The welfare state is not what it was. Decades of liberalisation have transformed how governments provide social policy and how citizens experience social protection. Services that were once the sole domain of public sector workers are now run by non-profit, even for-profit, firms. Payments that were once straightforward to access and understand are increasingly conditional and stingy, or require expert advice to invest in complex financial products. Even within the public sector, new public management and competition policy have created markets within the state, transforming the public sector into something that looks much more like the private sector.

Yet for all this transformation, predictions of a crisis of the welfare state have proven premature. Across the OECD, and particularly in Australia, the welfare state is on the march. The growth is both quantitative and qualitative. Through the height of neoliberalism social spending grew, and even before Covid-19, had moved closer to the OECD average (OECD 2022c). Areas of social need, such as child, disability and elder care, are supported in ways they were not before. And even though inequality overall has increased, social spending has also become more redistributive, doing more to ease inequalities than in the past (Whiteford 2017).

Much of this change is structural. As populations age there is more need for pensions and healthcare, two of the biggest components of the welfare state. As family structures change and women enter paid work in greater numbers, demands for paid care expand and parenting payments increase. Welfare states redistribute more when our initial market incomes are less equal, as happens when labour and capital markets are deregulated. However, deliberate policy also played a role. New programs have been introduced, and existing spending increased under both Labor and Coalition governments.

This book attempts to understand the varied politics of liberalisation in Australia and understand how to change it. Of course, we can exaggerate difference. Australia never developed a comprehensive welfare state equivalent to those in Europe, or even the UK. We have always had sizeable private sectors in health, education and care and relatively low social benefits. Social policy and the politics of welfare have changed since the 1980s, however less dramatically than many imagine. Liberalisation has not meant the end of the state, but the expansion of markets alongside welfare.