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The treatment of families in the Australian welfare state, 1984 to 2010
Author(s) -
Tapper Alan,
Fenna Alan,
Phillimore John
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
australian journal of social issues
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.417
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1839-4655
pISSN - 0157-6321
DOI - 10.1002/j.1839-4655.2014.tb00304.x
Subject(s) - welfare , project commissioning , redistribution (election) , welfare state , publishing , economics , demographic economics , government (linguistics) , state (computer science) , politics , public economics , economic growth , development economics , political science , law , market economy , linguistics , philosophy , algorithm , computer science
This paper uses Australian Bureau of Statistics' fiscal incidence figures to track trends in the treatment of families with children in the Australian welfare state across the period 1984 to 2010. Our four main findings are that: sole parent families gained while couple families made no net gain; there was no growth in ‘middle class welfare‘; couple families are slightly better off than elderly households in terms of their final incomes, but considerably less well off in terms of their net worth; and stated differences in policy intentions by the major political parties have had little influence on trends in actual government redistribution.