Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Social policy
identities and social groups, labelling some as deserving and others as less so. These
boundaries are sometimes arbitrary and are often fraught.
The concept of legal citizenship provides an example, as it opens the door for
individuals to access a range of social resources that are otherwise unavailable to
non-citizens. Whether this is always fair or just is debateable. For example, before
being recognised as citizens in the 1967 constitutional referendum, Indigenous
Australians were largely denied basic rights on the basis of their non-citizen status.
This included being denied access to many forms of social welfare that were enjoyed
by settler Australians. Instead, Indigenous Australians were (and arguably still are)
subject to domestic policies and practices that problematised them as requiring
heavy modification and intervention to conform to the standards of settler society.
Who is deemed to be deserving of social welfare thus depends on how social
policy ‘problems’ are framed, and which individuals or groups are problematised
as a result of that framing. Bacchi’s ‘What’s the problem?’ approach recognises that
policy ‘problems’ are not objective truths, but are instead socially and discursively
constructed and reproduced. 52 According to Bacchi’s approach, social policy
respondsto‘problems’that,justastheyhavebeensociallyconstructed,canalsobe
questioned, contested and disrupted.
With regard to gender equality, Bacchi and Eveline stated, ‘policies do not
simply “deal with” the “problem” of “gender inequality”. Rather, policies create
different impressions of what the “problem” of “gender equality” entails.’ 53 Bacchi
later discussed policy responses intended to address the pay gap between men and
women, focusing on one response that provided additional training to women. 54
Bacchi argued that the response placed the blameforthegaponwomen’sshoulders,
implying that it was women’s lack of training that had caused the pay gap. This
framing, however, ignores other fundamental structural and historical issues that
also play a critical role.
Discourses around ‘welfare dependency’ also provide a pertinent example of
how framing can directly impact social policy responses. For instance, recent
discourse tends to frame welfare as being innately problematic, with dependency
on the state perceived as a moral bad, while dependency on markets is celebrated as
a marker of success and independence. Welfare ‘poison’ is now perceived as a core
contributor to long-term social disadvantage, rather than a potential solution. 55
Therefore, the policy ‘problem’ shifts from claims that there is not enough welfare
topullpeopleoutofpoverty,toclaimsthatthereistoo much welfareforpeopleto
pull themselves out of poverty, thereby causing the ‘poverty trap’, where incentives
to remain on welfare outweigh incentives to move into paid work. This refocusing
of the issue shifts discussion away from historical, social and structural causes
52 Bacchi 2009.
53 Bacchi and Eveline 2010, 112.
54 Bacchi 2017.
55 Pearson 2009; O’Connor 2001.
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