Feminism, Social Liberalism and
Social Democracy in the Neo-Liberal Era
Working Papers in the Human Rights and Public Life Program
No 1: June 2015
Editor: Anna Yeatman
1
Copyright is held for each essay by its author.
Responsibility for the contents of these essays remains with the authors. The views expressed
in the essays are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of either the
Whitlam Institute or the University of Western Sydney.
Publication editing: Sandra Stevenson, Whitlam Institute
Design: Celia Zhao, UWS iMedia and Design
Publisher: Whitlam Institute within the University of Western Sydney
ISBN 978-1-74108-357-6
Cover: excerpt from podium copy of campaign launch speech, delivered by Gough Whitlam at
Blacktown Civic Centre, 13 November 1972. Whitlam Prime Ministerial Collection.
Photo by Sally Tsoutas, UWS.
2
About the Whitlam Institute
The Whitlam Institute within the University of Western Sydney at Parramatta commemorates
the life and work of Gough Whitlam and pursues the causes he championed. The Institute
bridges the historical legacy of Gough Whitlam's years in public life and the contemporary
relevance of the Whitlam Program to public discourse and policy. The Institute exists for all
Australians who care about what matters in a fair Australia and aims to improve the quality of
life for all Australians.
The Institute is custodian of the Whitlam Prime Ministerial Collection housing selected books
and papers donated by Mr Whitlam and providing on-line access to papers held both at the
Institute and in the National Archives.
The other key area of activity, the Whitlam Institute Program, includes a range of policy
development and research projects, public education activities and special events. Through this
work the Institute strives to be a leading national centre for public policy development and debate.
For more information about the Whitlam Institute, please visit our website: www.whitlam.org
3
About the Whitlam Institute’s Human Rights & Public Life Program
To use the words of Gough Whitlam, this program is designed to apply the intellect to human
affairs—to ensure that ideas and public conversation conjure possibility and create opportunity
for political community and public policy.
It is oriented by the core values that guided Whitlam's political vision and practice—liberty,
equality, fraternity—and by the conviction that above all these are political values that can be
made real only by an autonomous or sovereign political community.
Specifically, the program is oriented to intellectual enquiry of a kind that can stimulate public
conversation about the urgent political questions of our time, and contribute to the development
of a strategic framework for political action.
The questions that guide this program are:
»» What is the idea of citizenship that best responds to the challenge of our times, and how
is it to work with the idea of human rights?
»» How to renew the idea of the state as the public authority? What is the basis of public
authority, and in what ways should private agents be held accountable to it?
»» How is government (and the different arms of government), civil society, and family/
personal life to make their distinctive contributions to the vitality and integrity of public
authority?
»» Political community and sovereignty are national in character, even in context of the
different institutional orders of global governance. The question is: How should national
political communities (states) work with global governance institutions in ways that
enhance the effective public capacity of both?
»» How is the language of economics used as a language of political argument, and how can
it be held to account as such?
This program is anchored in the practical politics of contemporary Australia as this relates to
global patterns of political thought and action. It is committed to bringing political thought
into connection with the challenges of a practical politics. It assumes that new problems may
need new solutions but also that there are tried and tested ways of engaging in political action
and of building political institutions from which we can learn. Finally, it is committed to
the sovereignty of the Australian political community or state, and to enquiry as to how this
sovereignty is to be practised at this time if it is to be effective.
4
Feminism, Social Liberalism and
Social Democracy in the Neo-Liberal Era
– four essays
Editor: Anna Yeatman
Human Rights and Public Life Program, Whitlam Institute
Preface
These essays were workshopped at a one-day workshop organised by the Human Rights and
Public Life program within the Whitlam Institute in the Female Orphan School at the University
of Western Sydney (Parramatta campus) on Tuesday 12 August 2014.
They are intended to contribute to a public conversation about the cluster of values and family
of ideologies that are implicated in feminism, social liberalism and social democracy. The shared
intuition of these essayists is that the antagonism of neoliberal political philosophy to this
family of ideologies presents us with an opportunity – to rediscover and renew feminism, social
liberalism and social democracy as a coherent set of ideas and values for political development at
this time.
In its own way, each essay suggests that feminism, as a practical political philosophy of civic
and public import, has to be brought into relationship with social liberalism and social
democracy. Each essay also suggests that the inclusiveness or universalism of social liberalism
and social democracy will be flawed unless these political ideologies encompass feminist
values. Other important differences between human beings (of cultural heritage, ability, age,
sexuality, and gender identification) are unlikely to be factored into the civic conception of
the individual if the most fundamental human difference (between men and women) does not
inform the idea of equality.
We are academics and we are also public intellectuals. We hope that these essays are accessible,
that they help to lead and inform public conversation at this time, and that they circulate widely
and freely.
Anna Yeatman,
June 2015.
6
Contents
1. Feminism and ‘the ethical state’: Anna Yeatman
8
2. Does equality have a future? Feminism and social democracy in the era
of neoliberalism: Marian Sawer
24
3. Incorporating gender equality: Tensions and synergies in the relationship
between feminism and Australian social democracy: Carol Johnson
36
4. Revisiting social liberalism and feminism in New Zealand: Jennifer Curtin
51
Contributor biographies
Anna Yeatman is a professorial fellow in the Whitlam Institute where she leads the ‘Human
Rights and Public Life’ program. Her academic background is in political and social theory as
well as public policy and administration, and she has experience in public policy evaluation.
Her most recent publications are: ‘A two-person conception of freedom: The significance of
Jessica Benjamin’s idea of intersubjectivity,’ Journal of Classical Sociology 15 (2), 2015; and,
co-edited with Peg Birmingham The Aporia of Rights: Explorations in Citizenship in the Era of
Human Rights, Bloomsbury 2014.
Marian Sawer AO is an Emeritus Professor and Public Policy Fellow at the Australian National
University. She previously headed the Democratic Audit of Australia. She has a long-standing
interest in the ideology of social reform and her publications include The Ethical State? Social
Liberalism in Australia, Melbourne University Press 2003 and ‘The Fisher Government and the
era of liberal reform’, Labour History No. 102, 2012.
Carol Johnson is a Professor of Politics at the University of Adelaide. She has written extensively
on Australian social democracy and on issues of gender equality. Her books include The Labor
Legacy: Curtin, Chifley, Whitlam Hawke (1989); Governing Change: from Keating to Howard
(2000, 2007) and she co-edited Abbott’s Gambit: The 2013 Federal Election (2015). Her articles
appear in journals ranging from the Australian Journal of Political Science and Australian
Feminist Studies to Theory & Society, Citizenship Studies and Sexualities. Her latest article, on
Julia Gillard and the use of the Gender Card, will be published in Politics & Gender.
Jennifer Curtin is an Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at the University
of Auckland. She has published widely on Australian and New Zealand politics and elections,
and on gender, politics and public policy in comparative perspective. She can be contacted at:
[email protected]
7
Feminism and ‘the ethical state’
Anna Yeatman
Whitlam Institute within the University of Western Sydney
This essay is dedicated to Marian Sawer who understood long before most other people
did that the Australian version of neoliberalism as taken up by its champions within both
major parties was dedicated to the undoing of the influence of social liberalism
in Australian public life and institutions
8
Feminism and ‘the ethical state’
Introduction
In The Ethical State? Social Liberalism in Australia (2003), Marian Sawer suggests the importance
of ideas in shaping and building an institutional order. This is a vital point we would do well
not to overlook for it is ideas that shape the artifice of human institutions, and this is still the
case even when such institutions are said not to be expressions of such artifice, but instead, the
expression of natural forces, or as the neoliberal thinker Hayek had it, of a spontaneous order.
In other words, when those who advocate a particular institutional order that is said to express
natural forces, as distinct from what they argue to be undue intervention with this natural basis
of order, we must call them out because this is a rhetorical gambit that is designed to obscure the
intention in adopting this set of ideas, the ideas themselves, and the institutional artifice these
ideas inform. Any political rhetoric that naturalises its agenda in this way is to be placed under
profound suspicion for it is anti-democratic. When ideas are made to seem not what they are
(ideas that as such have to be communicated, clarified and argued in public), but instead the
expression of some naturally given order, then it is easy to justify their imposition on the public
rather than to engage in the democratic process of persuading the public of their virtue.
In this paper I discuss a particular family of ideas – social liberalism, social democracy and
feminism – and their influence over the shape of the Australian polity, institutional order, and
policy agenda from somewhere in the 1890s to somewhere in the 1980s. The political antagonist
of this family of ideas is the version of liberalism that is variously called market liberalism,
laissez-faire, or in its current iteration, neo-liberalism.
Perhaps the most significant difference between these two political antagonists is that the former
family of ideas owns its advocacy, and thus emphasizes the contingency of its project on whether
the ideas on which it depends are successfully communicated, clarified, argued, and publicly
persuasive. Such a political ideology is not afraid of public engagement but, on the contrary,
develops the culture and institutional domains of public communication and engagement.
Market liberalism in contrast does not own its advocacy of a particular artifice in the ordering
of society but rather makes it appear that its premises do not have to be argued because firstly,
they reflect the natural forces of how a market economy works, and secondly, freedom of market
economic action is the natural expression of economic activity as such. Market liberalism is a
political philosophy that refuses to openly argue its case in relation to the wider public. This
means that it is offered as a form of propaganda defined as the imposition on the public of a
premise from which logical consequences are derived as though they bear the force of necessity.i
The problem with an ideology that makes its claims appear necessary and natural, in whatever
way this is achieved, is that it deprives the public of conceptual and imaginative resources in
considering political options. The effect is to disperse the public and to depoliticize it.
My intention in this essay is to expand our conceptual and imaginative resources in considering
the fundamental practical-ethical question, the question of how should we politically institute
our mode of living together, and of course the related question, to what ends? The emphasis
Anna Yeatman
9
has to be on the contingency of ethical awareness in both the recognition of this fundamental
question and then in consideration of how best to practically express such awareness. With
this emphasis we can look to different political ideologies and ask how do they respond to the
question of what artifice should shape and inform the way we live with each other. We can
examine them in their role of offering ideas that are explained and argued for. These will be
political ideologies that are oriented to the ethical possibilities of being human, in other words,
to the real ethical choices concerning how to order and institutionalise human society. Such
ideologies have to offer a fully articulated intellectual account of the nature of the choice in
order to clarify the difference between possibility and potential, on the one hand, and the default
position of letting things be ordered by habitual patterns of adaptation to how we so readily
permit our institutional life to be captured by the most powerful players in our midst. I want to
suggest that we Australians have a rich heritage of political-ethical ideas and I want to help call
into being the polity we might comprise in assessing, discussing and debating the fundamental
policy options for us at this time.
Sawer proposes that the public institutional order that we enjoyed in Australia until recently
was shaped by the ethos of social reform that characterises social liberalism. She follows the
influence of the leading students of British social liberalism (especially Michael Freeden,
Andrew Vincent and Raymond Plant) whose historical investigations have shown how Idealist
philosophy, social liberalism, social democracy, and socialism were thickly entwined in the
British case. As Sawer shows, this was true also of the Australian and New Zealand polities
which were deeply engaged with intellectual and political developments in Britain in the period
under discussion, the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth
century. Against the conventional view of the Australian state as an instrument for the pursuit
of self-interest of one kind or another, Sawer argues that the newly federated Commonwealth
of Australia was shaped by a social liberal idea of the state: the idea of the ethical state which
justified state intervention on behalf of building an inclusive and just society where individual
freedom interpreted as the opportunity for self-development would be on offer to all individuals
regardless of their relative wealth, social standing, or gender.
Social liberalism was deeply indebted to the British Idealist tradition that is based in T.H. Green’s
reading of Hegel. In this tradition, the development of the community and that of the individual
are intertwined, there is an open-ended narrative of progressive rationally-directed improvement,
and the state’s role is to enable as well as to express the moral community it encompasses in
such a way as to ensure that fairness prevails in human relationships, and individuals have equal
opportunity to develop their potential. On this approach, the grounds for state intervention are
understood in terms of enabling and increasing rather than limiting freedom.
Sawer points out that the idea of an institutionally supported freedom for the individual is to
be contextualised within social liberalism’s rejection of a laissez-faire liberalism, and specifically
within its rejection of the freedom laissez-faire liberals then as now champion: a ‘freedom of
contract’. If freedom of contract is the motif for institutional design, as Marx and others have
10
Feminism and ‘the ethical state’
argued, the stronger party in a contract is able to prevail over the weaker party, and there can
be no third party adjudication of whether this is a fair contract. It was social liberalism’s refusal
of the ethical adequacy of freedom of contract, and its insistence that contractual relations be
held to account to the public interest, that was the driving force behind the Australian and New
Zealand adoption of the institution of industrial conciliation and arbitration. Sawer suggests that
‘[t]he institutionalising of social liberalism in the new federal industrial relations created a path
dependence that lasted for almost a hundred years (Sawer 2003, 5)’, its echoes continuing in the
rhetoric of a minimum wage that is sufficient to ensure that an adult can enjoy a decent standard
of living and participate fully in the life of the community (Sawer 2003, 67). The first president
of the Australian Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, H.B. Higgins, was a social liberal, and
it is the political ideology of social liberalism that framed his justification for this approach to
industrial relationsii: ‘Have not people come to realise that the greatest liberty is obtained where
there is the greatest law – that where there is the greatest restraint in the common interest, there
is to be found the greatest liberty for the individual and for individual action (Higgins quoted by
Sawer 2003, 57)?’
The influence of British Idealism and Social Liberalism on Australian institution building, and
on the political ideology of both major parties within Australia, has been neglected. The public
nature of the Australian institutions that follows from this influence, including the innovation
of compulsory voting, cannot be explained otherwise. Until John Howard’s prime ministership
which was dedicated to the undoing of this intellectual and institutional legacy, the ensemble
of Australian public institutions (for example libraries, schools, universities, CSIRO, public
broadcasting, public hospitals and public health, public income support and employment
services) shared a practical ethos of service to the public understood in terms not just of what is
currently present but in terms of what could be, namely, possibility and potential.iii
Sawer (2003, especially chapter 2) establishes the key role of Australian practical-political
thinkers who were deeply indebted to this tradition. She refers not just to Higgins but also to
George Higinbotham (Victorian Attorney-General), Alfred Deakin (Australian prime minister),
Reverend Charles Strong (who influenced both Higinbotham and Deakin), Alice Henry,
suffragists Isabella and Vida Goldstein, Catherine Helen Spence, Francis Anderson (professor
of philosophy at University of Sydney who promoted Green’s ideas through both his university
teaching and the Workers’ Educational Association), Walter Murdoch, G.V. Portus, and
W.G.K. Duncan, and H.V. Evatt (a third-generation discipline of Green, Sawer 2003, 65). Her
provocation is highly deliberate:
Many interpreters of Australian political traditions have clung to the familiar view of
Australia as a country without doctrines (unless those of utilitarianism), with a pragmatic
attitude toward the state and with political programs consisting of ‘ten bob a day’. Fewer
have discussed the reasons the Australian colonies were designated as ‘nurseries of practical
and fearless idealism’ or why the British idealists looked to Australia for confirmation of
their beliefs (Sawer 2003, 31).
Anna Yeatman
11
Being a feminist, Sawer emphasises in a way that other students of social liberalism do not
the historical imbrication of social liberalism, social democracy and feminism. The social
liberal conception of an inclusive society, one where the state made equality of opportunity
a genuine reality for all, was linked with the advancement of women. Social liberals rejected
the institution of domestic patriarchy (the doctrine of patria potestas, one that justified men’s
control over women’s bodies, their property and earnings, and their children), and argued
that the ethical state may have to intervene in order to protect women and children against
patriarchal domination (see Sawer 2003, chapter 3). Feminist social reformers advocated
for maternal and child endowment. Sawer (2003, 78) remarks: ‘The social-liberal concept of
citizenship was in principle gender-inclusive, with citizenship revolving around community
service rather than military service or property-owning.’ Furthermore, the idea of the ethical
state as one that nurtured its citizens in ways that conduced to their individual self-development
was symbolically aligned with feminine/feminist values. For the social liberal it was obvious
that individuals exist in different degrees and kinds of interdependence with each other. Their
individualism was of the relational kind, and entirely unlike the monadic individualism (the
idea of self-sufficiency) associated with the laissez-faire liberal idea of the minimal state, an
individualism that is masculine, or perhaps more accurately identified as patriarchal in character
(Sawer 2003, chapter 5; and on this point of difference between a relational and a monadic
individualism see Yeatman 2015).
