To Rebuild a Universal Welfare State, We Need to Scrap Means-Testing
When welfare and public services are means-tested, it makes them less efficient and less accessible. Worst of all, by limiting access to the “deserving poor,” means tests undermine the idea that social welfare is a right.
Long lines extend outside Centrelink, the Australian government’s welfare agency, in Melbourne in March 2020. (WILLIAM WEST/AFP via Getty Images)
In January of this year, a severe shortage of free rapid antigen tests (RATs) was exacerbating Australia’s largest wave of COVID infections. To the majority, it seemed obvious that the federal government should distribute RATs for free — but not to opposition leader Anthony Albanese. Although Labor shifted its position later, Albanese initially only called for free antigen tests for low-income Australians. This is to say that Albanese wanted to apply a means test to determine who should and who shouldn’t receive free access to COVID tests. It was a response that revealed Labor’s long-standing obsession with means-testing welfare.
Australia’s welfare system has always been heavily means-tested, especially when compared to universal welfare states built on the Nordic model. As socialists have typically pointed out, this is a major deficiency. Means-testing undermines public services and makes them less accessible, over time eroding the social rights that the welfare state should guarantee. Indeed, as the last fifty years of Australian history show, means tests are at best a built-in vulnerability. At worst, means tests are the thin end of a wedge intended to impose austerity and chip away at the universal provision of welfare.
The Hawke-Keating Years
In the postwar period, the view of welfare as a social right gained popularity. Consequently, Liberal governments relaxed means tests and took steps toward making social benefits universally available. In the campaign that led to his 1972 electoral win, Labor’s Gough Whitlam went further, promising a massive expansion of welfare and the end of all means-testing. In his short, three-year term in office, Whitlam abolished university fees, raised entitlements across the board, and established a universal, publicly funded health care scheme, Medibank.
This article is for subscribers only. Please login or subscribe to access our full archives and beautiful print and digital magazine starting at just $3 a month.