Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Greg Marston and Zoe Staines
Key terms/names
civil society, distributive justice, evidence-informed policy, liberalism, paternalism,
social policy, welfare state, workfare
Social policy is guided by questions of distributive justice: who gets what in society,
under what circumstances, and how. Social policy is generally considered to be
synonymous with the ‘welfare state’, which sees government as a direct provider or
regulator of private and not-for-profit social welfare services including education,
health, community services, social housing, occupational welfare and income
support. These forms of welfare are usually underwritten by social insurance
schemes, which redistribute funds accumulated through taxes and levies to those
inneedofsupport.Theycanalsotakeotherforms,liketheprovisionoftax
expenditures and informal care provided through civil society. 1
The various forms of welfare, provided through a combination of direct
government service delivery, markets, non-profits and civil society, are referred to
as a mixed economy of welfare. Social policies tend to interact and intersect in
a number of different ways, forming a complex web of enabling and disenabling
structures and systems. For example, the right to access and engage in meaningful
education is deeply linked with other areas of social policy, because policy
Marston, Greg, and Zoe Staines (2019). Social policy. In Peter J. Chen, Nicholas Barry, John R.
Butcher, David Clune, Ian Cook, Adele Garnier, Yvonne Haigh, Sara C. Motta and Marija Taflaga,
eds. Australian politics and policy: senior edition. Sydney: Sydney University Press. DOI: 10.30722/
sup.9781743326671
1 Marston, McDonald and Bryson 2014.
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