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In the opening article of Redesigning the Welfare State in New Zealand (1999), Professor in Public Policy Jonathan Boston began with the 1938 Social Security Act, which laid the foundations of the modern welfare state in New Zealand. He cited the prime minister of the day, Michael Joseph Savage, who explained the aim of the legislation was ‘for the first time to provide, as generously as possible, for all persons who have been deprived of the power to obtain a reasonable livelihood through age, illness, unemployment, widowhood, or other misfortune’. For the next four decades, Boston wrote, there was solid, bipartisan support for the principles underpinning the welfare state. ‘Since the early 1980s, however, support for the welfare state – both in New Zealand and in many other industrialised democracies – has been dissipating’. He explained that this was jointly the result of fiscal pressures, such as lower economic growth, and a shift in the intellectual climate, the rise of market liberalism and neo-conservatism. In this chapter, I will argue that the shift occurred earlier, and I will focus on reports produced in New Zealand in the 1970s as an essential background to the changes in welfare that were to occur in the 1980s. These reports highlighted not just the economic costs of the welfare state, but also the social costs. With their emphasis on diversity and giving agency to local communities, they appealed to new social movements and consumers, those on the left as well as the right of the political spectrum, thus allowing ideas about the rolling back of the State to take hold. The economic downturn did not cause the rise of neoliberalism but rather, along with social and political factors, gave the neoliberals the opportunity to gain political ascendancy. New Zealand did not of course act in a vacuum, but the reports of the 1970s did not actively engage with overseas influences and experiences; rather they queried the effectiveness of ‘the Welfare State’ in solving New Zealand’s social problems of the time. |
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