Sawer’s attention to ideas permits her to be alert to political rhetoric and to changes in meanings
for key concepts such as equality of opportunity. She makes it clear that the social liberal
conception of equality of opportunity is not the thin gruel of the neoliberal one, which confines
equal opportunity to the formal right of participating in a market economy. The social liberal
idea is ‘premised on the interdependence of individuals and the role of the community (with
the state as the collective agency) in achieving equal opportunity for all its members (Sawer
2003, 23).’ Sawer further clarifies: ‘The new liberals had the view … that full development of the
individual was only made possible by and could only take place through participation in the
community and through community development (Sawer 2003, 23).’ Michael Freeden (1978,
47) calls this a maximalist view of equality of opportunity.iv
Social liberalism continued to influence Australian political ideology and institutional life until the
mid 1980s. This meant that the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s in Australia could
link into this tradition of rhetoric and public policy.v Sawer argues that the Australian pattern
of reliance on state intervention in order to ensure social inclusion and equality of opportunity
provided a very particular political-institutional conjuncture for second-wave feminism:
The conjuncture of social-liberal and feminist discourses made possible an internationally
remarkable development of state feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. Reforming Labor
governments operating within social-liberal equal opportunity frameworks were pressured
by the new wave of feminist organisations into establishing feminist structures within the
state. The idea of creating structures within government to monitor the gender impact of
12
Feminism and ‘the ethical state’
policy, and hence advance equal opportunity, assumed the social-liberal idea of the ethical
state (Sawer 2003, 111).
Sawer’s book was published in 2003. Sawer’s agenda is one of reclamation of social liberalism in
the face of the systematic ideological attack on it by neo-liberalism. In reclaiming this ideological
heritage of social reform and inclusive citizenship, she is calling those of us who may value this
heritage to come to appreciate and understand the arguments that informed it. Specifically, to
come to recognise that our own contributions to social reform in feminist public policy and
other kinds of policy activism in the period of the 1970s to the 1990s had as their foundations
an ideological heritage that we had come not only to take for granted, but of which we were
largely unaware. However, if we are to reclaim and revive this heritage in the face of neoliberal
ideological assault we will need to intentionally revisit it and be willing to examine how our
conception of social reform (‘equal opportunity’ for example) are values that have anchorage
in a set of ideas that were and can be again philosophically argued. I think we have shortchanged our own vision and activism in our un-thought and largely unknown dependence
on our profound debt to this heritage. Not only this: I would suggest that our lack of reflective
awareness of these ideological roots has disabled our ability to argue against neoliberal ideology
and, in this process, to re-examine this heritage, and consider how it may be re-discovered in a
way that fits our current context.
Our current opportunity
As Sawer understood, the current ascendancy of neoliberalism, an ideology that is oriented
to the use of the state and public authority for the purpose of securing private property right
is an opportunity to retrieve and rethink this heritage. If we are to recognise and understand
neoliberalism as a specific set of ideas, as indeed a political ideology, first we have to have a
sense of an alternative. We can then ask of neo-liberalism that it argue its case in a way that is
genuinely accountable within a public discussion and debate about political-ethical questions.
Many contemporary scholars whose value orientation leads them in the direction of an idea
of a socially just alternative to neoliberalism are responding to this provocation. Like Marian
Sawer, they are returning to the era of the turn of the nineteenth century into the first few
decades of the twentieth century in order to retrieve, analyse and reflect upon a family of
ideologies (Michael Freeden’s phrase)—social liberalism, socialism, social democracy, guild
socialism, syndicalism, industrial democracy, and let us be sure to add, feminism. Michael
Freeden’s generative work begun in the 1970s on new liberalism as an ideology of social reform
has spawned further work by his students, Ben Jackson and Marc Stears particularly. Others
are rediscovering the importance of John Dewey and his influence on American pragmatism
and progressivism. Work on Max Weber and Emile Durkheim is also being undertaken in this
context, as is also a new set of engagements with Karl Polanyi’s critique of laissez-faire liberalism
in his magisterial The Great Transformation: the origins of our times, published in 1944.
Anna Yeatman
13
The development of a social liberalism that provided the ethical and intellectual foundations
of social democracy in Britain, Australia and New Zealand was provoked by the first era of
‘laissez-faire’, a time when a new industrial capitalism combined with the ideology of laissezfaire liberalism to enable an unrestrained advance of the dynamics of capital accumulation and
exploitation. In terms of Polanyi’s argument it took the historically unprecedented transformation
of labour, land and money into commodities to provoke not just a profound consternation shared
by many but a reasoned response as to why this entails the systemic destruction of society, human
beings, and what we call today ‘the environment’. When in The Communist Manifesto Marx and
Engels rhetorically suggest the radical nature of this transformation – ‘all that is solid melts into
air, all that is holy is profaned’– we can grasp why it provoked a major rethinking of the tenets
of liberalism in relation to the development of the English idea of socialism. By the 1880s in
Britain as Michael Freeden explains, any consideration of ‘the social question’ was associated with
socialism: ‘on the simplest level, any public awareness of a desire to confront the social question
was socialism (Freeden 1978, 26).’ Beyond this popular meaning, a more intellectual discussion
occurred whereby the new social liberals clarified their position:
As a theory socialism signified for advanced liberals an ethical, humanistic conception of
man in society as opposed to the diverse shades of doctrinaire, deterministic, Utopian and
Marxist creeds. That approach was common to a wide spectrum of progressive thinkers
– Christian Socialists, Positivists, Idealists, and Fabians – and was basically no more than
stating the obvious: the truth of socialism was in the perception that man was a social
being. (…) As the liberal editor of the Christian Social monthly The Commonwealth wrote
in the opening number, by talking about socialism people were not advocating a scheme
but recognizing a fact: ‘We mean that there is no private action that has not a social value, a
social significance’ (Freeden 1978, 27).
If the first era of laissez-faire provoked a creative set of counter-movements, then perhaps the
second, current era of a neo-liberal version of laissez-faire can do the same. If this is to occur,
however, we need to engage with the new scholarly work, led by Philip Mirowski especially, that
demonstrates how neo-liberalism is to be understood as an intellectual-practical movement
of reaction against the twentieth century ascendancy of social liberalism as this was expressed
in the institutional ensemble of the Keynesian Welfare State. Neo-liberalism began with the
theory of a free market economy offered by Ludwig von Mises. Hayek developed Mises’s
central proposition that the price mechanism within a market economy should be permitted to
operate without interference and the accompanying proposition that price has nothing to do
with objective factors of production but instead with subjective valuation. The implication is
that the state should do nothing to interfere with free market dynamics of trade, labour, capital
investment, and the value of money. Karl Polanyi’s book The Great Transformation was written
as an ideological response to the emergence of this Austrian school of neo-liberal economic
theory even as he framed his argument in relation to the 19th century era of laissez-faire in
Britain.vi Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, published in the same year as The Great Transformation
(1944), was a neoliberal ideological manifesto directed against the entire family of ‘socialist’
14
Feminism and ‘the ethical state’
movements that position the state as a legitimate instrument of social planning and ‘interference’
with the market economy.
If we are to retrieve the social liberal family of ideas, it is important that we do not airbrush
the portrait we paint of it. In a recent book of essays honouring Michael Freeden Ben Jackson’s
(2012, 34) chapter opens with this sentence: ‘One of the abiding lessons that I learned from
Michael Freeden was that the history of British liberal thought contains a rich and radical vein of
social democratic political theory, whatever the foibles of the politicians who claim to represent
the British liberal tradition at any particular moment.’ Jackson (2012, 34-35) goes on to argue
that ‘Freeden’s revisionist account of the British progressive tradition nonetheless leaves us
with some important unanswered questions regarding the relationship between liberalism and
socialism in twentieth-century British politics.’ His essay is devoted to showing that there was a
‘pattern of mutual influence and …intellectual interdependence’ between social liberalism and
socialism that is crucial to understand in our current era when there is a mobilization of bias
against socialism, and a tendency to occlude its historical significance in the British tradition
of social reform. Jackson’s essay focuses on the influence of the socialist idea of the social
ownership and control of industry on social liberals from Hobson and Hobhouse to Beveridge:
‘it was socialism that placed public ownership on the British political agenda (38).’
If Jackson suggests that the recuperation of social liberalism must involve also a recuperation
of socialism in its rich ethical, intellectual and policy entanglements with the former, we face a
further challenge regarding ‘the language of ethical imperatives and spiritual uplift’ (Lawrence
Goldman 2014, 268, in reference to R.H. Tawney), for this was inseparable from a religious and
spiritual consciousness that was Christian in the main (and in particular for Tawney). As Vincent
and Plant (1984, 7) argue, Idealist political theory claimed ‘to make articulate and defensible
the central elements’ of a Christian religious and spiritual consciousness that characterised
late-Victorian society. The aspiration and capacity of the human being, both collectively and
individually, to engage in rational self-improvement was understood as an expression of the
immanence of the divine within the human. In contrast to Hegel, Vincent and Plant (1984, 12)
suggest, T.H. Green argued that ‘the self-realization of God in human history is never a finished
process’: ‘The future is open, and the past is explicable in teleological terms, in terms of the
progressive development of the characteristic human qualities, including those which are involved
in the formation of social and political relationships (Vincent and Plant 1984, 13).’ What are we
to make of this metaphysical component of social liberalism? Can a politics centred on ethical
possibility be a secular politics? And if it can, can it do without some idea of the transcendent that
suggests the possibility of connecting what is by way of being human to the potential of being
human? The philosopher Jeff Malpas suggests that the transcendental frame of reference does not
require a metaphysical origin, but, rather, brings out the unity of something – in this case, the
unity of being human. He offers a nice clarification: ‘to determine that in which the possibility of
something rests is, at one and the same time, to determine what is possible for it (Malpas 2012,
83).’ Here it is relevant to refer to the brilliance of Hobbes’s account of being human. Hobbes’s
very pessimism (in Leviathan) – Nancy Streuver calls it a ‘sophisticated’ pessimismvii – regarding
Anna Yeatman
15
how it is that human beings must act if all that is on offer to them is a competitive seeking after
power enables him to ask what has to be in place if the potential for a more entire mode of being
human is to be on offer, more entire in the sense of including all humans on an equal basis as
well as their many different comportments and creative activities. Contemporary movements
of political idealism that suggest right rather than might should be the basis of our institutional
order must be able to invoke an ethically adequate and historically relevant idea of the
transcendent. Returning to Lawrence Goldman (2014, 272) with reference to R. H. Tawney again,
if we do not invoke the transcendent then we are condemned to a politics that is driven by ‘the
economy’ and what allegedly it can do for people’s material wants regardless of the consequences
of the marketization of everything for human, societal and environmental integrity:
The language of ethical imperatives and spiritual uplift is not easy to conjure and project
in contemporary politics. But Tawney’s message is that without it, politics are reduced to
materialism, an auction in which the people will naturally and logically support whoever
offers them ‘a little more’, whether of the left or the right.
The last great flowering of Australian social liberalism came with the Whitlam government.
Whitlam’s rhetoric was distinctively socially liberal, and he reinterpreted the idea of
citizenship in terms of the discourse of human rights, itself a postcolonial and anti-racist
reinterpretation of social liberalism. Yet to recognise this in Whitlam’s political thought we
have to become re-acquainted with the social liberal family of values and ideas as these were
first discovered and enunciated.
During a period of socio-political change an ideology should be judged by its transformative
capacities. On the dawn of the twentieth century, the relics of nineteenth-century liberalism
were about to be stranded on the shores of conservatism, as the progressive tide shifted the
centre of ideological gravity towards the ‘left’ (Freeden 1978, 4-5).
The ethos of social reform
Social liberalism offers an ethos of social reform. This ethos has four pillars: an ethical
humanism, a conception of society and of the social, an idea of the state as the organising centre
of society, and a reliance on science in the construction of policy response to social problems
and issues. Let me take these each in turn.
1.
An ethical humanism: this is a humanism that is oriented in terms of what Hegel called
the principle of subjective freedom. It is a humanism predicated on the core value
of individuality: each individual is to be valued as a person in his or her own right
who is entitled to personal security, the core human right as Blandine Kriegel (1995)
argues, and on the basis of such security, to be assured access to publicly provided
services (especially education) that enable him or her to develop, grow and flourish as
16
Feminism and ‘the ethical state’
a creative, socially responsible and self-determining being. Social liberalism substitutes
its own ethical and relational individualism for the solipsistic individualism of market
liberalism (the idea of the individual as an owner of private property). It does not reject
the right to private property but situates it in a derivative relationship to a universal
conception of individual personhood. This means that private property ownership
cannot be permitted to undermine an equality of standing as individual persons, from
which it follows that there has to be a limit provided to freedom of private property
in the interest of ensuring universal freedom. In this vision there is an inherent
relationship between the values of freedom and equality.
2.
A conception of society and of the social: It is this that underwrites and is elaborated in
the new science of sociology that is developed by Simmel, Weber, Durkheim, and others.
The emergence of the social question, centred on the problems of an industrialization
and urbanization that was shaped by the needs of capital and that brought with it
degradation, exploitation, child labour, poverty, crowded housing and slums, urban
planning and sanitation issues, provoked the articulation of an idea of society that is the
subject of social reform. For instance, the idea of public health presupposes a collective
subject of health as does also the idea of public education. This collective subject is
distinctly modern – it has nothing in common with traditional ideas of collectivism
that are based in kinship. The modern collective subject is secular, complex, and
differentiated – in short: ‘society’. It does not contradict individualism, and as Durkheim
argued, a modern individualism and society are co-defining ideas and realities.
3. The state as the organizing centre of society, and as the vehicle by which social needs are
addressed in public policy: In this conception, the state is thought of as the organizing
centre of society (an idea I take from Emile Durkheim’s idea of civic morals) that
gathers and articulates all that needs to be known about the society in question if there
is to be an adequate state-centred or policy response. Durkheim (1992, 51) proposes
that the state ‘is the very organ of social thought’. He clarifies: ‘The State, as a rule
at least, does not think for the sake of thought or to build up doctrinal systems, but
to guide collective conduct.’ Further, Durkheim (1992, 51) emphasizes that thought
is paramount: ‘None the less, its [the state’s] principal function is to think.’ Public
policy is the expression of social thought. Public policy presupposes that the state
comprises a practical, legal and public jurisdiction of action in relation to persons,
their relationships, and their needs. As this public jurisdiction, the state is responsible
for: (a) instituting the status of universal, equal personhood so far as this needs to be
publicly supported in both law and a public sector comprising the range of needsprovision and services that make equal personhood practically real for all individuals
regardless of their market-based standing as private property owners. The idea of equal
opportunity, understood expansively, is based on this idea of equality; (b) instituting
national economic management including provision for the institutions of a ‘mixed’
economy where public ownership complements and checks the power of profit-driven
Anna Yeatman
17
private enterprise. For example J.A. Hobson advocated ‘a substantial public sector’
(Jackson 2012, 41), and two of the reasons he proposed for this were first, ‘the state
should undertake to supply directly those goods and services that were required by all
citizens: the basic necessities “of physical, moral and intellectual life” (Jackson 2012,
42).’ The second reason was that public ownership was needed ‘to safeguard the public
and workers from exploitation by dominant private monopolies (Jackson 2012, 42).’
