Chapter 6 - From 'Sales and Service' to 'Cash and Carry': the Planning of Postwar Reconstruction

Summary

Accounts of the development of national social welfare policies in Australia have taken the Second World War as a key political moment. The federal Labor governments of Curtin and Chifley have been seen as the catalyst of a first serious – and for many years the only – attempt to accept state responsibility for social provision on the model of British and European social democracy, a 'radical liberal (or even mildly socialist) experimentation in social welfare'. Much of the medical profession has shared this view of the 1940s as a sustained attempt to introduce socialized medicine to Australia, abolishing the free market, destroying the direct relationship of patient and doctor and making both subservient to the wishes of the state.

While the views of organized medicine have not softened on this score over the last four decades – the mild reforms of Medibank and Medicare were opposed in similarly apocalyptic tones – more leftist analysts of the origins of the welfare state have become increasingly sceptical of the socialist pretensions of the Labor governments of the 1940s, pointing out both their unquestioning acceptance of the capitalist organization of the economy and the extent to which social reforms owed more to the exigencies of war finance than to the 'Light on the Hill'.

Health policy has played little part in this critique.