I've been doing some research on National's
welfare reforms. As most of you will know, it is a largely unmodified re-run of
National's neoliberal welfare reforms of the the 1990s, with exactly, and I
mean exactly, the same ideological justification as the 1990s. This is the idea
that people become sucked in by a culture of welfare dependency. In other
words, the existence of benefits creates the problem of 'welfare dependency'
because it disables people with respect to applying for, and performing well
within, paying jobs.
The main
international intellectual and political influences on the Key Government’s
neoliberal paternalistic approach to welfare reform come from the United States. See for example, the
Wisconsin shift to workfare in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which was
then implemented on a national scale by the Clinton Administration through The Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Clinton
claimed this Act ‘would end welfare as we have come to know it’ and the workfare approach
it encouraged has been a key influence over successive governments in New
Zealand from the mid-1990s to the present.
The key intellectual figure who helped to develop
and advocate workfare (known as the ‘paternalistic welfare’ approach) was
Lawrence M. Mead in books such as: Government Matters, The New
Politics of Poverty, Beyond Entitlement, The New Paternalism:
Supervisory Approaches to Poverty. (Thanks to Rebecca Stringer, Department of Sociology, Gender and Social Work, University of Otago, for drawing my attention to this).
For more on the current National Government see my
article: The Fifth (Key) National Government’s Neoliberal
Policy Agenda: Description, Analysis, and Critical Evaluation. New Zealand
Sociology 26 (1): 12-40 (2011).
You can
access this article at:
http://sociology.org.nz/
