially constructed, can also be questioned, contested and disrupted.

With regard to gender equality, Bacchi and Eveline state, ‘policies do not simply “deal with” the “problem” of “gender inequality”. Rather, policies create different impressions of what the “problem” of “gender equality” entails.’^[63] Bacchi later discusses policy responses intended to address the pay gap between genders, analysing liberal feminist policy responses that make greater work-readiness training available to women.^[64] Bacchi argues that this response places the blame for the gap on women’s shoulders, implying that it is women’s lack of training that causes the pay gap. This framing, however, ignores other fundamental structural and historical issues that also play a crucial role. For instance, the foundation of Australia’s capitalist economy is that some labour – primarily that typically carried out by men – is more highly remunerated than other forms of work, particularly care work and domestic labour traditionally performed by women, which are often undervalued or unpaid despite being essential to social reproduction.

Discourses around ‘welfare dependency’ also provide a pertinent example of how framing can directly impact social policy responses. For instance, recent discourse tends to frame welfare as being innately problematic, with so-called ‘dependency’ on the state perceived as a moral failing, while dependency on markets is celebrated as a marker of success and independence. Welfare ‘poison’ is now perceived as a core contributor to long-term social disadvantage, rather than a potential solution.^[65] This is epitomised in the mantra repeated by politicians on both sides of politics that ‘the best form of welfare is a job’.^[66] Under this framing, the policy ‘problem’ shifts from claims that there is not enough welfare to pull people out of poverty, to claims that there is too much welfare for people to pull themselves out of poverty. This refocusing of the issue shifts discussion away from historical, social and structural causes of poverty to the individual themselves, informing responses that focus on overcoming perceived individual deficits such as laziness, lack of skills and moral hazard.

The reframing of welfare in Australia has prompted increased calls for the ‘activation’ of welfare recipients by engaging them in welfare-to-work or ‘workfare’ programs. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, a series of reforms to the provision of unemployment support have resulted in an increased focus on ‘activating’ and upskilling the unemployed. This has involved, for example, the introduction of activation measures from 1986 (e.g. a requirement to register with the then Commonwealth Employment Service) and an ‘activity test’^[67] in 1989 as a condition of social security payments.^[68] Since then, active participation requirements have continued to be strengthened through a range of incremental reforms to social security and employment services.

This relatively recent history sits in contrast to the approaches of past Australian governments, particularly between Federation and the Second World War, which moved towards a focus on the demand (rather than supply) side of the unemployment ‘equation’. In particular, historical policies primarily sought to boost the availability of jobs through mechanisms like job guarantees and full employment, and ensure suitable work conditions. Policies since the late 1980s have, instead, recast the unemployed as the core ‘problem’ and site of possible intervention.

Currently, for example, recipients of JobSeeker Payment (unemployment benefit), Youth Allowance for jobseekers, Special Benefit payments, or Parenting Payment Single (from when their youngest child turns six) have mutual obligation and other participation requirements they must fulfil to be paid.^[69] For JobSeeker recipients, this typically includes attending appointments with an employment services provider, undertaking job searches, training programs and more. Mutual obligation requirements are laid out in individual Job Plans, with reporting and compliance continuing to shift over to digital self-management approaches (‘Workforce Australia’^[70] online portal), raising significant issues for those with little or no digital access and/or literacy.^[71]

In recent years, the punitive framing of welfare recipients as problems requiring intervention has escalated beyond mutual obligation requirements into more fundamental violations of their rights. This has been seen, for instance, under recent legislation that strips away the presumption of innocence itself for social security beneficiaries.^[72]

Case example: making welfare recipients ‘guilty until proven innocent’

A recent legislative change starkly illustrates how welfare recipients in Australia are treated with disregard for their fundamental rights.^[73] In late 2025, the government amended social security laws to allow the cancellation of income support for anyone subject to an outstanding arrest warrant for a serious crime. Because arrest warrants can be issued without a charge, conviction, or even court appearance, this measure punishes people merely accused of offences, directly violating the presumption of innocence enshrined in international human rights law. It also denies the right to social security, which is also protected under international human rights.

This policy reform reveals how welfare recipients occupy a separate legal category where normal protections are simply not afforded in the same way as for non-recipients. Under these laws, the minister for the Australian Federal Police can – upon receiving a request from state police – cancel social security payments without independent review. Constitutionally, this blurs the separation of powers, designed to ensure that courts, not politicians, decide guilt and punishment. Moreover, there is no requirement to reinstate benefits or provide back pay if warrants are cleared or innocence is established. For some social security payments – particularly Disability Support Pension – it could take years to re-qualify, meaning the implications of cancellation (as opposed to suspension, for example) can be long-lasting.