An additional reason offered for public ownership by its advocates was that it could
act as a model employer serving as an example to the private sector (Jackson 2012, 43).
After he became influenced by the syndicalist and guild socialist currents of thought,
Hobson advocated a model of public ownership that incorporated ‘joint democratic
control of managers, workers, and consumers (Jackson 2012, 46)’, an idea that
anticipates discussion of the democratization of the administrative state in the 1970s
and 1980s. Hobson proposed that “the motive of public service” would be an important
and more effective motive for workers than “the desire for profit” (Jackson 2012, 46).
The essential idea of national economic management is that all enterprise, public or
private, is held accountable to the state understood as a sovereign political community,
and to the ends that this political community is designed to embody and to secure. Of
course to realise this end may require the state to cooperate with other states within a
system of appropriate international law and institutions.
4.
A reliance on science, that is on rational methods of constructing and analysing data,
and rational methods of constructing philosophically oriented argumentation. It is
important that we understand how sophisticated the understanding of science became
in the era of social reform: it was no simple scientism or positivism. Max Weber’s
(1949) defence of the inherent roles of values in the cultural and social sciences, while
arguing for a rigorous philosophical as well as technical criticism of value-oriented
action, public policy especially, represents perhaps the apogee of such sophistication.
Weber argued strongly for the importance of the scientist being able to differentiate his
scientific-academic role and his civic-political engagement –to learn how to discriminate
‘the hairline which separates science from faith’ (Weber 1949, 110). The conception of
office and the related idea of vocation are central to this ethos of social reform, a point
that Paul Du Gay is exploring in his current work. While syndicalist and guild socialist
currents of thought had opened the door to a democratic approach to the management
of the public sector, by the 1970s there are important ideas of how to triangulate expertframed assessment of social needs and possibilities with citizens’ own understanding
of what it is they need and want. In this sense a ‘politics’ of the policy process (the
engagement of all stakeholders, including the experts, in it) opens up a rich combination
of ‘scientific’ and ‘political’ assessment as the basis of policy initiative.
18
Feminism and ‘the ethical state’
The ascendancy of neoliberalism
Just exactly how neoliberal ideology succeeded in displacing the tradition and heritage of social
reform still needs much more investigation. The work of Philip Mirowski and his colleagues on
the development of the neoliberal thought collective (The Road from Mont Pèlerin) has been
extraordinarily important and useful. Mirowski speaks of the neoliberal thought collective
as a Russian Doll. The inner circle of the Mont Pelerin Society was convened as a private
members-only debating society; the second circle or shell refers to the academic departments
that neoliberalism dominated by the 1980s, these including the University of Chicago, LSE,
St Andrews in Scotland, and now including most Economics Departments, and Business
Schools; the third shell ‘was fashioned as the special-purpose foundations for the education
and promotion of neoliberal doctrines such as the Volker Fund’ (Mirowski 2009, 430); the
fourth shell are ‘general-purpose “think tanks”’ that developed ‘their own next [the fifth] layer
of protective shell, often in the guise of specialized satellite think tanks poised to get quick
and timely position papers out to friendly politicians or to provide talking heads for various
news media and opinion periodicals (Mirowski 2009, 430-431).’ The sixth shell are supposed
grassroots organisations ‘frequently organised around religious or single-issue campaigns
(Mirowski 2009, 431).’
Mirowski and his colleagues have demonstrated that neoliberalism is an intentional, organized,
effectively networked, and powerfully instituted movement of ideas that has progressively
penetrated mainstream academic institutions and the environments that shape the public
policy agenda, not least of these being the most powerful international economic institutions
(WTO, IMF). The movement was intended to target and win over ‘intellectuals and opinion
leaders of future generations’, ‘elite civil society’ (Mirowski 2013, 48-49). It was a natural ally for
private corporations that sought to free themselves from public regulation (see Van Horn and
Mirowski re how Hayek’s project at the University of Chicago was funded by the businessman
Harold Luhnow, and the Volker Fund of which Luhnow was president). Mirowski’s point about
the Russian Doll image is very important: ‘Outsiders would rarely perceive the extent to which
individual protagonists embedded in a particular shell served multiple roles, or the strength
and pervasiveness of network ties, since they never could see beyond the immediate shell of the
Russian Doll right before their noses (Mirowski 2009, 431).’
Neoliberalism has attacked and rejected all four pillars of the ethos of social reform. It refuses an
ethical humanism centred on what Hannah Arendt (1958, 176) called ‘the paradoxical plurality
of unique beings’, just as it refuses the proposition that freedom and equality are co-defining
values. It substitutes for individuality and the idea of creative living an inherently unequal
individualism that centres on entitlement to own private property. It explicitly rejects the ideas
of equality and equality of opportunity, and justifies inequality as a spur to individual aspiration
and enterprise. It rejects the idea of the social and of society, but as I have discovered in working
on von Mises, it does this in a more complex way than Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that there
is no such thing as society would suggest. Neoliberalism accepts that individual action is always
Anna Yeatman
19
socially contextualized but it justifies a decontextualized and abstract account of action that is
essentially economic action writ large. There is no basis for a collective public identity which
is the role of the state to distil, organize, express and articulate. The state is needed, but its only
justifiable role is to provide a legal and institutional order for the market economy, free trade,
and private property. Finally, neoliberalism rejects the authority of science and expertise. It
argues a radically subjectivist and constructionist view of knowledge that reduces it to privately
motivated and interested opinion. Neoliberalism values knowledge so understood, and Hayek
suggests that the market is a vast information processor where valuable knowledge is knowledge
that is valued by means of the price mechanism (see Mirowski 2009; and Mirowski 2011). The
object here is to refuse any possibility for a humanist conception of knowledge as universal
enlightenment, where the pursuit of knowledge understood as rationally justified conceptions
of reality and argumentation is motivated by personally disinterested and, thus, public service.
The very idea of public service is rejected of course in the reduction of all action to privately
interested and in this sense ‘economic’ action.
Mirowski emphasises the epistemic aspect of neoliberalism, and he is right to do this. It is this
aspect in its radical subjectivism that withdraws all authority from the ethical state. In particular,
neoliberalism is a discourse dedicated to the destruction of sovereignty, without which the state
under law as a sui generis political agency is not possible. Neoliberalism’s reduction of public
agency to private agency positions the state as a conduit of decisions that are made by powerful
units of capital (the multinational corporation). Such collectivism as the state realizes is the
collective interest of these units of capital.
Closing comments
Feminism, at least in its practical-public aspects, belongs to what Freeden would call the
conceptual configuration of social liberalism and social democracy. These stand or fall
together. The question is what should we make of the successful assault of neoliberalism on this
conceptual configuration? Historicists might say that feminism, social liberalism and social
democracy have been by-passed by the tides of history. It is this view that licenses the suggestion
that ‘globalisation’ as some kind of supposed spontaneous process means the demise or at least
the serious weakening of sovereignty, and the parallel rise of politically unaccountable power of
the multinational corporation, as though the organised rise of the latter had nothing to do with
the former.
So the first thing I would emphasise is that we must reject historicist pseudo-explanations
and embrace what is fundamentally a task for ‘thinking politically’ (Freeden 2012), that is,
understand that we have been experiencing the discursive violence of an organized war between
two sets of ideas that has been going on for some time. If this is so, then it follows that those of
us who reject neoliberalism must assume responsibility for reinvigorating and re-engaging the
ideas of social reform.
20
Feminism and ‘the ethical state’
Michael Freeden urges us as political theorists to accept ‘the responsibility of relevance’, to
construct theories ‘that have a reasonable chance of relating to the thought-practices of the
intricate, messy world which both political elites and ordinary people display (Freeden 2012,
264).’ He is right surely. There is a great deal to relate to in contemporary popular discourse
concerning fairness, wealth distribution, equality of opportunity, and community. Yet nothing
is likely to change much if public intellectuals and opinion leaders expediently piggy back such
discourse or convert it into single-issue slogans that leave out an entire, complex analysis. There
is hard work to be done on two fronts. Firstly we have to consider carefully what Mirowski and
his colleagues have been saying both about the content of neoliberal doctrine and the organized
advocacy of it such that it has now become the new common sense for the decision-making
elites. We have to address both of these fronts – to carefully consider the doctrine and offer a
compelling critique of it. This is a challenge because it is sophisticated, and it is also something of
a protean creature, adapting itself to the contexts in which it finds itself. We have to demonstrate
how this doctrine has so successfully captured the elites and the institutions that form elites.
Secondly, we have to retrieve and rethink our own heritage of social reform as a political project
and a task for thinking politically.
References
Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Arendt, H. (1994) ‘Understanding and Politics,’ in Essays in Understanding 1930-1954, New York,
San Diego & London: Harcourt Brace, 307-328.
Durkheim, E. (1992) Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, London and New York: Routledge.
Freeden, M. (1978) The New Liberalism: an ideology of social reform, Clarendon Press: Oxford.
Freeden, M. (2012) ‘The Professional Responsibilities of the Political Theorist,’ in B. Jackson
and M. Stears eds. Liberalism as Ideology: Essays in Honour of Michael Freeden, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 259-278.
Goldman, L. (2014) ‘Remembering RH Tawney: biography, legacy, example,’ Juncture, 20: 4,
268-274.
Jackson, B. (2012) ‘Socialism and the New Liberalism,’ in B. Jackson and M. Stears eds.
Liberalism as Ideology: Essays in Honour of Michael Freeden, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
34-53.
Kriegel, B. (1995) The State and the Rule of Law, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Anna Yeatman
21
Malpas, J. (2012) ‘Ground, Unity and Limit,’ in Heidegger and the Thinking of Place: Explorations
in the Topology of Being, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: MIT Press, 73-97.
Mirowski, P. and D. Plehwe (2009) The Road from Mont Pèlerin: the Making of the Neoliberal
Thought Collective, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mirowski, P. (2009) ‘Postface: Defining Neoliberalism,’ in P. Mirowski and D.Plehwe eds. The
Road from Mont Pèlerin: the Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 417-457.
Mirowksi, P. (2011) Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science, Cambridge Mass. and London
England: Harvard University Press.
Mirowski, P. (2013) Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the
Financial Meltdown, London and New York: Verso.
Polanyi-Levitt, K (2006) ‘Tracing Polanyi’s Institutional Political Economy to its Central
European Source,’ in K. McRobbie and K. Polanyi Levitt eds. Karl Polanyi in Vienna: The
Contemporary Significance of The Great Transformation, Montreal/New York/London: Black
Rose Books, 378-392.
Sawer, M. (2003) The Ethical State? Social Liberalism in Australia, Carlton, Victoria: University
of Melbourne Press.
Streuver, N. (2009) Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, University of Chicago Press: Chicago and
London.
Van Horn, R. and P. Mirowski (2009) ‘The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics and the
Birth of Neoliberalism’ in P. Mirowski and D.Plehwe eds. The Road from Mont Pèlerin: the
Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 139-181.
Vincent, A. and R. Plant (1984) Philosophy Politics & Citizenship: the Life and Thought of the
British Idealists, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Weber, M. (1949) ‘“Objectivity” in Social Science and Social Policy,’ in E. Shils and H. Finch eds.
Max Weber The Methodology of the Social Sciences, New York: Free Press, 50-113.
Yeatman, A. (2015) ‘A two-person conception of freedom: the significance of Jessica Benjamin’s
idea of intersubjectivity,’ Journal of Classical Sociology, 15(2), 3-23.
22
Feminism and ‘the ethical state’
i I n this respect neoliberal political ideology conforms to what Hannah Arendt calls ‘the totalitarian
transformation’ of an ideology, in this instance what we might call economic liberalism. She (1994,
317) proposes, ‘If it was the peculiarity of the ideologies themselves to treat a scientific hypothesis, like
“the survival of the fittest” in biology or “the survival of the most progressive class” in history, as an
“idea” which could be applied to a whole class of events, then it is the peculiarity of their totalitarian
transformation to pervert the “idea” into a premise in the logical sense, that is, into some self-evident
statement from which everything else can be deduced in stringent logical consistency.’ The problem she
identifies with the conversion of truth into consistency is that the quality of truth is lost, that is, its ability
to reveal something, and further, the ties of ideology to ‘reality and experience’ are severed.
ii S awer (2003, 63) takes to task the view that Higgins’s ‘views was most influenced by the medieval
Catholic precept of the living wage, revived in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum.’ While Higgins
referred to this encyclical ‘in support of his argument concerning evolution toward a higher social ideal’,
Sawer argues that he ‘belongs much more clearly to the non-Catholic social-liberal tradition (Sawer
2003, 63-4).’
iii A
s Marian Sawer argues in her essay in this publication, it was Labor Governments that first embraced
a neoliberal policy agenda for the management of the national economy including industrial relations
but for the most part they left the socially liberal institutional heritage of public institutions alone.
That is, they continued to subscribe to a discourse of things public even as, arguably, in their decision
to embrace neoliberal ideology for ‘economic’ policy, they began to white ant the existing public
institutional heritage. This is probably especially obvious in the adoption of the competition policy by
the Keating Labor Government which brought about the re-engineering of the publicly funded service
sector (its transformation from a political-civil relationship between government and NGOs as delivery
arms of government policy to a market-based relationship between government and services placed on
an enterprise basis) which is discussed particularly by Sawer in her essay.
iv F
reeden (1978, 47) quotes L.T. Hobhouse regarding the ‘practicable socialism’ associated with this
maximalist view of equality of opportunity: ‘[Practicable Socialism] aims primarily not to abolish
the competitive system, to socialize all instruments of production, distribution, and exchange, and to
convert all workers into public employees—but rather to supply all workers at cost price with all the
economic conditions requisite to the education and employment of their personal powers for their
personal advantage and enjoyment.’ Freeden comments that here we find ‘a very generous—indeed
maximalist—definition of equality of opportunity’ as ‘a mechanism by which an accepted term was
infused with new substance (Freeden 1978, 47).’
v S awer points out that within second-wave feminism, it was the policy-oriented and practical currents
that linked into state-centred social reform. In Australia the Women’s Electoral Lobby was the
organizational focus for such currents.
vi S ee Kari Polanyi Levitt (2006, 380) who points out that Polanyi ‘engaged in a debate on the feasibility of
a socialist economy with Ludwig von Mises, mentor of Friedrich von Hayek, in the pages of the premier
German language social science journal, Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik.
vii S treuver (2009, 10) suggests that ‘Hobbesian psychology…expresses a simple opposition to
philosophical moral optimism as trivializing the civil imperatives of the important issues confronting
communities. Yes, it would be nice for politics to be moral. No, it is not a real possibility in most of real
time. The most we can hope for, according to Hobbes, is a range of community functions that achieve
the peace as justice that allows inventions, arts, cultural innovations, surprises’.
Anna Yeatman
23
Does equality have a future?
Feminism and social democracy
in the era of neoliberalism
Marian Sawer
Australian National University
24
Does equality have a future? Feminism and social democracy in the era of neoliberalism
Introduction
Equality and equal opportunity were once watchwords of the Australian Labor Party and of the
social liberals of Australia and New Zealand who introduced conciliation and arbitration systems
and old-age pensions. Social liberalism was the gospel of social reform disseminated by the followers
of T. H. Green. Philosophically it rested on the critique of contract as the paradigm of liberty and
the development of the concept of ‘positive liberty’. In policy terms it meant initiatives in areas such
as compulsory public education, arbitrated wages and conditions, public health, child protection or
legislation opening public life to women. In Principles of State Interference, widely read in Australasia
at the beginning of the 20th century, Green’s follower David Ritchie attacked the deployment of
so-called economic laws to ward off social reform. Too often there was a confusion between natural
and social sciences and between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. As Ritchie said: ‘ if you give a person a sufficient
quantity of laudanum he will die; if there is unchecked competition, great inequality will result’. As
he pointed out, it did not follow that there should be unchecked competition. Ritchie’s work inspired
the views of industrial reformers such as H. B. Higgins, who declared that men’s livelihoods were too
important to be left to the ‘higgling of the market’ (Ritchie 1891: 123).1
An interventionist state was needed to counterbalance market inequalities and ensure access of all
to education, to decent working conditions and wages and to provision for sickness, widowhood
and old age. While a focus on the male breadwinner meant a lack of gender equality in the
wages system for many decades, there was clear recognition that old-age pensions needed to be
non-contributory in order to give equal recognition to the paid and unpaid work performed by
citizens. The advocates of old-age pensions insisted that the unpaid work performed by women
in caring for others should not condemn them to the workhouse or to poverty in old age. A
contributory basis for pensions would make a mockery of the work of married women.
