Sunday 30 September 2012

International intellectual and political influences on the Key Government’s approach to welfare reform.

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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/

Thursday 27 September 2012

Remembering Alison Stoddart

"We were horrified to learn of the loss of Alison Stoddart (1980 - 2012), a fighter against injustice and oppression gone much too soon. Our thoughts are with all of her family and friends."
Dougal McNeill, despite the grief that I know he is feeling, has written these words in the immediate wake of the tragic passing of a truly wonderful person. Just knowing that there were people like Alison Stoddart in the world made me feel more optimistic about the potential capacity of humankind to create a better world. For his obituary go to: http://www.isonz.blogspot.co.nz/2012/09/in-memory-of-alison-stoddart.html

Wednesday 26 September 2012

The National (Key) Government's Tax and Welfare Reforms

If you are interested in National's tax and welfare reform, you can hear my interview about this on Radio National last Monday night by going to the link below.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/nights/audio/2533543/thinkers-politically-left