The consequences of these laws will likely fall hardest on already-marginalised groups. First Nations peoples, who comprise 36 per cent of prisoners despite being 3.8 per cent of the population, will likely bear disproportionate impacts. This pattern is confirmed by similar laws in Aotearoa/New Zealand, where by June 2020 Māori peoples represented 71 per cent of those with welfare cancellations under these laws, but only 36 per cent of the adult welfare recipient population.^[74] This discriminatory impact led Aotearoa/New Zealand’s Welfare Expert Advisory Group to recommend removing the powers in 2019.^[75]

Domestic violence victims fleeing abuse also face particular danger. The increasing trend towards victims being wrongly identified as perpetrators makes it more likely that they may also be subject to these new laws.^[76] This means there is potential to have their incomes cut off precisely when they’re most vulnerable, possibly forcing them to choose between severe economic hardship or returning to violent situations.^[77]

This measure transforms social security from a safety net into a law enforcement tool, punishing families alongside accused individuals and imposing hardship before any judicial process occurs. It demonstrates that when discourses position welfare recipients as suspicious, undeserving, and criminal by default, governments feel emboldened to strip away their most basic rights—including the foundational principle that one is innocent until proven guilty.^[78] This creates a two-tier justice system where the need for state assistance via social security payments becomes grounds for diminished rights.

Social policy as a behavioural tool

Social policy can be used to enable and empower, but also to govern, coerce and control. Social policies inevitably embed normative assumptions about suitable or desirable ways of living and behaving, which can serve to restrain each individual’s power over their own lives and identities. They can also explicitly contain behavioural objectives, seeking to influence the ways that social policy ‘subjects’ view and interact with the world, including through behavioural economics and ‘nudge’ interventions.^[79] For instance, social policies often seek to influence how individuals address their health, spend their time, grow their wealth, and more.^[80]

Thaler and Sunstein discuss ‘nudge’ interventions as being grounded in a ‘libertarian-paternalist’ framework, which recognises the critical importance of personal liberty, but which also acknowledges the potential benefits of ‘soft’ paternalism in influencing behaviour without restraining individual choice. ‘Choice architects’ – those responsible for devising nudge interventions – seek to subtly manipulate the context within which choices are made to encourage, but not to require, certain choices over others. Thaler and Sunstein provide the example of placing fruit at eye-level in school cafeterias to encourage students to choose healthy food options. While this policy does not restrain students’ ability to choose other options, it nevertheless subtly influences the likelihood that their choices will be healthier than if the fruit was placed elsewhere.

At the other end of the scale are policies driven by hard paternalism. These policies tend to limit individual freedom and choice, instead coercing individuals to conform to particular standards of behaviour or ways of being. Extending Thaler and Sunstein’s example, a hard paternalist approach to improving school students’ diets might involve regulating the food options available in school cafeterias to exclude unhealthy foods, thereby restricting choice and removing individual discretion.

Over the past decade, there has been an intensified interest in translating behavioural economics theory into public policy development.^[81] Bonoli has referred to this as the ‘active social policy paradigm’: one in which governments routinely use social policy instruments to pursue the health and wellbeing of their populations.^[82] In Australia, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet now has a dedicated behavioural economics team, ‘BETA’, established to enhance the ability of the Australian public service to, among other things, ‘improve the lives of Australians by generating and applying evidence from the behavioural and social sciences to find solutions to complex policy problems’.^[83] The team has worked on a range of policy projects to date, including in relation to tax compliance, influencing consumers’ energy and financial product choices, and ensuring compliance with labour laws.^[84] Though there are arguments for and against the use of behavioural economics, behavioural objectives are apparent in a range of social policies in Australia. Income management (discussed in the below case study) provides one example.

Case example: income management in Australia

Compulsory income management involves ‘quarantining’ proportions of an individual’s welfare income and diverting the quarantined amount to a ‘BasicsCard’, a type of debit card where funds cannot be converted to cash, nor used to purchase certain items that are deemed (by the state) to be morally hazardous, including alcohol, tobacco, pornography and/or gambling services.^[85] As of August 2025, 32,274 individuals across Australia remained subject to compulsory income management.^[86]

First introduced in 2007 under the Northern Territory Emergency Response, income management thereafter operated in discrete jurisdictions across Australia, including across the NT, and in parts of Western Australia (WA), Queensland, New South Wales (NSW), South Australia and Victoria.