The class-based and male breadwinner understanding of equal opportunity, the dominant
understanding until the 1970s, was often at the expense of a broader view encompassing equal
opportunity for women or for those from other races and cultures. As the ‘workingman’s party’,
the ALP promoted the claims of workers to a family wage, adequate to support a wife and
children. It was believed that working-class welfare required a family wage, not competition
from cheaper female or Asian workers.
In the 1970s there were serious attempts to reinvent the ALP as a more inclusive political party.
This involved extending the compass of equal opportunity beyond class, to address other forms of
disadvantage. This more expansive attitude towards equal opportunity and the attempt to address
new constituencies was never totally accepted. There was continuing sentiment in the party that
women, ‘ethnics’ and refugees were not part of Labor heartland, which was made up of male
workers and their families. There has not been a national gender equality plan since 1992 and by
the mid 1990s the ALP was moving away from serious election commitments to advancing the
status of women. As I shall argue in this paper, the abandonment of a serious commitment to
gender equality policy went hand in hand with a general loss of interest in redistributional issues.
Marian Sawer
25
I shall contrast the equality focus of earlier reformers with the market discourse of more recent
social democratic governments. Part of the problem has been absorption of market discourse to
the point where freeing up markets and providing market choices can appear more important
than public provision to counterbalance the effects of markets. Sometimes it seems forgotten
that markets produce inequality, not equal opportunity. As Thomas Piketty (2014) has recently
reminded us, the narrowing of inequalities in Western economies in the middle of the 20th century
has been replaced by a surge in inequality since the 1980s, as faith in the market increased. The
increased faith in the market often coincided with periods of social democratic government, as
with the Hawke and Keating governments’ commitment to ‘micro-economic reform’.
In Australia the share of national income held by the top one percent of the population was at
its lowest during the government of the conservative Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser. However
from 1980 there was a sharp rise in the share of national income held by the top one per cent.
The top marginal tax rate fell from 69 per cent to 60 per cent under the Fraser Government and
then to 47 per cent under the succeeding Labor Government. The corporate rate fell from 49 per
cent to 33 per cent. The decreased progressivity of the tax system was in line with developments
in other Anglophone democracies; perhaps more surprising was the way in which Labor
spokesmen championed reforms such as this intended to make the Australian economy more
‘competitive’ at the cost of greater inequalities.
Moreover, prominent Labor politicians have even borrowed from neo-liberal discourse to
suggest a divide between the ‘mainstream’, interested primarily in paying off their mortgages, and
so-called ‘special interests’ who voice concerns about equality and social justice (Sawer 2003).
The concept of ‘special interests’ derives from public choice theory, as developed by American
economists James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. It stems from rational actor premises,
whereby both individual and collective actors are motivated by the desire to maximise returns.
The term ‘special interests’ debunks the idea that groups that purport to be pursuing the public
interest are motivated any differently. It is particularly applied to those such as environmentalists
or equality seekers who invoke state interference with the market. Their expressed concerns are
viewed as masking a vested interest in maximizing redistribution of income from those with
‘real’ jobs in the market economy. The influence of special interests has been blamed for the
disaffection of the Labor heartland and for the desertion of blue-collar workers.
There is a significant gender dimension to the way this divide between the mainstream and
special interests has been constructed. The mainstream is in particular made up of male tax
payers, whose taxes are being used to support single mothers and old-age pensioners and to
pay the salaries of social workers, teachers and librarians. As if to confirm the negative effects of
redistributive policies on male support for the Labor Party, the gender gap in support for Labor
has grown. In the 28 July 2014 Morgan poll it was around 10 percentage points, with only 49.5%
of men supporting Labor on a two-party preferred basis compared with 59% of women. But it
sometimes seems, contrary to electoral logic, that women’s votes are not regarded as worth as
much as men’s votes.
26
Does equality have a future? Feminism and social democracy in the era of neoliberalism
In this paper I show how market discourse has led Labor governments to overlook the
implications for gender equality and for equality more generally of initiatives such as
decentralised wage bargaining, occupational superannuation and competition policy. In
particular it will draw attention to one of the tools of feminist public policy that usefully directs
attention to distributional impact of government budgets. I shall also look at Australia’s political
finance regime as a symbol of the embrace of inequality by both Labor and Liberal parties.
Conciliation and arbitration
It is often forgotten that one of the objectives of the original conciliation and arbitration Acts
was to promote trade unionism and counterbalance the power of employers over workers. In
the words of the subtitle of the first successful Act, which came into operation in New Zealand
in 1895, it was ‘An Act to Encourage the formation of Industrial Unions and Associations’. The
conciliation and arbitration acts were successful in this objective and led to a rapid growth in
trade unionism, seen as intrinsic to the enforcement of industrial awards. At first the creation of
legally enforceable awards and the strengthening of trade unions was far from promoting equal
opportunity for women, who were not regarded as primary bread winners and therefore entitled
to the family wage. The feminist idea of the relationship between economic independence and
equal citizenship, whether such independence came from paid work or from motherhood
endowment, fitted uneasily into this picture.
This gendered inequality built into in wage-fixing principles began to change with the series
of equal pay decisions between 1969 and 1974. The centralised wage-fixing system enabled the
relatively rapid rise in women’s wages following the 1972 equal pay decision and moved Australia
ahead of many other OECD countries in terms of pay equity. Women benefited from centralised
wage fixing because wage increases flowed on to those who worked in smaller workplaces, were
less highly unionised and performed work that was harder to quantify.
However, as the wage-fixing system was progressively decentralised from the late 1980s, the
structural factors weakening women’s bargaining position came into play. Labor Minister Laurie
Brereton explained in the second reading speech of the Industrial Relations Reform Act 1993 that
reform was designed to promote ‘a system based primarily on bargaining at the workplace, with
much less reliance on arbitration at the apex’ (Hammond 1994: 40).
The President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), Martin Ferguson, was critical
of women’s organisations that opposed the introduction of enterprise bargaining principles into
the industrial relations system. Women’s organisations and women’s units within government
accurately predicted the kind of effect that enterprise bargaining (as contrasted with centralised
wage-fixing) would have on pay relativities between men and women. A report commissioned
by the NSW Department of Industrial Relations provided further evidence of the gender effects
of enterprise bargaining: mainly female agreements were likely to have lower pay increases than
Marian Sawer
27
mainly male agreements; non-cash benefits were confined to male areas; and that productivity
increase measures were more likely to benefit male employees (Chappell 1995). As president
of the ACTU, Ferguson saw this concern over equal pay as ‘denying, or trying to deny, other
workers in a position to gain wage increases, the capacity to gain those increases’ (Burgmann
1994: 23).2 In other words the union movement was not to pursue the kind of solidarism that
had narrowed wage differentials in Sweden.
Women’s Electoral Lobby was successful, however, in persuading the then Labor Minister for
Industrial Relations to use Australia’s ratification of ILO Conventions to try to prevent women’s
gains being bargained away at enterprise level. Safeguards for equal remuneration for work of
equal value and for family-friendly work provisions were inserted into the Industrial Relations
Reform Act and the federal government also provided funding for Working Women’s Centres in
each State to provide advice and support.
Despite these safeguards, the introduction of enterprise bargaining had the adverse effects on the
gender wage gap that had been feared, with female-dominated industries doing significantly worse
than male-dominated ones. The safeguards that had been incorporated into the Act proved to
be ineffective. They incorporated the expression ‘without discrimination’ drawn from the Equal
Remuneration Convention (ILO 100). This was interpreted by the industrial tribunal as requiring
equal pay applicants to demonstrate that disparities in earnings were brought about by intentional
discrimination. That requirement favoured cases focussed on individuals over those focussed on
broad differences in work and wage structures. These limitations were not seriously addressed until
2009, when the equal remuneration provisions of the Fair Work Act removed the requirement to
demonstrate discrimination as a threshold to bringing an equal remuneration claim, accepting
instead a requirement to establish an undervaluation linked to, or attributable to, gender.
The first case under the amended legislation was brought by the Australian Services Union and
four other unions in the social and community services (SACS) sector. Importantly, the unions’
application noted that a factor contributing to the undervaluation of work in the industry had been
a lack of opportunity to bargain at the enterprise level due to structural factors affecting levels of
unionisation. In its first decision under the revised legislation, the industrial tribunal (renamed
the Fair Work Commission) confirmed that impediments to bargaining can impede equal
remuneration. The characterisation of caring work as female was also recognised as contributing to
undervaluation (Meagher 2014: 95). These steps forward in terms of equality policy were quickly
reversed by the incoming Coalition government in 2013, which undid the funding decisions
intended to support equal pay in the social and community services sector and attempted to
remove reporting requirements under the Workplace Gender Equality Act covering equal pay.
Moreover, even before the defeat of the Labor Government, a fit of absence of mind on its part
enabled the Australian Bureau of Statistics to cancel the time use survey scheduled for 2013, the
only survey measuring the distribution of paid and unpaid work and their intersection as well
as time taken by the journey to work. This data is essential for evidence-based work and family
28
Does equality have a future? Feminism and social democracy in the era of neoliberalism
policy, transport and other social policy. It is also fundamental for monitoring progress towards
gender equality, given unpaid work is the major contributor to poverty in old age.
From old-age pensions to the superannuation guarantee
Non-contributory old-age pensions were, as mentioned in the Introduction, a very important
expression of citizenship entitlements in Australia and New Zealand. The British poverty surveys
had showed that men’s wages were too low for saving for old age, but that women had even less
opportunity to provide for themselves or pay into a contributory scheme, due to lives spent
attending to the needs of others. Charles Booth, the poverty survey pioneer, felt strongly about
women’s case for assistance in old age: ‘they may spend lives of the utmost social utility with
hardly any opportunity of saving for themselves’ (Booth 1899: 15). Important aspects of the
Australian old-age pension included being paid to the individual citizen, not to a family ‘head’
and, at least until 1963, without a reduced ‘married rate’.
One of the invidious aspects of the situation before the introduction of the old-age pensions
was that those living in charitable institutions for the aged poor were deprived of the vote
in all States except South Australia. Today this principle, that poverty should be reason for
disenfranchisement is enshrined in the policy prescriptions of Frederick Hayek on the ground
that those reliant on state pensions have a vested interest in state expenditure.
But to return to the women who from 1909 were able to queue up for their fortnightly gold
sovereign. This was the first time many of these women had received their own money – which they
received as individual citizens not as family dependents – and for almost all of them it was the first
time that they had received equal pay. From 1910 they were able to receive their pension from the
age of 60. In New Zealand non-contributory old-age pensions became non-contributory universal
superannuation. This form of superannuation upheld the equality principle by providing men and
women with retirement income regardless of their earning history and giving some recognition to
the unpaid caring work that prevented women’s accumulation of savings. This means that unlike in
many countries, women do not have a markedly higher risk than men of poverty in old age.
By contrast, in Australia the introduction of compulsory occupational superannuation in 1992 has
made the old-age pension a more residual category. This development has been exacerbated by the
large tax concessions for superannuation, which overwhelming benefit high income earners and
increase the gender gap in post-retirement income. Low income-earners, including women working
part time, receive almost no assistance. Women, with their interrupted work histories and lesser
earnings while in the paid workforce will never have superannuation earnings equal to men and
indeed ‘superannuation effectively takes the income inequalities that exists during people’s working
lives and magnifies them in retirement’(Cameron 2014: 19). Women are effectively penalised for their
care work by gender-biased tax policy: ‘Without the market earnings to make large contributions to
private superannuation accumulation they forgo large fiscal subsidies’ (Smith 2007: 110).
Marian Sawer
29
As the Australia Institute has shown, a much more equitable way to provide income support
in retirement would be to provide a non-contributory universal pension/superannuation as
in New Zealand. Abolition of the tax expenditures currently associated with superannuation
would more than pay for a universal pension, allowing its level to be raised. Improving the base
pension while de-emphasising contribution-based superannuation would address the penalty
currently incurred by the performance of unpaid caring work and result in a more equal income
distribution in retirement. (Ingles & Denniss, 2014: 20–21).
Competition policy
The competition policy agreements of 1995 were quickly pushed through the Council of
Australian Governments by the Keating Government with no opportunity for proper public
debate or analysis of likely distributional impacts (Churchman 1996; Margetts 2012). The
principle of contestability covered all government utilities and services and governments
were required to review all legislation that restricted competition. The enthusiasm of Labor
Government for competition policy signaled the absorption of market discourse to the point
where it was seemingly forgotten that markets produce inequality, not equal opportunity.
In other countries the privatisation of utilities flowing from competition principles had been
shown to lead to increased costs for domestic users, with a particular impact on women due
to their relative economic disadvantage. It also meant that services previously provided by
government or by government and non-profit organisations were now likely to be subject to
competitive tendering from the private sector. This had foreseeable gender consequences, given
that women were the majority of community service employees and that these services might
now be delivered by private sector operators winning contracts through offering lower wages
and poorer conditions (Ranald 1995).
The Commonwealth Bureau of Immigration, Multicultural and Population Research
commissioned a survey of female school cleaners from non-English speaking backgrounds who
had previously been employed by the Government Cleaning Service (GCS) in NSW. After the
introduction of competitive tendering they were employed by private contractors and reported
an uncompensated increase in work intensity. They also reported a deterioration in conditions
of service and entitlements such as sick leave, superannuation and long-service leave and an
increase in humiliating treatment and verbal abuse (Fraser, 1998; Fraser & Quiggin 1999).
The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission drew attention to the likelihood that
private contractors would have less familiarity with their obligations under anti-discrimination
and human rights legislation and how to operationalise principles of equity and social justice
(Department for Women 1998: 5–6). This was one aspect of a broader concern that contracting
out of services previously provided by government would mean a loss of accountability and
responsiveness, particularly affecting vulnerable groups including women.
30
Does equality have a future? Feminism and social democracy in the era of neoliberalism
The NSW Department for Women pointed out that while the benefits of national competition
policy and microeconomic reform were often discussed, the potentially adverse effects on
disadvantaged populations ‘sometimes disproportionately including women’ were perhaps less
known. The Department recommended the systematic use of gender analysis in regulatory
reviews and adequate consultation processes to ensure the interests of women were taken into
account. It also recommended close monitoring of the outcomes for women (Department for
Women 1998: 6–7).
Unfortunately, as with many agencies that have drawn attention to the distributional outcomes
of neoliberal policy, the NSW Department for Women was to be abolished by the State Labor
government in 2004 (Teghtsoonian & Chappell 2008). The Bureau of Immigration, Multicultural
and Population Research had already been abolished by a conservative federal government in
1996. Recent research has found that women’s units that identify such distribution implications
and track gender impact are as vulnerable to disestablishment under Labor as under
conservative governments (Andrew 2014). (http://institutionalharvest.net/).
One of Australia’s policy innovations in terms of tracking gender impact had been the women’s
budget statement (WBS), first introduced in 1984. WBS programs were subsequently adopted
in all Australian jurisdictions but then abandoned, just as they were being adopted in many
countries throughout the world under the rubric of gender budgeting or gender-responsive
budgeting. In Australia they proved particularly vulnerable as they were originally intended
to track distributional effects of Budget outlays (or cuts) across the board and hence tended
to highlight where budgetary decisions ran counter to gender equality objectives. Today there
is commitment, for example at the Council of Australian Governments level, to monitor gaps
in Indigenous and non-Indigenous outcomes but no commitment to monitor inequality in
outcomes more broadly, including gender inequality.
