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Dole Bludgers, Tax Payers and the New Right: Constructing Discourses of Welfare in 1970s Australia
Verity Archer*
The international shift to New Right economics in the early 1970s, led by America, was the driving force for the invention of the dole bludger in Australia. The construction of the 'dole bludger' as the financial burden of the 'taxpayer' was a vital part of a broader effort to construct neo-liberal parameters for economic debate in Australia. This new discursive frame displaced the old deserving and undeserving poor discourses that existed during the decades of full employment leading up to the 1974 stagflation. This article argues that dole-bludger discourse should be included within a broader understanding of Australia's shift to neo-liberalism. It focuses specifically on the role that economic think tanks played in bringing these ideas to Australia and the role that political figures played in popularising New Right welfare frames for an Australian audience.
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| The invention of the term 'dole bludger' in 1974 marks a pivotal point in Australian welfare state history.1 Prior to this point, discursive constructions of the unemployed drew upon the figures of the 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor, prominent throughout the 1930s Depression and in the decades of 'full employment' leading up to 1974. This new term constructed welfare recipients as parasites upon 'ordinary Australian' taxpayers and in doing so embodied an ideological and discursive shift occurring in relation to the welfare state. The new cognitive frames reflected an emerging struggle to define economic 'common sense' taking place in all western economies throughout the 1970s. Together the construction of new cognitive frames and the shift of institutional resources away from Keynesianism led to the fundamental transformation of welfare policy and discourse in Australia. |
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This shift has not been noted by any of the studies that pay attention to the emergence of the dole bludger. While Philip Mendes has correctly identified the dole bludger as existing alongside the neo-liberal push that occurred in the early-to-mid 1970s, further work needs to be done to provide a detailed analysis of the relationship between the two phenomena.2 Keith Windschuttle's 1979 book Unemployment is the only published work dealing specifically with dole bludgers as a discursive category.3 This study regards the dole bludger as a revival of the deserving and undeserving poor discourse prominent throughout the 1930s and in the lead up to 1974. Studies of the New Right tend to examine the discourse in the context of the 1980s and 1990s – the decades during which the New Right achieved government in the United Kingdom (UK) under Thatcher and the United States of America (USA) under Reagan. Both neglect the formative relationship between the two phenomena. One necessarily acts to strengthen the foundation of the other.4 |
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A History of Bludgers | |
| The term 'dole bludger' is unique to Australia and New Zealand.5 Both 'dole' and 'bludger' are terms essentially confined to Australasia. In America, for example, we see equivalent terms such as welfare chiseller and welfare queen,6 with their own distinct meanings and gender connotations, used by New Right actors to similar effect, whereas in the UK the term 'welfare scrounger' is common.7 These terms all have their own genealogy and bring with them meanings specific to the people of the nation in which they are used, by this means giving a 'national character' to anti-welfare discourses. However, they hold in common the fact that they all have been used by the New Right to render illegitimate social justice calls for welfare state expansion. |
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