These schemes have operated differently over time and across locations, quarantining between 50 and 80 per cent of an individual’s welfare income and taking different approaches to the administration of income management. For example those living in the Northern Territory can have between 50–70 per cent of their welfare incomes managed via the current ‘Enhanced Income Management Measure’.^[87]

Alternatively, income management under the Cape York Welfare Reform initiative^[88] is delivered as one of multiple options (including referral to support services) available to the Family Responsibilities Commission: a statutory authority that undertakes restorative conferencing with welfare recipients who breach certain social triggers.^[89] Conferencing is undertaken by Indigenous community Elders (sitting as ‘local commissioners’) and the decision about whether to apply income management, including what percentage (60 per cent, 75 per cent or 90 per cent) and for how long, is also made by the Elders.

Although the models differ in their design and administration, they all involve behavioural objectives, which seek to coerce certain behaviours by restricting or removing individual choice over expenditure – a form of hard paternalism. In this way, welfare income is used as a lever for behavioural compliance with selected social norms. Welfare conditionality of this nature is also supported by broader discourses around welfare dependency and, thus, it is hoped that by increasing conditionality, individuals will ultimately be incentivised away from long spells on welfare.

This social policy focus raises challenging questions around the roles of different players in social policy design and implementation. For instance, income management in all areas (aside from Cape York) has been conceived of and designed by the Commonwealth government. However, it co-opts state-level bureaucracy in its implementation by requiring child safety workers, for instance, to make client referrals to the scheme. Its operation therefore depends on the co-operation and compliance of state government level public servants. The case study of compulsory income management, like so many social policy examples illustrates the complexity of federalism, particularly the degree to which co-operative or competitive federalism is at play in the design and delivery of social policies.

Conclusions

Social policy is a way of describing the actions and configuration of governments, the family, markets and civil society in meeting the wellbeing of citizens and residents. The formal and informal rules and regulations governing access to goods and services create forms of inclusion and sites of exclusion. Invariably, the design and implementation of social policies reflects and embeds value judgements about the good life and the good society. As discussed throughout this chapter, the means and ends of social policy are often controversial and highly contested. Political debates frequently revolve around the overall size of the welfare funding envelope, the shape of the welfare system, the forms of delivery and the identities of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ beneficiaries. Although Australia has a long history of welfare conditionality, there has been an intensification of this in recent decades. This has coincided with changing discourses around the role and impacts of welfare, including an increased focus on the perceived toxic impacts of long-term ‘welfare dependency’. Where welfare was once viewed as an acceptable safety net or fallback measure for alleviating poverty, it is now regularly described as a core contributing factor to moral decay and decline.

The framing and reframing of welfare in Australian society has had, and continues to have, a direct influence on how social policies are constructed, implemented and monitored. Social policies themselves both reflect and are active in the construction of these dominant narratives. They can be used as tools to unite, enable and empower, but also to divide, discriminate and coerce. The history and case studies contained in this chapter provide examples of this variability. Debates around these aspects of social policy will likely continue into the future, as Australia rapidly defines and redefines its national identity in both domestic and international contexts. Being alert to the changing contexts within which social policy is discussed, designed and implemented is an important first step in being able to deconstruct and question social policy objectives – critical factors in ensuring robust democratic debate among students and scholars of social policy, but also among practitioners, beneficiaries and the wider public.

References

About the authors

Zoe Staines is Senior Lecturer and Director of Research in the School of Social Science at The University of Queensland. Her deeply interdisciplinary research spans social policy, sociology, and criminology, examining gender and work, care, welfare conditionality, and (de)coloniality with particular attention to structural injustice. Zoe is current Chair of the Organising Committee for the 2026 Australian Social Policy Conference and an elected board member of Australia’s Council for Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (CHASS). Before entering academia, Zoe held senior research and policy roles in government and the non-profit sector.

Greg Marston is professor and Director of the Centre for Policy Futures at The University of Queensland. He is also Coordinator for the Queensland Decarbonisation Hub. He has been researching critical social policy and the politics of policymaking for nearly two decades. He is active in basic income, employment and poverty debates, and is undertaking research into the role of welfare states in transitioning countries to a low-carbon future.