In contrast, a 2011 survey of OECD countries found that 44 per cent always implemented
gender-responsive budgeting at the national level and 6 per cent did in some cases. In three
countries, Austria, Belgium and Spain, the requirement for gender-responsive budgeting was
enshrined in legislation (OECD 2014: 191). The OECD recommends the wider use of genderresponsive budgeting in order to promote budget literacy and to ensure Budgets meet both men’s
and women’s needs and reduce gender gaps (OECD 2014: 199).
Political finance
Regulation of political finance is a rather different but symbolically important area in which
Australia’s democratic aspirations have been dimmed. In 1903 the Labor Party’s Manifesto
proudly promoted the new Commonwealth Electoral Act: ‘Elaborate precautions exist to prevent
wealthy men practically purchasing seats: the expenditure of a senatorial candidate is limited to
£250 and of a candidate for the other House to £100.’ As we can see from the 1903 Labor Party
Marian Sawer
31
Manifesto, historically, Australia followed the UK with limits on campaign expenditure, targeted
at candidates. Over time this regulation became ineffective and was rarely enforced. Expenditure
limits were not indexed for inflation; losing candidates who did not submit returns were not
prosecuted; and the shift from candidate to party advertising rendered many restrictions
obsolete. After 1980 most of expenditure restrictions were discarded, with a cap on campaign
expenditure for Tasmanian Legislative Council elections being the sole remaining restriction.
From the time when campaign expenditure limits were dropped, Australia has been notable for
the laxity of its regulation of political finance with, for example, no controls over the source or
size of political donations and no limits to expenditure or restrictions on electronic advertising
(see Orr 2010; Tham 2010). In the early 1980s first the Wran Government in NSW and then the
Hawke Government at the federal level did introduce public funding for election campaigns.
This was intended to reduce dependence on corporate donations and to provide a standard
payment per vote, underpinning the equality principle. However, receipt of public funding was
not made conditional on abstention from such sources of income and instead public funding
became an adjunct to ever-growing dependence on corporate donations.
At the federal level both Labor and Liberal Parties have become dependent on corporate
donations and reluctant to reintroduce controls over campaign finance. Corporate donors are
purchasing political access far in excess to that enjoyed by other citizens and a far cry from the
idea of political equality where each counts for one and nobody for more than one.
The arms race in electoral campaign expenditure has been fuelled in particular by the cost
of television advertising. A majority of European countries, including the UK, Ireland, and
the Scandinavian countries, have never allowed such paid political advertising. It is widely
recognised that allowing paid political advertising on television drives up the costs of political
campaigns and increases dependence on wealthy donors. When the House of Lords upheld the
UK prohibition on political advertising in 2008, it argued that the ban was necessary to maintain
a level playing field, preventing ‘well-endowed interests’ from using ‘the power of the purse to
give enhanced prominence to their views’ (House of Lords 2008).3
Also offending against equality principles is the selling of access to Ministers, such as charging
$10,000 for seats at a dinner. Labor has been just as much involved in this as the Coalition,
although in 2009 Queensland Premier Anna Bligh banned Labor ministers from attending such
functions after it was alleged that businesses that had been Labor Party donors had received
preferential treatment.
However elsewhere Labor politicians were expected to solicit large political donations from
businesses wanting access to decision-makers. One Labor Councillor in Sydney told a NSW
District Court that:
32
Does equality have a future? Feminism and social democracy in the era of neoliberalism
he hadn’t sought the money for himself. Instead he claimed it was a donation to gain him
kudos within the party. ‘In regard to me being very politically ambitious, I thought it was a
very good idea. He went on to tell the Court: ‘That’s what happens in government: deals are
made’ (McClymont & Besser, 2014: 11).
This is not to suggest that conservative parties do not equally pursue political donations from
corporate interests, just that it is more of a surprise to find that offering privileged access
in exchange for money has become normalised in the day-to-day operations of the Labor
Party. While Senator John Faulkner, Special Minister of State in the Rudd Government, had a
commitment to political finance reform this became impossible to achieve due to the resistance
of State Labor premiers such as John Brumby in Victoria, whose party had benefited significantly
from corporate donations attracted through the fundraising organisation Progressive Business.
Needless to say, the corporate interests gaining access to Labor ministers through political
donations, are also likely to be bringing pressure on a range of regulatory issues. This includes
pressure to remove the ‘regulatory burden’ involved in consumer and environmental protection
and workers’ rights. Employer organisations like the Business Council of Australia and the
Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry have even lobbied to end reporting and
monitoring of the gender pay gap, as referred to above. In other words, reliance on corporate
donations to participate in the electoral arms race is likely to reinforce neoliberal perspectives on
governance and the moving away from equality agendas.
Conclusion
If gender equality were to be installed as a central goal of social democratic parties like the ALP,
and as a touchstone of equality in general, this would require a much more critical relationship
with neoliberalism. It would require careful consideration of what kinds of regulation are needed
to balance the ways in which market competition produces inequalities. It would mean thorough
analysis of potential distributional effects before embracing policies such as decentralised
wage bargaining, occupational superannuation, and competition policy. It would also require
careful monitoring of the effects of existing policies, in order to ensure that inequality is not
undermining the goal of equal opportunity for achievement of full potential. Fortunately
Australia has already invented a means to analyse the distributional effects of Budget outlays
and now, with the added experience of many OECD countries, could use gender-responsive
budgeting as a means to highlight issues of inequality. It seems clear that a refocusing on such
issues is essential if progress is to be made with either social democratic or feminist projects,
because they are so interwoven. Changing government or ensuring that women are in Cabinet
or on Boards is not sufficient to achieve these aims; much more sustained and evidence-based
questioning is needed of when market solutions are the right ones to achieve equity goals.
Marian Sawer
33
References
Andrew, Merrindahl. 2014. The Institutional Harvest: Women’s Services and Agencies in Australia
1970–2013. Available at: http://institutionalharvest.net/
Booth, Charles. 1899. Old Age Pensions and the Aged Poor: A Proposal, Macmillan, London.
Burgmann, Meredith. 1994. ‘Women and Enterprise Bargaining in Australia’ in Suzanne
Hammond (ed), Equity under Enterprising Bargaining, Working Paper 33, Australian Centre for
Industrial Relations Research and Teaching, University of Sydney.
Cameron, Prue. 2014. What’s choice got to do with it?’, Australia Institute Policy Brief No. 55.
Chappell, Louise. 1995. ‘Women’s Policy’, in Martin Laffin and Martin Painter (eds), Reform and
Reversal: Lessons from the Coalition Government in New South Wales 1988–1995, Melbourne:
Macmillan Education.
Churchman, Susan. 1996. ‘National Competition Policy—Its Evolution and Implementation: A
Study in Intergovernmental Relations.’ Australian Journal of Public Administration, 55(2): 97–99.
Department for Women, NSW Government. 1998. ‘National Competition Policy and
Microeconomic Reform’
Fraser, Lyn .1998. Impact of Contracting Out on Female NESB Workers: Case Study of the NSW
Government Cleaning Service. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service.
Fraser, Lyn and John Quiggin. 1999. ‘Competitive tendering and service quality’. Just Policy 17:
53–57.
Hammond, Suzanne. 1994. ‘Equity and Enterprise Bargaining – Lessons from the Experiment’,
in Suzanne Hammond (ed), Equity under Enterprising Bargaining, Working Paper 33, Australian
Centre for Industrial Relations Research and Teaching, University of Sydney.
House of Lords. 2008. UKHL 15, 12 March
Ingles, David and Richard Denniss. 2014. Sustaining us all in retirement: The case for a universal
age pension. Australia Institute Policy Brief No. 60, April 2014. http://www.tai.org.au/content/
sustaining-us-all-retirement.
Margetts, Dee. 2012. ‘Critique of Australia’s National Competition Policy: Assessing its outcomes in
a range of major sectors’. PhD Thesis, University of Western Australia, Business School. Available at:
http://pc-web01.squiz.net/__data/assets/pdf_file/0017/136106/sub001-retail-trade-attachment.pdf
34
Does equality have a future? Feminism and social democracy in the era of neoliberalism
McClymont, Kate and Linton Besser. 2014. ‘Well, someone has got to be paid.’ Good Weekend,
2–3 August
Meagher, Gabrielle. 2014. ‘Persistent Inequalities: The Distribution of Money, Time and Care’,
in Susan K Schroeder and Lynne Chester (eds) Challenging the Orthodoxy: Reflections on Frank
Stilwell’s Contribution to Political Economy, Heidelberg: Springer,
OECD. 2014. Women, Government and Policy Making in OECD Countries: Fostering Diversity for
Inclusive Growth. OECD Publishing
Orr, Graeme. 2010. The Law of Politics: Elections, Parties and Money in Australia. Sydney:
Federation Press
Picketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard University Press.
Ranald, Pat. 1995. ‘National Competition Policy.’ Journal of Australian Political Economy 36: 1–25.
Ritchie, David. 1891. Principles of State Interference, London, Swan Sonnenschein & Co.
Sawer, Marian. 2003. ‘Reinventing the Labor Party: From Laborism to Equal Opportunity’, in Jenny
Hocking and Colleen Lewis (eds) It’s Time Again: Whitlam and Modern Labor. Melbourne: Circa.
Smith, Julie. 2007. ‘Time Use among New Mothers, the Economic Value of Unpaid Care
Work and Gender Aspects of Superannuation Tax Concessions.’ Australian Journal of Labour
Economics 10 (2): 99–114.
Teghtsoonian, Katherine and Louise Chappell. 2008. ‘The Rise and Decline of Women’s Policy
Machinery in British Columbia and New South Wales: A Cautionary Tale.’ International Political
Science Review 29(1): 29–51.
Tham, Joo-Cheong. 2010. Money and Politics: The Democracy We Can’t Afford. Sydney: UNSW Press.
1 F
or more on the influence of socal liberalism in Australia see Marian Sawer, Social Liberalism in
Australia, Melbourne University Press, 2003.
2 Ferguson was also unsympathetic to the issue of paid maternity leave, regarding it as a middle-class issue.
3 I n 2013 the European Court of Human Rights determined that although the ban was an interference
with freedom of expression it served the legitimate purpose of preserving the impartiality of
broadcasting on public interest matters and thereby protecting the democratic process http://hudoc.
echr.coe.int/sites/fra/pages/search.aspx?i=001-119244#{“itemid”:[“001-119244”]}
Marian Sawer
35
“Incorporating gender equality:
Tensions and synergies in the
relationship between feminism and
Australian social democracy.”
Carol Johnson
Politics and International Studies Department,
University of Adelaide
36
“Incorporating gender equality: Tensions and synergies in the relationship between feminism
and Australian social democracy.”
This essay focuses on exploring the tensions and synergies in the relationship between feminism
and social democracy via an analysis of Australian Labor governments. The Australian Labor
Party (ALP) is Australia’s longstanding social democratic party and one of the first in the world
to achieve government.1 Yet, it is important to recognise that without the influence of feminism,
social democracy in Australia (as elsewhere) would have been a much diminished movement
that risked representing only half of the population, not only in terms of policy but also in terms
of gender representation.
As late as 1973, Gough Whitlam (1973: 1152) acknowledged that the ALP was “a male
dominated Party, in a male dominated Parliament in a male dominated society”. Indeed, there
were no female Labor members of parliament at that time (Whitlam 1973: 1152).2 Twenty years
later, there were still only nine female Labor members of the House of Representatives and four
female senators, with Paul Keating (1993) noting “the great anomaly of Australian democracy
— the great flaw in Australian democracy. This is a country which pioneered women’s rights
— which delivered to women the vote and the right to stand for parliament in 1902, yet whose
national parliament in 1993 is overwhelmingly male.” As Whitlam and Keating’s comments
indicate, the historical underrepresentation of female Labor politicians partly reflected a broader
underrepresentation in public political life that impacted on other political parties, including the
Liberal Party (McCann and Wilson 2012).
However, there were also gender factors that posed specific issues for social democratic
parties internationally, and particularly those with strong labour movement roots, such as the
British and Australian Labour/Labor Parties. There had been a long history of struggles by
socialist feminists in Britain to push for women’s economic equality (see e.g. Liddington and
Norris 1978: especially 231-251; Taylor 1983) but these had been resisted by many male trade
unionists. Instead, union strategies based around a male wage-earner head of household had
contributed to lower pay and fewer working opportunities for women despite, or perhaps
partly as a response to, the central role of female employment in the early industrial revolution
(see further Johnson 1996a). That British history influenced the nascent Australian labour
movement. For example, the (otherwise internationally innovative) Australian Arbitration
system legally enshrined the conception of the male wage in the early twentieth century,
ensuring that a man’s wage would be sufficient to keep a man, his wife and three children, while
women’s wages were set at 54% of the male rate (Probert 1989: 98).
1 W
hile there are some differences in how the ALP and most social democratic parties were formed
given that the Labor Party had a formal relationship with the trade union movement (see e.g. Scott
2000, 11-12), social democratic parties generally had agendas that included improving the position of
the working class and the Labor Party is still part of the broad social democratic tradition (Dyrenfurth
2010; Johnson 1989, 1).
2 The Liberals had two female senators at the time.
Carol Johnson
37
The Arbitration system was influenced both by social liberalism (Sawer 2003) and by
union demands for higher male wages. Social liberalism intersected with early forms of social
democracy because it saw a legitimate role for the state in providing services and regulating the
society and economy (see further Sawer 2003 and the essays in this publication by Yeatman and
Sawer). While early Labor was influenced by some social liberal insights that sought to provide
equal welfare support to women via non-contributory old age pension schemes (Sawer 2012:
78), a focus on the male provider remained a central plank of Labor thought. Feminist attempts
to argue against the male family wage, and for women to be paid at a higher independent rate,
were strongly resisted by both many male trade unionists and the Labor Party in the early
twentieth century, with broader implications for government social policy (see e.g. Lake 1992).
In short, there was an ongoing struggle within social democracy, as within the broader liberal
democratic tradition that intersected with it, over whether the citizen was to be constructed
primarily as male (with women and children receiving their citizenship entitlements second
hand as his dependants) or whether the adult citizen was to be constructed in both male and
female terms (see further Pateman 1996: 13-17). While male trade union advocates of the male
family wage may have seen themselves as advocating a chivalrous, protective form of masculinity
that benefitted stay-at-home mothers, it was one that nonetheless privileged men and placed
women in a subordinate and dependant position (see Lake 1992: 3-4).
Some limited efforts were made to improve the level of female wages by Labor during
the second world war, with Prime Minister Curtin asserting that women doing men’s jobs
during wartime should be paid the same rate (Curtin 1943: 9). After many delays, the Labor
government eventually supported increasing women’s wages to seventy-five per cent of the male
rate in eleven key industries (Johnson 1989: 33). Although this decision was initially successfully
challenged by employers, it contributed to the Arbitration Commission’s subsequent decision,
the year after Labor lost office, to increase female wages across all industries to seventy-five per
cent of the male rate (Johnson 1989: 33). However, it wasn’t until the Whitlam government,
and the influence of so-called second-wave feminism, along with changing union attitudes,
that serious attempts were made to institute equal pay for equal work (Whitlam 1974). Indeed,
prior to the Whitlam government, Labor’s position on women’s work had been ambivalent to
say the least. While Curtin praised women’s employment during wartime manpower shortages,
he also asserted that: “ in this country where there is no great numerical disparity between
the sexes most women will ultimately be absorbed in the home…I agree that the natural urge
for motherhood, husband and home is the great motivating force in a woman’s life…”(Curtin
1943: 10). Nearly thirty years later, in his first speech in parliament, Paul Keating (1970: 51415) deplored the fact that “husbands have been forced to send their wives to work in order to
provide the necessaries of life”. Keating (1970: 514-15) had argued that: “Family life is the very
basis of our nationhood. In the past couple of years the government has boasted about the
increasing number of women in the workforce. Rather than something to be proud of, I feel it is
something of which we should be ashamed.”
