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This article seeks to demonstrate the way in which labor market choices are shaped by institutional arrangements devised by the state. Since these arrangements differ markedly from country to country, much that is distinctive about national labor market outcomes is a function of diverse encounters with the state. This argument is illustrated by an account that explains why Australia, a country which apparently devotes little in the way of public resources to the old, manifests an exceptionally high level of early retirement. This account shows that, in contrast to the standard European welfare state strategy of public pensions, the Australian state has over many decades tackled the need for provision for the old by encouraging retirement strategies that are not subsidized directly from the public purse. These strategies include the encouragement of widely dispersed home ownership and occupational pensions. Read broadly, the article suggests that the extremity of contrasts frequently made between the advanced welfare states of Western Europe and the miserable social policy outcomes in the democracies of the New World have been far too extreme. The article experiments with novel presentational techniques designed to focus attention on individual choices and on policy outcomes for the individual rather than policy outputs by governments.

Examines the nature & efficiency of needs-based welfare strategies in Australia & New Zealand over the past century. The social protection approach here is characterized by the guaranteed provision of social protection to those citizens meeting certain conditions, a comprehensive system of means-tested income support benefits, & income benefits for employed persons meeting standards of need as defined by social policy. Under these circumstances, policy plays a fundamental role in the definition of need & thereby the provision of cash transfers &/or social services. Although recent economic & sociocultural changes have undermined traditional social protection mechanisms, these changes also encourage favorable developments in educational opportunities & advancement of female social, political, & economic power. Therefore, it is argued that the erosion of the male-centered, wage earners' welfare states in New Zealand & Australia does not represent the end of social protection in these countries, but the necessary transformation of dated institutions & policies. Recent studies suggest that the contemporary needs-based systems in these countries are as or more efficient than the most effective systems in Europe & North America. 2 Tables, 85 References. T. Sevier

This article sets out to give an overview of the most significant policy changes and developments influencing the development of social protection in Australia in the past decade. Rather than focussing on an assessment of gains and losses within the narrow confines of the state welfare system, it looks at what has happened to the broad configuration of policies which have come to constitute Australia's highly distinctive wage earners' welfare state. Overall, the conclusion is that the institutional forms and normative goals of the wage earner's welfare state have proved far more resilient and adaptable than critics have assumed likely, with targeting, award‐based superannuation and women's welfare singled out as the most interesting areas in which Labor has contributed to the refurbishing of the established model.

This paper Compares and Contrasts the Australian and Scandinavian welfare states with a view to demonstrating that, whilst the extent of welfare expenditures and the instruments of social policy vary quite markedly in these countria, policy outcomes in terms of levels of inequality and poverty and social protection are much more similar. In the course of this comparison. the paper casts serious doubts on the usefulness of both the prevailing paradigms for evaluating welfare state performance: measures of expenditure effort and measures of welfare decommodification. Instead. it is argued that welfare state performance can only be properly assessed, as Richard Titmuss pointed out many years ago, by evaluating the impact of fiscal and occupational welfare in addition to the extent and character of the explicit expenditures of the state. When we broaden our conception of social policy in this way. Australia appears much less of a welfare state laggard than it is often taken to be and the oft mooted Scandinavian claim to welfare superiority is. perhaps. rather less compelling than is sometimes argued.