Social policies, and social policy outcomes, are different in different countries because they have been shaped over many decades by a diversity of values concerning the purposes of social policy—a diversity, which is continually affirmed, but occasionally, modified through political choice. What the welfare state does and is expected to do is, in other words, a reflection of a country’s ideas about social justice and how that end may be achieved. Such ideas differ. Generally, the character of a country’s social policy profile changes only slowly. For the most part, social policy systems are like ‘elephants on the move’, going forward ponderously one step at a time. Very occasionally, they move at a canter and change direction radically.
Over recent decades, Australia has been elephantine in certain respects and radical in others. We have been extremely slow in modifying our family policies to cope with the new realities of family life, but have moved much faster to remove key elements of the system of social protection that once made Australia unique. I would also suggest that our choices do really matter: that the way we structure our systems of welfare provision can have major consequences for the quality of the society in which we will live in the future. It follows that, if we care about families, we should choose carefully.
In examining the facts of social expenditure and family policy development across the OECD area, I have compared total social expenditure as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 21 advanced Western nations from 1960–1998.
A first point to notice is that, contrary to the warnings of the globalisation literature, there has been no ‘race to the bottom’ in social spending, with OECD average expenditure rising by four percentage points of GDP over the past two decades. Contrary to the views of many domestic critics, Australia has been amongst the countries in which expenditure growth has been greatest in that period, increasing from 11.3 per cent of GDP in 1980 to 17.8 percent in 1998.
A second point to note, however, demonstrating the range of social policy choice open to us, is that differences between countries are huge. At one end of the distribution, we find countries like Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland, spending at and around 30 per cent of national income on the welfare purposes, and, at the other end, countries like the United States (14.6 per cent) and Japan