Social Policy

Towards A New Social Settlement: Rethinking Social Policy Across the Life Course Project, 2001-2003

This project aims to develop a framework and policy matrix for rethinking the future of social policy in Australia, with an emphasis on responding to labour market and household change.

The New Social Settlement research and policy development program is co-ordinated by Brian Howe (University of Melbourne) and Linda Hancock (Deakin University) with a group of researchers based at the Centre for Public Policy, University of Melbourne.  Across 2000-2002 the program was supported through an Australian Research Council (ARC) Strategic Partnerships with Industry grant.  This brought on board Maryann Wulff (Monash University) as Associate Investigator and cash and in-kind contributions from CEDA and the Brotherhood of St Laurence as industry partners.  The Myer Foundation also contributed funds to this stage of the program.  A wide range of academics, policy analysts and social researchers from around Australia have made significant contributions at various stages of the research program.

Increasing income inequality and emerging forms of labour market disadvantage suggest the breakdown of the postwar social settlement based around standard employment relationships, the male breadwinner family model and residual social security. This breakdown is accompanied by the emergence of new risks, often mutually reinforcing. There is the economic risk faced by the individual worker engaged in precarious employment arrangements within a volatile labour market. This is compounded by the social risk that arises as household relationships, once an important redistributive system, become, like work relationships, increasingly serial and contingent. Finally, there is the political risk arising from the collapse of the consensus around state capacity for intervention, expenditure and the provision of public services.

Overall, the program aims to critically analyse shifts in working life and household relations and to tease out the implications of such shifts for social policy.  Of central importance is the concept of needs across the lifecourse through the central organising lens of shifts in labour markets and households; during adolescence and early adulthood, over the working life and in retirement, focusing on:  income and employment security, housing, work/family balance and education and training.

The program aims to arrive at a new ensemble of policies around income security, caring and family, workplace relations and transitions into and out of the workforce that is responsive to this changed life course.  It requires close analysis of new institutional arrangements that reflect structural change in both labour markets and household formation, with the aim of promoting the management of risk and the enhancement of people's capacity for social participation.

What is increasingly clear is that the lifetime experience of that cohort of Australians who entered the labour market or formed families after the mid-1970s will vary greatly from that of the immediate postwar generations. The new types of arrangements that have been identified in both working life and household formation will not be confined to the periphery of society or the labour market and demand new policy responses.

On the basis of the funding already received a series of seminars and roundtables were convened between 200-2002, bringing together a wide range of academics, policy analysts and social researchers.  The program has resulted in a series of publications analysing the contours of change and pointing toward new policy directions.  These have included two major reports published by CEDA which have made a major contribution to public debate by attracting widespread media attention.

The policy ideas that have arisen from the New Social Settlement program are suggestive of a new, emerging policy paradigm.  While Australia has substantially adopted a new model of economic policy, based around greater openness, global competition, microeconomic reform, privatisation and structural adjustment, there has been no new model of social policy.  Instead, there has been a series of incremental adjustments rather than a systemic renovation.  In contrast to this incremental approach, it is suggested that the changes that we are now seeing in the way Australians work and live require a fundamentally new set of interlinked and mutually reinforcing reforms to the financial and regulatory frameworks that underpin social policy.

Our project so far suggests that attention to the distribution and nature of new and emerging forms of risk raises new questions for social policy, for the role of government and for other social partners.

For more information, please contact the Centre Manager, Lauren Rosewarne.