Three Recent Books that Anyone Interested in Australian Social Policy Should Read

especially if you're interested in the welfare state, social democracy and retirement income policy

I am not really a book guy. I find that many non-fiction books are basically written as a PR exercise – an excuse to give some talks, make media appearances, get some time off teaching (if you’re a full-time academic) and constantly remind everyone about your new book. I also think that most books should’ve been journal articles, most journal articles should’ve been blog posts and most blog posts should’ve been Twitter threads. Authors and publishers often take one or two ideas that would’ve made for a decent article or 30 minute talk and stretch them across 100+ pages of hell. All this is to say that I refrain from recommending books to people unless I’ve actually read them and think they’re worth reading.

Here are three books that came out last year that I’d recommend to anyone interested in Australian social policy, politics and, more specifically, the welfare state. In no particular order:

Gen F'd? – Alison Pennington

Alison Pennington is a left-wing intellectual from South Australia who barracks for Port Adelaide, so it’s no surprise to anyone that knows me that I’d put her first book on this list. The premise of the book is simple: the promises of the Hawke-Keating era have been broken, the worst excesses of neoliberal thinking have generalised out to the rest of society and we need to rebuild social democratic institutions for the 21st Century.

This is one of the few books that I can recommend to anyone with an interest in Australian politics. The 18 year old university activist, the 20 year old casual retail worker, the 26 year old new union organiser, the 39 year old EL2 and the 70 year old retiree can all find something valuable here. Pennington draws on her experiences in insecure work, the University of Sydney’s Master of Political Economy program, the Australian Public Service, working as an organiser for the CPSU and later as Senior Economist for the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work. She’s synthesised a combination of insights that are rarely presented alongside each other. You’ll rarely see the activist case for rebuilding rank-and-file unionism over the modern conception of trade unions a ‘an arms-length insurance product, a passive service, or worse, a shopping benefits scheme’ combined with serious takes on employment and welfare policy, but you’ll find it here.

The book is fairly short and covers a range of different issues for a popular audience. It’s the most well-written and accessible book here but it’s also lighter on the details than the other two. You won’t find a detailed deep dive into the minutiae of the NDIS or unemployment services. That being said, you’ll find plenty of things to think about and investigate on your own once you’re finished reading.

How to Pool Risks Across Generations – Michael Otsuka

Michael Otsuka draws on his experience as a political philosopher and as a previous member of the University and College Union’s Universities Superannuation Scheme negotiating team to defend what he calls a ‘collective, multigenerational, society-wide form of pension provision’. He argues that this collective approach is far superior to individualised retirement income accounts like Australia’s superannuation fund system or the United States’ 401(k)s. What makes How to Pool Risks Across Generations unique is that Otsuka doesn’t appeal to egalitarianism, nor does he argue that we need to redistribute between rich and poor retirees. Instead, he defends collective pensions as a form of fair and rational cooperation between persons for their mutual advantage. He’s putting forward an argument that a retirement income system should perform the Piggy Bank function – redistributing across our own possible life cycles or, in other words, insuring ourselves against disability in old age.

Otsuka points out that individualised schemes fail to perform the Piggy Bank function because they don’t insure people against longevity risk: the risk that you’ll live longer than you expected and run out of funds before you die. Collective schemes are different in that they pool the funds and the risk between multiple members. Otsuka discusses a few different kinds of collective system, including some that already exist at a sectoral level in the UK, the US, and Sweden, along with how they could function as plausible alternatives to individual schemes.

How to Pool Risks Across Generations is a must read for anyone interested in retirement income policy. Every politician, policy adviser and trade union official in Australia should read it. Admittedly, the technical parts of the book focus largely on pension schemes in the United Kingdom and not Australia. That being said, the book is pretty accessible to those that don’t know anything about all of the different schemes and I think it’s a good idea to expose yourself ideas from countries that’ve engaged in more experimentation on this front than we have.

Politics, Inequality and the Australian Welfare State After Liberalisation – Ben Spies-Butcher

If you’re familiar with the literature on the Australian welfare state, then you know about Francis Castles’ 1985 book The Working Class and Welfare. You can think of Ben Spies-Butcher’s Politics, Inequality and the Australian Welfare State After Liberalisation as a much needed modern update and spiritual successor to The Working Class and Welfare.

Castles argued that Australia had developed a unique welfare state that had gone long misunderstood by European commentators. He claimed that Australia had established something approaching a social democratic welfare state ‘by other means’ – contributory social insurance substituted with a combination of wage regulation and non-contributory, flat-rate and means-tested welfare payments. Australia’s powerful union movement and electorally weak Labor Party built a wage-earner’s welfare state instead of a Nordic-style welfare state. But that was in 1985. Now union membership rates have collapsed, real wages have only just started growing for the first time in over a decade, public services have been replaced by the private and not-for-profit sector, and our approach to welfare conditionality has a lot more in common with the paradigm cases of liberal welfare states than 1980s Australia.

And yet, weirdly, social spending has grown and our welfare state has expanded. Despite growing inequality our social spending is actually more redistributive than it was in the 80s. Spies-Butcher dives into all the strange features of Australia’s liberalised welfare state: a highly financialised and individualised approach to social insurance, a ‘hidden welfare state’ for the rich in the form of tax concessions along with means testing (which are identical to spending and taxing in fiscal incidence terms) and quasi-markets that seek to integrate the logic of commodification with social services.