38
“Incorporating gender equality: Tensions and synergies in the relationship between feminism
and Australian social democracy.”
Feminist influences on social democracy, both from within and outside of the labour
movement, were therefore essential in order to ensure that social democracy fully represented
women as well as men. Fortunately, the historical tensions between feminism and social
democracy were also countered by potential synergies between the two movements. The social
democratic commitment to equality and to providing government services to cater for peoples’
needs that were not met by the market also opened up major opportunities for feminists
to argue both for anti-discrimination measures and for the provision of women’s services.
Feminists achieved particular success after the development of second wave feminism, due
to the combined influence of femocrats working within the state (Sawer 1990) and the (often
intersecting) influence of women’s movement organisations. Those synergies, and the practical
policies that resulted, were particularly apparent during the Whitlam period, given Whitlam’s
argument that government legislation and services had a key role to play in providing what he
described as “positive equality” for all sections of the community (see Johnson 2013). Whitlam
stated that:
We are concerned about the problems facing all women in Australia, be they young or
old, Aboriginal or newcomers, married or unmarried, English speaking or non-English
speaking . It is the second principle, that of humaneness, that has prompted us to fund
women’s refuges, women’s health centres, rape crisis counselling centres, family planning
centres and multi-purpose centres where the health, welfare, educational, training,
workforce, legal, recreational and child-care needs of women can be met. We have removed
the sales tax from the pill and for the first time in the history of Australia have recognised
that supporting mothers form one of the largest groups below the poverty line and
introduced a supporting mothers’ benefit (Whitlam 1975, typescript p. 6).”
Subsequent Labor governments built on Whitlam’s legacy, with the Hawke government
introducing affirmative action and anti-sex-discrimination policies. Nonetheless, there were
some differences in the approach followed. Whitlam saw clear synergies between feminism
and a social democratic commitment to providing substantial government services to fill gaps
in market provision. However, Keynesian economics, and the welfare liberalism it helped to
fund, had already begun to be questioned by the final period of Whitlam’s government. The
Hawke Labor government went on to embrace aspects of neo-liberalism which emphasised the
key role to be played by the market in improving peoples’ lives. Consequently, while attempts
to integrate feminist demands with social democracy continued, these attempts were to be
partially hampered by forms of social democracy that supported pruning government services
and reducing levels of government regulation of private enterprise. It is therefore particularly
unfortunate that feminists’ increased success in influencing social democracy should have come
just as social liberalism came under challenge and neoliberalism was beginning its ascendancy.
Nonetheless, Hawke and Keating saw synergies between equal opportunity for women
and their governments’ economic rationalist policies of encouraging a healthy market economy
in which women could participate equally with men. The Hawke government’s affirmative
Carol Johnson
39
action policies emphasised not only that “women should be able to enter and compete in the
labour market on an equal footing with men” but that “neither individual employers nor the
nation can afford to waste the valuable contributions which women can, and do, make to our
economy” (Hawke, Parliamentary Debates, Representatives, 19 February 1986: 862). It was a
point that Keating, the former opponent of women’s participation in the workforce endorsed
when he succeeded Hawke as Prime Minister, arguing that “successful countries are those
with flexible and skilled workforces: it is therefore common sense that women with skills and
work experience be kept in the workforce. Our economic growth and our living standards
will benefit from women’s participation (Keating 1993).” Keating (1992) sometimes still had a
tendency to suggest that most women would work part-time in order to juggle work and family
responsibilities, while men would work full-time. However, women were increasingly seen as
independent economic actors in their own right, albeit within a market-oriented context that
was assumed to be largely compatible with encouraging gender equality.
So Labor’s commitment to gender equality continued. By the twenty-first century,
Australia’s first female Prime Minister was proud to highlight Labor’s record in regard to policies
that improved the position of women. She argued that Labor had led the way compared to
their conservative opponents, citing policy measures from maternity allowances to equal pay to
parental leave.3
Look at our history. It was Labor that introduced maternity allowances…. It was Labor
that gave women the chance to serve and shine in the farms and factories of wartime in the
1940s. It was Gough Whitlam’s Labor that delivered the first pay equality case and started
federal funding for childcare. And it was only ever Labor that was going to give this nation
its first female prime minister. It was only ever Labor that was going to put paid parental
leave on the agenda and get it done. Only Labor that understood that childcare was about
affordability, but it was about quality too, and it’s about supporting the women who work
in childcare…. It was only ever Labor that was going to increase the tax-free threshold to
more than $18,000, benefiting low-income workers, predominantly working women…. it
was only ever Labor that was going to reduce tax on superannuation for part-time working
mums. It’s only Labor that ever would have put in an equal pay principle that actually
worked; that worked to make a difference so women in social and community services can
get the pay and recognition that they deserve.” (Gillard, 2013).
The Gillard government was particularly proud of its attempts to improve the pay of low
paid female workers. The government argued that while Whitlam’s attempts to bring in equal
pay were an important first step, there needed to be further reforms to ensure that equal value
was really being measured, particularly in female dominated areas of work, including many of
3 C
ontrary to some popular misconceptions, Gillard saw Labor as a social democratic party and herself as
leading a social democratic government (see e.g. Gillard 2011).
40
“Incorporating gender equality: Tensions and synergies in the relationship between feminism
and Australian social democracy.”
the caring professions (Gillard, Parliamentary Debates, Representatives, 23 November 2010:
3429). Admittedly, there were delays in phasing in equal pay under Labor, that were partly
influenced by the impact of increased wages for women on the government’s budget (Gillard,
Parliamentary Debates, Representatives, 23 November 2010: 3429). Such a delay not only
reflected a neo-liberal influenced prioritisation on reducing budget deficits – it also involved an
implicit acknowledgement that governments had actually been benefitting financially previously
from the low payment given to many female-dominated caring professions. For that reason,
and because of flow-on effects in the broader economy, a purely neo-liberal position would have
counselled against tackling issues of gender pay inequality at all.4 However, fortunately, there
were social democratic influences at work too.
Gillard’s comments and her government’s policies reflect the fact that, despite neo-liberal
influences, women’s equality has increasingly been seen as part of Labor’s expanding social
democratic equality agenda (e.g. Gillard 2013, Wong 2014). As Senator Penny Wong (2011) has
argued, Labor’s conception of equality has been expanding throughout the party’s history, to now
embrace issues of gender, race, ethnicity and same-sex issues. Labor’s increasing commitment
to gender equality needs to be seen in this broader context. Nonetheless, it will be argued below
that there are still some ongoing tensions between feminism and Australian social democracy.5
Tensions between feminism and social democracy
in the neo-liberal era.
It is essential that feminists continue to engage with social democracy in order to ensure that the
position of women in Australian society continues to be incrementally reformed and improved.
Much of the literature on social democracy tends to assume synergies between social democracy
and tackling inequality (e.g. Judt 2010: 12-29; Meyer with Hinchman 2007: 230; Collingnon
2012: 45). It is indeed true that, unlike some other ideologies such as neo-liberalism, social
democracy (along with the social liberalism with which it interacted) facilitates the recognition
of socially disadvantaged groups and the need for government action to improve the position
of such groups in society. Nonetheless, as already indicated, the social democratic project has
always been a site of gender contestation, with conservative social democrats being resistant to
some forms of gender equality. After all, social democracy has also been implicated historically
in pursuing gender agendas in regard to particular forms of masculinity, not just in regard to
women’s equality, as the traditional emphasis on the male family wage earner reveals. In this
4 Th
e Abbott Government opposed a comparable work equal pay claim for childcare workers, partly
because of concerns over flow-on effects (Hannan and Karvalas 2014).
5 S ince this paper focuses on the Labor party I have not discussed the role that the Liberal Party, or
feminists within that party, have played in improving women’s position in Australian society. However,
it is important to recognise that feminists need to continue to be active in all political parties and that
feminist social liberals, in particular, have played a significant role within the Liberal Party.
Carol Johnson
41
respect, incorporating gender equity into the social democratic project isn’t just about adding on
another (accidentally overlooked) form of equality to social democracy’s pre-existing equality
project, it is about radically transforming a social democratic project that in some respects was
as much about pursuing a form of male privilege as it was about pursuing issues of class justice.
It means revisiting a battle that nineteenth and early twentieth century feminists had lost in
order to reclaim a more gender inclusive social democratic tradition.
This is particularly the case given that the earlier tensions, between those who wished
to reinforce forms of masculinity based on the traditional male wage-earner provider and
those who advocated gender equality, have arguably returned in a new form because of the
influence of neo-liberalism. It is not just that neo-liberalism has constrained the provision of
government services or forms of government regulation that can assist women. One reason
why a watered-down form of neo-liberalism was successful in influencing Australian social
democracy was because neo-liberalism’s anti-elitist arguments seemed to mimic class politics
and this helped to sell aspects of the neo-liberal project to some right-wing elements within
Labor. To elaborate, neo-liberal arguments that were widespread in Australia (as well as the
US and Britain) suggested that the source of exploitation of ordinary Australians did not lie in
the market but at the level of the state. It was argued that inner city, politically correct, cultural
elites, associated with various social movements, were ripping off ordinary taxpayers’ money
via extracting financial largesse from government. Social movements were thereby identified as
“industries”, rather than as movements advocating for the disadvantaged. Feminism was one of
the social movements targeted for being “elite”, and an advocate of “middle class welfare”, with
the suggestion being that blue collar working class men and “mainstream” families (i.e. those
with more traditional gender roles) were losing out (see e.g. Ferguson 1999, vi-vii; Johnson
2007: 39-54; 180-181; Sawer 2004: 43). It is no longer socially acceptable to argue that women
should be paid only a portion of the full male wage. However, older male-defined conceptions of
the social democratic project could be brought in via the backdoor by constructing feminism as
elite and by implicitly suggesting that the working class consisted predominantly of blue-collar
males combatting those politically correct “elites” (rather than capital) over the distribution of
(state rather than market) resources. In other words, ongoing arguments that Labor should focus
more on its working class “heartland” can involve forms of gendered dog-whistling.
Even those elements within Labor that tried to combine a support for women’s equality
with market-influenced policy, often didn’t adequately rethink the gender implications of
their broader economic policy agendas. For example, although both the Hawke and Keating
governments advocated gender equality, there were numerous feminist critiques of the
ways in which their economic rationalist policies, influenced by watered down forms of free
market, neo-liberal ideas, impacted negatively on women. Such critiques argued that, despite
their support for important affirmative action and anti-discrimination measures, neither the
Hawke nor Keating governments adequately took into account how their own policies of wage
restraint and enterprise bargaining impacted upon poorly paid and industrially weak female
workers; or the ways in which cutbacks to government health and welfare services could
42
“Incorporating gender equality: Tensions and synergies in the relationship between feminism
and Australian social democracy.”
impact disproportionately on women, given that women could be left filling the resulting gaps
in services due to their caring role in the home (see e.g. Sawer 1990; Sharp and Broomhill
1989; Johnson 1990: 97-104; 1995; 1996b). In general, women were often tacked on to existing
Labor policy agendas as additional afterthoughts rather than the gender implications of those
existing agendas having been thoroughly thought through from the beginning (Johnson 1990).
Furthermore, one of the challenges that social democracy faces is to develop a new ethics of
care.6 Traditional social democracy handed much caring work to women in the home while men
went out to work. Contemporary social democracy faces challenges in developing workplaces
that are compatible with a range of carer responsibilities (not just family ones) and in providing
services that privilege an appropriate ethics of care over budgetary or market constraints.
This is particularly the case given the commodification of personal relationships and
services in advanced neo-liberalism (see further Yeatman 2014: 89-90). In addition, there is a
related assumption in current neo-liberal influenced social democracy that the path to social
inclusion lies in integrating citizens within the existing workforce, thereby reducing so-called
welfare dependence and encouraging citizens to be self-reliant (see Levitas 1998 for a critique).
In the case of women, social democrats pursuing such policies often do not think through
adequately the implications of gendered market inequities in either the Fordist or post-Fordist
forms of that economy (see e.g. work by Adkins and Dever 2014; Johnson 1995) and the forms
of government action that consequently might be necessary to shape labour markets in more
equitable directions. It was acknowledged long ago that governments had problems influencing
the types of employment available even under Keynesianism (Robinson 1978:23) but those
problems are exacerbated under neo-liberalism in a situation in which government is meant to
be minimising its direct intervention in, and regulation of, the economy in order to encourage
the free play of market forces. Libertarian (though not socially conservative) forms of neoliberalism may be able to encourage female independence, self-reliance and the equality of
female entrepreneurs but neo-liberalism simultaneously undermines the ability of the state to
look after the vulnerable.
The practical implications of such positions, including for issues of care, were evident
when the Keating government cut single parent benefits for older children to encourage women
to enter the workforce. While excellent training packages were provided to increase women’s
skills, those training packages by themselves couldn’t adequately counter existing labour market
inequities or ensure that a sufficient range of rewarding jobs with good wages and working
conditions were available for women, especially at a time when the government was pursuing
a neo-liberal influenced industrial agenda of labour market deregulation and enterprise
bargaining (see e.g. Pixley 1994; 24; Rimmer, 1994: 33-35, 39-41). It was a step that the Gillard
government took even further. Some 80,000 single parents, mostly mothers, were forced off
more generous single parent benefits and onto the much lower Newstart allowance once their
6 For key new research on issues of care, see the Revaluing Care Research Network (n.d).
Carol Johnson
43
child turned 8 on the grounds that overcoming perceived welfare dependence, developing
capabilities, self-reliance and finding jobs was the key to economic equality (see e.g. Macklin,
2013). Yet, once again, the government could not ensure that sufficient good quality jobs, never
mind ones with suitable family-friendly working conditions, were available for those women.
There are also arguments that the social democratic state has sometimes been uncritically
implicated in neoliberal “workfare” strategies in other ways, for example in forms of governance
that involve women’s labour in producing “work ready” children (McDowell 2014). As Janine
Brodie (1995: 51) has pointed out: “it is important to stress that the ascendancy of the market
over politics does not mean that the state is disappearing. Rather, state power has been
redeployed from social welfare concerns and economic management to the enforcement of the
market model in virtually all aspects of everyday life.” It is a redeployment that has considerably
limited the ability of feminists to use the state to improve women’s equality, while potentially
implicating the social democratic state in other forms of gendered neo-liberal governance.
Yet, at the same time as the influence of neo-liberalism poses new challenges for feminist
social democrats, feminists also need to remain vigilant to ensure that older issues aren’t
resurfacing. For example, as suggested by Curtin’s views on female employment cited earlier,
the version of Keynesian social liberal policies adopted in Australia in the 1940s had been
largely based on the conception of full employment for men (see further Johnson 1989: 20-21;
36-7). More than seventy years later, the Rudd government’s Keynesian economic stimulus
package, during the Global Financial crisis was criticised for largely focusing on predominantly
male dominated industries such as the construction industry (Cox 2009; Ludlam, Senate
Parliamentary Debates,10 February 2009: 633. Similarly, the Textile, Clothing and Footwear
Union of Australia’s (TCFUA) complaints (AAP 12 May 2009) that the Rudd government was
supporting “jobs for the boys” in the automotive and construction sectors but not for female
workers in the TCF industry could have been made just as well during the Whitlam period,
when tariff cuts to clothing and footwear began. Such examples reveal that feminists still need to
be vigilant to ensure that even policy settings that potentially give more option for government
intervention and support for women’s employment are implemented in female-friendly forms
and don’t reflect more traditional, male-defined agendas. However, such Keynesian policy
settings can be few and far between. Despite turning to forms of Keynesianism during the
Global Financial Crisis, Labor governments still place significant emphasis on market solutions
(Johnson 2011), even though they have rejected what they see as the more extreme forms of
neo-liberal policy supported by the Liberal Party. Keynesianism is still not as firmly entrenched
as previously given that neo-liberalism survived the global financial crisis surprisingly well
(Quiggin 2012; Crouch 2011; Mirowski 2013).
