| Book Review | Labour History, 95 | The History Cooperative

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BOOK REVIEW

*Philip Mendes, Australia's Welfare Wars Revisited: The Players, the Politics and the Ideologies,* UNSW Press, Sydney, 2008. pp. xi + 320. $44.95 paper.**
As my mother always said, you cannot judge a book by its cover. I was reminded of the truth of this adage when confronted by the second edition of Phillip Mendes' book with the encouraging title Australia's Welfare Wars Revisited. I would like nothing better than to agree with the implication contained in the title of this book that Australia is hosting a vigorous, highly public and intensely political debate between some well-defined and diverse approaches to social policy. Of course I cannot say anything of the sort. As Mendes himself acknowledges nothing could be further from the truth.	1
There are no welfare wars. Apart from some occasional huffing and puffing on the part of a few academics including the two Peter Saunders, Mendes himself, and the odd social policy academic, there is no politics of welfare. Indeed if we are to speak plainly there is, as Mendes shows all too clearly, an absence of politics. What we actually have is a substantial measure of bi-partisan consensus – or what he calls 'ideological convergence' – centred on support for the status quo. If there is a contest it is a pseudo affair between politicians competing with each other for media time to show who is tougher on 'welfare fraud' and who deploy the banal and shallow vocabulary of 'mutual obligation' while they busily promote a politics of fear premised on the need of 'decent hard working Australians' to protect ourselves from the army of 'welfare dependents' who simply want to get something for nothing. Do we not see here one effect of years of being told why we should be very afraid of 'power-hungry' unions, welfare 'cheats', land-grabbing Aborigines, criminally-inclined asylum-seekers or Muslim terrorists?	. . .

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