6 - Hybrid Policy Making

Summary

How can the lessons of our case studies be applied? In this section, I identify a set of common features from the successful case studies to develop a broader account of how to contest liberalisation. In each case, welfare state expansion appeared to involve a combination of strong political pressure to address social needs and technocratic expertise to incorporate these goals through novel policy design. This chapter focuses on policy design, emphasising strategies that respond to the growing power of neoclassical economic knowledge and fiscal discipline. The next chapter will focus on political mobilisation, emphasising strategies that connect citizens to democratic governance, although both chapters touch on both themes.

The case studies were selected to reflect three strategies of neoliberal welfare reform; residualisation, marketisation and financialisation. These strategies are commonly identified as driving rising inequality and insecurity. Each chapter presented evidence for that conclusion. Income payments were transformed into workfare and used to discipline rather than protect vulnerable workers. Marketisation in childcare entrenched producer power, unequal access and led to the collapse of ABC Learning. The integration of retirement policy into financial markets has produced growing inequality and eroded security of tenure in housing.

As welfare state scholars have noted, liberalisation rarely involved overt retrenchment of social programs. Instead, restructuring transformed provision to transfer risks from states and corporations onto citizens, managed through private markets and finance. These transformations reflect the declining power of traditional social democratic politics in the public sphere and the growing role of central economic agencies and of market economic ideas inside government. The result is neoliberal technocratic governance.

Yet, understanding each of these transformations is made more complex by other changes that appeared to extend social protection, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Family spending increased significantly, was highly redistributive and expanded under both Labor and Coalition governments. Medicare marked a breakthrough in equal access to healthcare.

Income-contingent loans (ICLs) play a contradictory role, facilitating the reintroduction of student fees, while increasing access and mitigating the social risks students face from market loans.