Yet, it isn’t just economic agendas that are a problem. Concepts of the “political” need
to be sufficiently broad to recognise the deeply gendered nature of Australian culture. Gough
Whitlam spoke of the need to “re-define and re-describe the political” and the need to challenge
“the deeply ingrained cultural assumptions” about women’s role (Whitlam 1975, 8, 6). Whitlam’s
44
“Incorporating gender equality: Tensions and synergies in the relationship between feminism
and Australian social democracy.”
comments reveal a second-wave feminist emphasis on the need for broader cultural as well
as policy change (no doubt encouraged by his Women’s Adviser, Elizabeth Reid amongst
others). Indeed cultural and policy change interacted as, for example, policy reform financially
supporting single mothers potentially made single parenthood more socially acceptable
and reduced gendered social stigmas.7 However, there has been a tendency to downplay the
importance of the politics of cultural change in regard to gender as the focus on market-based,
economic solutions increased with the influence of neo-liberalism and conceptions of the
political became correspondingly narrower.
The practical relevance for social democracy of developing strategies that take into
account, and deal with, the broader cultural politics of gender became clear during the Gillard
years. Admittedly, gender politics was only one of the factors that contributed to the Gillard
government’s demise but it was a factor that didn’t seem to have been adequately taken into
account by Labor strategists. For example, the male factional leaders who were plotting against
Kevin Rudd don’t seem to have adequately taken into account that a woman “knifing” a
male Prime Minister would lead to so much gendered opprobrium, with Gillard repeatedly
depicted as a Lady Macbeth or Madame Defarge type figure. Similarly, Labor’s political and
media advisers seemed to be unaware that repeatedly emphasising Gillard’s “toughness” was
unwise when so much international feminist literature suggests that balancing “toughness”
and “compassion” is a key issue for female politicians in performing gender (Murray
2010: 19: Messner 2007: 466). Meanwhile, political opponents used Gillard’s breaking of
commitments over the carbon “tax” to exploit traditional conceptions of female deviousness and
untrustworthiness.
As many feminists active on social media and elsewhere are well aware, the politics of
gender has to be fought out in cultural forums as well as policy ones. Neither state-centric nor
market-centric policies can adequately address that broader gendered culture, nor its manifold
ramifications in social life. The much broader conception of “the political” advanced by so-called
“second-wave” feminism, from personal life to popular culture, goes well beyond traditional
social democratic conceptions of “the political” — even as articulated by progressive social
democratic theorists such as Berman (2006). In short, there needs to be an active extraparliamentary political/cultural/social struggle as well as government action.
Conclusion
The above analysis suggests that there is a need for an active state sector that is prepared to both
provide services for women that are not provided by the market and to tackle market-based
issues of the nature, quality, remuneration and conditions of female employment. However, such
7 My thanks to Susan Ryan for making this point.
Carol Johnson
45
a programme needs to go much further than existing policies and would require a renewal of
the social democratic project — a renewal that draws once more on social liberal rather than
neo-liberal perspectives, and is premised on a more fundamental engagement with feminist
perspectives (including an ethics of care) than has occurred so far.8 Such government-based
strategies would form a crucial part of the broader political struggle for a more feminist future.
Nonetheless, feminists need to remain alert to the potential tensions between feminism and
social democracy as well as the positive synergies that can result. The social democratic project
remains a site of gendered contestation, as does the wider society and culture.
Acknowledgements
This Working Paper draws partly on research undertaken for ARC DP140100168, “Expanding
Equality: A Historical Perspective on Developments and Dilemmas in Contemporary Australian
Social Democracy”. My thanks to Clare Parker for her research assistance on that project. My
thanks too for the extremely useful feedback given on the initial draft of this paper when it was
presented at the workshop on “Feminism, Social Liberalism and Social Democracy in the NeoLiberal Era”, Whitlam Institute, University of Western Sydney, 12 August 2014.
References
Adkins, Lisa & Maryanne Dever (2014) “Gender and Labour in New Times: An Introduction.” Australian Feminist Studies, 29:79, 1-11.
Brodie, Janine (1995) Politics on the Margins: Restructuring and the Canadian Women’s Movement. Halifax: Fernwood.
Berman, Sheri (2006) The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Collingnon, Stefan (2012) “The Preconditions of Social Europe and the Tasks of Social Democracy” in Henning Meyer and Jonathan Rutherford eds, The Future of European Social Democracy: Building the Good Society. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cox, Eva (2009) “Rudd’s Sexist, Moralistic Stimulus Package”, Crikey, 4 February 2009,
http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/02/04/cox-rudds-sexist-moralistic-stimulus-package, accessed 24 December 2014.
8 There are also potentially lessons that can be learned from Nordic social democracy. See Andrew Scott
(2014).
46
“Incorporating gender equality: Tensions and synergies in the relationship between feminism
and Australian social democracy.”
Crouch, Colin (2011) The Strange Non-Death of Neo-Liberalism. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Curtin, John (1943) “Why this election should matter to women”, Question and Answers, John Curtin and Robert Menzies, interviewed by Alice Jackson, Australian Women’s Weekly, 14 August 1943: 9.
Dyrenfurth, Nick. (2010) “It’s the Culture, Stupid,” in Nick Dyrenfurth and Tim Soutphommasane, All That’s Left: What Labor Should Stand For. Sydney: UNSW Press.
Ferguson, Martin (1999) “Foreword”, in Michael Thompson, Labor Without Class: the Gentrification of the ALP. Sydney 1999.
Gillard, Julia (2011) “Labor in Australia is a movement”, Address to the Chifley Research Centre, Canberra, 16 September 2011, http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/121064/20111205-0008/
www.pm.gov.au/press-office/labor-australia-movement-address-chifley-research-centre-
canberra.html, accessed 17 October 2014,
Gillard, Julia (2013) “Transcript of Remarks At Launch Of Women For Gillard,” 11 June 2013, http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/121064/20130626-1841/www.pm.gov.au/press-office/
transcript-remarks-launch-women-gillard.html, accessed September 27, 2013.
Hannan, Ewin and Patricia Karvalas (2014) “Coalition Resists Equal pay Claim”, The Australian, 25 February 2014, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/industrial-relations/
coalition-resists-equal-pay-claim/story-fn59noo3-1226836394235, accessed 1 January 2015.
Johnson, Carol (1989) The Labor Legacy: Curtin, Chifley, Whitlam, Hawke. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Johnson, Carol (1990) “Whose Consensus? Women and the ALP.” Arena, 93: 85-104.
Johnson, Carol (1995) “Women and Economic Citizenship: the Limits of Keating’s Inclusive Social Democracy.” Just Policy, 2: 11-16.
Johnson, Carol (1996a) “Does Capitalism Really Need Patriarchy? Some Old Issues Reconsidered.” Women’s Studies International Forum, 19, 3:193-202.
Johnson, Carol (1996b) “Negotiating the Politics of Inclusion: Women and Australian Labor Governments 1983-1995.” Feminist Review, 52: 102- 115.
Johnson, Carol (2007) Governing Change: From Keating to Howard, Revised edition, Perth: Network Books.
Carol Johnson
47
Johnson, Carol (2011) “Gillard, Rudd and Labor Tradition.” Australian Journal of Politics and History, 57 (4): 562-579.
Johnson, Carol (2013) “Gough Whitlam and Labor Tradition,” in Troy Bramston ed., The Whitlam Legacy. Sydney: The Federation Press.
Judt, Tony (2010) Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on our Present Discontents. London: Penguin.
Keating, Paul (1970) Maiden Speech, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, Second Session of the Twenty-Seventh Parliament, 17 March 1970: 514-515.
Keating, Paul (1992) “Address to the National Family Summit”, Parliament House Canberra, 11 November 1992. http://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/transcripts/00008719.pdf, accessed 22 December 2014.
Keating, Paul (1993) “Speech at Women, Power and the 21st Century”, Melbourne, 3 December 1993, http://pandora.nla.gov.au/nph-wb/19990627130000/http://www.keating.org.au/
details16.html, accessed 22 December 2014.
Lake, Marilyn (1992) “The Independence of Women and the Brotherhood of Man: Debates in the Labour Movement Over Equal Pay and Motherhood Endowment in the 1920s.” Labour History, 63:1-24.
Levitas, Ruth (1998) The Inclusive Society? Social Exclusion and New Labour London: Macmillan.
Liddington, Jill and Jill Norris (1978) One Hand Tied Behind Us: The Rise of the Women’s Suffrage Movement. London: Virago.
McCann, Joy and Wilson, Janet (2012), Representation of Women in Australian Parliaments, Parliament of Australia, Parliamentary Services, 2012, http://www.aph.gov.au/
About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp1415/
WomanAustParl, accessed 19 December 2014 .
McDowell, Linda (2014) “The Sexual Contract, Youth, Masculinity and the Uncertain Promise of Waged Work in Austerity Britain.” Australian Feminist Studies, 29 (79): 31-49,
Macklin, Jenny (2013) Doorstop, Melbourne, 1 January 2013, http://www.formerministers.dss.
gov.au/13238/dad-and-partner-pay-family-payments-parenting-payment-doorstop-
melbourne/, accessed 21 December 2014.
Messner, Michael A. (2007) “The Masculinity of the Governator: Muscle and Compassion in American Politics.” Gender & Society, 21 (4): 461-80.
48
“Incorporating gender equality: Tensions and synergies in the relationship between feminism
and Australian social democracy.”
Meyer, Thomas with Lewis Hinchman (2007) The Theory of Social Democracy. Cambridge: Polity.
Mirowski, Philip (2013) Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. London: Verso.
Murray, Rainbow (2010) “Introduction: Gender Stereotypes and Media Coverage of Women Candidates.” In Cracking the Highest Glass Ceiling: A Global Comparison of Women’s Campaigns for Executive Office, ed. Rainbow Murray. Santa Barbara California: Praegar.
Pateman, Carole (1996) Democratization and Citizenship In The 1990s: The Legacy Of T.H. Marshall. Vilhelm Aubert Memorial Lecture 1996. (Oslo: Institute for Social Research and Department of Sociology, University of Oslo).
Pixley, Jocelyn (1994) “After the White Paper - Where?” Just Policy: 1: 20-26.
Probert, Belinda. (1989) Working life. Melbourne: McPhee Gribble.
Quiggin, John (2012) Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us. Melbourne: Black Inc.
Revaluing Care Research Network (n.d.) http://revaluingcare.net/
Rimmer, Sheila M. (1994) Australian Labour Market and Microeconomic Reform. Melbourne: La Trobe University Press.
Robinson, Joan (1978) “Obstacles to Full Employment.” (1946), reprinted in Joan Robinson, Contributions to Modern Economics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell
Sawer, Marian (1990) Sisters in Suits: Women and Public Policy in Australia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Sawer, Marian (2003) The Ethical State? Social Liberalism in Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Sawer, Marian (2004) “Populism and Public Choice in Australia and Canada: Turning Equality-
Seekers into ‘Special Interests’.” In Marian Sawer and Barry Hindess eds, Us and Them: Anti-
Elitism in Australia. Perth: API Network.
Sawer, Marian (2012) “Andrew Fisher and the Era of Liberal Reform.” Labour History, 102: 71-86.
Scott, Andrew (2000) Running on Empty: “Modernising’ the British and Australian Labour Parties. Annandale, NSW: Pluto.
Carol Johnson
49
Scott, Andrew (2014) Northern Lights: The Positive Policy Example of Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway. Melbourne: Monash University Publishing
Sharp, Rhonda and Ray Broomhill, (1989) Short-Changed: Women and Economic Policies. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Taylor, Barbara (1983) Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century London: Virago.
Whitlam, Gough (1973) “The Emancipation of Women”, Address given to YWCA Convention, Queensland, 24 August 1973, Australian Government Digest, 1 July 1973-30 September 1973, pp. 1152-6.
Whitlam, Gough (1974) “Equal Pay for Women”, Press Statement no 245, 2 May 1974.
Whitlam, Gough (1975) “Speech at the Opening of the Women and Politics Conference”, Canberra, 31 August 1975, available at http://cem.uws.edu.au, accessed 24 December 2014.
Wong, Penny (2011) “Marriage of Equality is a Core Value for All to Hold Dear.” Sydney Morning Herald, 19 November 2011, http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/marriage-of-equality-
is-a-core-value-for-all-to-hold-dear-20111118-1nn28.html, accessed 27 April 2014
Wong, Penny (2014) Senator The Hon Penny Wong, “Speech at 2014 Annual Jessie Street Luncheon”, Parliament House, Sydney, 11 April 2014, http://www.pennywong.com.au/
speeches/2014-annual-jessie-street-luncheon/, accessed 24 December 2014.
Yeatman, Anna (2014) “Feminism and the Technological Age.” Australian Feminist Studies, 29:79, 85-100.
50
“Incorporating gender equality: Tensions and synergies in the relationship between feminism
and Australian social democracy.”
Revisiting Social liberalism
and feminism in New Zealand1
Jennifer Curtin
University of Auckland
Jennifer Curtin
51
The influence of ideas has become of increasing interest to scholars in recent years with attempts
to reveal the causal effects of ideas on changes or variations in policy outcomes (Blyth 2002;
Rochon 1998). However, this focus on empirically-determined cause and effects relies on two
problematic notions. First, that evidence of the impact of ideas can only be demonstrated when
a change occurs and when new ideas emerge (Cox 2004, 206), and second, that history does not
matter because time is considered to be a ‘discrete, infinitely divisible entity’. As such, history is
included only as ‘the assemblage of moments on a temporal continuum’ (Howlett and Rayner
2006: 1). In response, both Cox (2004) and Howlett and Rayner (2006), suggest the development
of ideational and historical turns in policy studies allow for a more contingent reading of history
(see also Abbott 1992; Buthe 2002; Castles 1989), and a recognition that the ‘stickiness’ of old
ideas can continue to influence policy reform, often incrementally, with an impact beyond what
is first imagined (see also Hall 1989).
In this essay I do not evaluate the various policy making ‘turns’ and models alluded to above.
Rather, in the spirit of the other essays here, I explore the ideas that have underpinned early social
liberalism and social democracy in New Zealand and review how these have been reflected in
and sometimes resisted by feminist claims over time. I conclude by suggesting that there remains
some power in these ‘old ideas’ that could be harnessed politically to reignite social liberal and
social democratic claims for progressive policy reforms in the pursuit of gender equality.
Early social liberalism
The history of progressive politics in New Zealand has a somewhat counter-intuitive countenance.
In his highly cited work The Working Class and Welfare (1985), Francis Castles reminds
comparative scholars unfamiliar with the antipodean world that a historical analysis of New
Zealand and Australia demands we question the Euro-centric claim that the democratic socialist
movement was the ideological midwife of the modern welfare state (1985, ix).2 His interest in
the Australasian cases is not with history for its own sake, but rather to explore the ‘anatomy
of an anomaly’ in order to better understand how class politics, social democratic control of
government and working class strategy intersect with social policy outcomes (1985, xii).
Castles begins with a discussion of the late 1890s and the first decade of the 20th century,
when New Zealand and Australia came to be viewed as innovative social (and democratic)
laboratories. Albert Métin, a socialist who later became the French Minister of Labour, visited
New Zealand and Australia and proclaimed both to embody Socialism without Doctrine. Métin’s
perception was that the colonial labour movements had achieved much by virtue of being
unencumbered by intellectualism (Métin cited in Castles 1985, 12). And it is fair to say that
in the mid-1890s Labour members of parliament were ‘in no way utopian in their dreams or
unreasonable in their demands. They never went in search of misty ideas but were pragmatic
and reformist’ (Brown 1962, 3).
52
Revisiting Social liberalism and feminism in New Zealand
And yet, the lack of ‘misty ideas’ did not represent an absence of any ideas. As the work
of Marian Sawer highlights and the policy histories of New Zealand reveal, the reform agenda
pursued in Australia and New Zealand was underpinned by a rich tradition of social liberal ideas
that overlapped with the principles of the then fledgling labour movement. The combination
produced a particular brand of Pakeha politics known as the ‘Lib-Lab’ era.3 Moderate Labourites
aligned themselves with the governing anti-elitist Liberals and together they pioneered a suite of
policies that reflected early colonial values of equal opportunity for all and the desire for social,
moral and racial harmony through practical reform (Belich 2001, 853; Sawer, 2003; Sinclair 1967).
The ‘innovation’ tag was as much to do with the regulation of the labour market as with
the social security reforms that followed (Castles and Mitchell 1993, 94). The Maritime Strike
of 1890 is remembered as a significant moment in New Zealand, and its defeat signalled
the diminishing of a radical brand of unionism. In its place came recognition that workers’
associations were unavoidable and their inclusion necessary for a stable economy, growth
and a collective prosperity. Specifically, it was not unionism per se that was the goal of labour
moderates, but the passage of legislation to enshrine the rights of workers to a fair wage and to
redistribute wealth in a way that undermined poverty (Brown 1962).
William Pember Reeves was a Liberal member of parliament, and New Zealand’s first
Minister of Labour. Renowned author of State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand,
Reeves is best known for translating socially liberal ideas of an enabling state into law in the
form of the 1894 Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act. Sometimes forgotten however is
that the planning and enactment of the labour-friendly industrial reforms were also informed
by the ideas of Edward Tregear (Brown 1962, 3). Tregear, a freethinker and socialist, believed the
state had a role to play in controlling the rich and protecting the poor. He was also a personal
friend of Reeves and Premier Ballance, and became the first head of the Bureau of Industries,
later renamed the Department of Labour in 1891. He remained head of the department until
his retirement in 1911 (Shaw 2012) during which time he pushed new Premier Richard (Dick)
Seddon for more state regulation and control. Tregear’s influence led to regular amendments to
strengthen the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act, extensions to shops and factories
legislation aimed at improving the working conditions of women and children and, through
his assistance to Seddon, in the design of the Old Age Pensions Act of 1898 (Howe 2012).
But Tregear was also interested in how ideas could inform progressive policy development.
Clayworth (2014) argues that while Tregear was at the helm, the Department of Labour carried
out important research on working conditions and industrial matters around the country, and
Tregear regularly published material in the Journal of the Department of Labour and in journals
overseas, sometimes embarrassing his superiors with his frankness. Eventually, Tregear became
disillusioned with the Arbitration Court’s increasingly rigid rulings in the first decade of the new
century, as did many in the Trades and Councils, when real wages had begun to fall below 1894
rates (Brown 1962, 6; see also Sutch 1942). Tregear’s outspoken position on the issue meant from
1906 his intellectual influence on the Liberal government declined (Howe 2012).4
Jennifer Curtin
53
Thus there is evidence that ideas about what constituted an ‘ethical state’ and the
programmatic reforms required to bring this to fruition underpinned both liberal and labour
political traditions in early New Zealand. Labour put great faith in the efficacy of legislation to
better industrial conditions and hence their chief concern was not so much to build up working
class organisations but to get labour laws passed and a more equal distribution of access to the
country’s wealth. They advocated a graduated tax on large incomes and large estates, a national
land policy whereby the state would purchase private land and lease it to tenant farmers, the
development of a state bank, the cessation of assisted immigration, and legalisation of the eight
hour day (Brown, 1962).
It is unsurprising that many of these aims coincided with those of early Liberals. While
conceptually social liberalism may have come to symbolise a transition from a nightwatchman
state to a nurturing state – from Adam Smith to Keynes – it is not self-evident that New Zealand
ever fully embodied the classical liberal tradition of the nightwatchman state. Rather, in part
because settlement intensified after the heyday of laissez-faire had passed (in the 1870s and
1880s) the relevance of classical liberalism to a new and hopeful colony was challenged by those
more influenced by the ideas of JS Mill, the Webbs, and the Chartists amongst others.
In addition, although it has been commonplace to locate the birth of New Zealand’s social
liberal project from 1890, it is sometimes forgotten that considerable ideational and policy
groundwork for New Zealand’s brand of liberalism had begun over a decade before by Premier
George Grey and his short-lived ministry of 1877-79 (Wilson 1954).
Grey’s ideas were closely aligned with that of JS Mill, with whom he had had numerous
discussions (Wilson 1954). Grey saw national public education as the means by which the
people were to be rendered fit to exercise political rights, thus removing power from the hands
of the governing classes. Parliament was to be reinvented as a democratic body through the
introduction of manhood suffrage and triennial parliaments, and the abolition of plural voting
and adjustment of representation according to population. Alongside this, Grey was keen on
reforms of an economic nature. He was for free-trade and advocated the abolition of duties
on the necessities for life, and sought a more ‘just’ system of taxation. Specifically he proposed
a land tax on the absentee landowner and the speculator, and his colleagues in the ministry
supported the state’s purchase of large estates for subdivision to be made available as farms to
the landless.5 Members of the early Liberal party advocated for a state bank issuing cheap loans,
free grants of land to unemployed workers, taking duties off basic goods and reserving taxation
for joint stock companies’ income as a general income tax was thought to harm the working
classes. Indeed, Grey’s ministries held strong sympathy for the labouring classes and introduced
a measure to legalise trade unions in 1878 (Wilson 1954, 20-34; see also Belich 2001).
In addition, there was perceived to be a very real need for government to consolidate a
centralised state apparatus (provinces had been abolished in 1876), to protect fledgling rural
and urban enterprises, (although there was less interest in supporting larger enterprises), and to
54
Revisiting Social liberalism and feminism in New Zealand
build an independently governed democratically elected state separate from Australia. As part
of the latter, the democratic claims for enfranchisement of Pakeha and Māori, men and women
became entwined with the nation-building project (Belich 2001; Wilson 1954). Indeed Grey,
‘true to the precepts of John Stuart Mill’ proposed that women who were ratepayers be given the
right to vote and to become members of the House (the latter right was not granted until 1919)
(Wilson 1954, 30).
Not all these ideas became embedded if measured in terms of legislative outcomes and
policy implementation. Wilson (1954) attributes this lack of programmatic success to the
residual power of conservative forces, as well as to Grey’s personality, and it was to take a
decade of economic depression before working people and those facing poverty would demand
the radical liberalism that Grey’s government had offered. But Wilson argues that the Grey
premiership, nevertheless, was an important liberal moment when traditional ideas of liberalism
were melded with new ideas about how to advance the economy and the social lives of workers
and small entrepreneurs. Also important were the ideas of New Zealand’s fledgling organisations
of ‘state-socialists’ (Brown 1962, 2) and the values of mutualism and communitarianism brought
to New Zealand by the skilled working class who had arrived in the 1870s (Nolan 2000).
In this way, the foundations of the social liberal-social democrat governing alliance settled
around the notion that the responsibilities of the state must be expanded in order to secure equal
opportunity: to recognise individual rights and equality before the law, and to enable a better
life, a humane life, for its people, particularly those in need. Notions of egalitarianism in New
Zealand were not about the absence of class but the absence of extreme class distinction, class
oppression and conflict, and gentry rule. Politicians at the time saw themselves as reflecting
these beliefs and led the early Liberals to imagine themselves as able to represent labour, farmers
and entrepreneurs, prompting legislative change on four fronts, land, labour, welfare and
women’s rights (Belich 2001, 22-23, 42-44).
Social-liberal and labour feminist claims
The ideas of JS Mill and others had also infiltrated feminist thinking and activism in the late
1800s. The right to education was of significance to women and feminists claimed that it was
the state’s role to ensure that women received as good an education as men. There were other
feminist claims – for the vote, for less constraining norms around dress and exercise, for
matrimonial property rights, and for better working conditions and decent paid work. However,
for the most part the feminist project at this time was only somewhat radical and reformist, not
unlike the early social-liberals. Feminists challenged Victorian conservative ideas about women’s
rights and capacities, but were reformist in that often they only partly challenged women’s
destiny as wives and mothers. This is manifest most obviously in their claims for political rights
and economic rights.
Jennifer Curtin
55
Although New Zealand is best known for its early adoption of female suffrage (1893),
other feminist achievements had accompanied this, in line with social liberal ideals. Women
ratepayers had voted in some local body elections since 1867 and this was extended to the colony
in 1876. Several suffrage bills had been presented to parliament in the 1870s and 1880s, and
Elizabeth Yates was elected the first female mayor in the British Empire in 1893 (Belich 2001,
45). Suffrage claims were shaped by two central themes that overlapped: equal rights for women
and the moral reform of society (Atkinson 2003; Belich 2001). As such, the quest for equality
evolved out of the liberal individualism of the enlightenment and the moral reform movement.
Indeed, William Pember Reeves argued women won suffrage as a result of the activism of the
temperance movement and its desire for prohibition, rather than as a result of an adherence to
the ideas and arguments put by John Stuart Mill (Reeves cited in Grimshaw 1987, 109). As such
Reeves did not see his own social liberalism reflected in his feminist peers’ claims for political
rights. However, both Grimshaw (1987) and Atkinson (2003) argue it is impossible to ignore
the influence of rights-based claims of the British feminists on their New Zealand counterparts.
Mill’s influence on liberal male supporters of suffrage inside the New Zealand parliament
(Hall, Vogel, Stout) was also widely recognisable (Atkinson 2003, 84-85). Moreover, although
Liberal Premier Ballance had been concerned that giving women the vote would result in a
surge of support for the conservatives, it is likely that the opposite occurred. Although there
is no empirical evidence that women’s votes had any impact on the overall result of the 1893
election, we know at least two thirds of New Zealand women over 21 voted, and that the Liberals
consolidated their hold on power in 1893 (Atkinson 2003, 96). Premier Seddon, formerly antisuffrage but ever the populist, became the suffrage movement’s biggest advocate when overseas,
building the belief that women were more liberal than conservative (Grimshaw 1987, 120).
However, feminist interpretations of Mill’s liberalism did not extend to claiming the right
to stand for election. Atkinson (2003) argues that suffragists did not expect or desire to see
women representatives in parliament. Rather, they believed that women were equal but different,
and accepted that their political influence would be largely confined through the ballot box to
issues concerning women and children. Thus, while not all women were wedded to the cult of
domesticity, the practical impact of New Zealand’s social liberal focus on the family stilled the
potential of more radical feminist demands (Dalziel 1986; 1989; Grimshaw, 1987a).
Feminist disunity was also apparent around domesticity and women’s role as breadwinners,
the contest around which is comprehensively discussed by Melanie Nolan (whose compelling
arguments I draw on further below). For although feminists looked to the state for key reforms
in New Zealand (as they had in Australia, see Sawer 2003; Sullivan 1994), their demands
only sometimes challenged the state to think more radically about equality with men and
the gendered nature of economic citizenship. Nolan argues against the notion that the state
attempted to support the institutionalisation of a fixed and particular model of domesticity. The
Liberals did endorse the male breadwinner model to support a family wage, and this did lead
to economic discrimination against women in that it curtailed equality of remuneration and
labour market participation. They also embraced a degree of paternalistic protection of women
56
Revisiting Social liberalism and feminism in New Zealand
as mothers and wives through the use of labour legislation. However, Nolan argues that these
two strands of liberal impulses resulted in the state juggling the promotion of women’s rights as
individuals with communitarian or family objectives, and often in a way that reflected its own
economic interests as employers, and sometimes to the benefit of women. The intention, she
suggests was not to disadvantage married women economically, nor to prevent women’s labour
market participation, particularly for single women. Rather, early social liberal reforms resulted
in a liberalising of domesticity, and set the scene for further female-friendly reforms to the male
breadwinner model from the 1920s onwards (Nolan, 2000 35, 41).
Nevertheless as with much public policy innovation, there were both intended and
unintended consequences of these competing impulses. The protective legislation was at times
both remedial (for factory workers) and preventative (thus excluding women from coal mines);
protective and reactionary (around women’s role as barmaids), and at times discriminatory (in
the case of married women teachers and nurses who became unionised through associations
as a result) (Nolan 2000, 41-68). At the same time, the state’s education system trained a nation
of women, not to be equal to men, but to enter paid employment. Nolan (2000) reveals that
this was especially true of clerical work. Between 1890 and 1939 the proportion of women in
office work rose from 2 per cent to 40 per cent, with the increase correlated with the significant
increases in the number of girls with post-primary qualifications (Nolan 2000, 65). Although
domestic education later experienced a revival, with support from some women’s organisations,
girls themselves often resisted the push toward domestic work (Belich 2001).
The Liberal and later the Reform governments did not stand in the way of women’s paid
employment if that is what employers wanted (the public service included), but over time it
became apparent that the wages awarded under the arbitration system were not sufficient to
support low income workers with large families. As a result, the Family Allowance Act of 1926
instituted a means-tested benefit that was applied for by the breadwinning husband but paid to
the wife. The measure had wide political support – including from women’s groups at the time,
and Nolan argues liberal feminists gained more from the legislation than is usually suggested
because these allowances helped to unravel the sole focus on the male in New Zealand’s
breadwinner model (Nolan 2000, 139-141). The family allowance might not have promoted
women’s wage work, or equal pay as workers, but it gave women an income for the first time and
a taste of economic independence.
Women’s organisations had lobbied hard for the introduction of a version of the family
allowance. An alliance formed between Labour Party women and the liberal-centrist National
Council of Women both of whom argued that women and children had their own rights to
subsistence, separate from those of men. There had been a range of measures debated – and
women’s organisations supported a variety of these – equal pay, motherhood allowance, and
childhood endowments. And while there might not have been total agreement between women’s
organisations at the time, there was a growing consensus across the political divide of the
importance of extending the notion of citizenship to encompass social rights, including the
Jennifer Curtin
57
alleviation of family poverty through state intervention, based on a citizen’s right to economic
subsistence, whether male or female (Nolan 2000, 140). These ideas on the role of the state
reflected the social liberal traditions articulated by Grey and later Liberals and their feminist
counterparts, and continued to inform the development of what was to become Labour’s
modern welfare state.
As such, thus the family allowance retained a central place in the nation’s policy architecture
although campaigns for both a living wage and a family wage did not decline, and were central to
union claims (Olssen 1989). Trade unions argued for increases to the family wage while women
in the Labour Party and their supporters, argued (with other women’s groups) for an increase in
the family allowance. It was to take the election of the Savage Labour government in 1935, and
further lobbying by women’s groups before the family allowance was increased (in 1939), and
then made universal in 1946 (Nolan 2000, 164). Savage noted, when expanding social security,
that he was ‘taking off where [Premier] Dick Seddon left off ’ suggesting Labour’s intentional
continuation of a social liberal project (Oliver 1989, 82).
Economic security for families and poverty alleviation became Labour’s underlying message
during the mid-1940s and leading into the 1949 election campaign (to paraphrase Walter Nash,
the nation needed happy mothers and happy children in happy homes; see Nolan 2000, 193-194).
It is around this time we see women as voters being sought by both parties with the National
party promising a special cabinet minister concerned with the interests of women and children
(Hilda Ross).6 During this period then, the domestic sphere was reinvented as the preferred site
for women – we see the reactivation of the marriage bar and idealisation of the family.
But despite the political narrative, the proportion of married women in the labour market
continued to rise and women’s concerns around issues of equal pay continued to percolate
throughout the 1950s and 1960s (Nolan 2000, 194-198). However, the social liberal consensus
did not stretch to the state actively supporting women’s access to paid work and the state was
resistant to feminist campaigns for its involvement in ensuring equal opportunity for women
as individual citizens. The social democratic ideas so strong in the Scandinavian system were
muted if not absent in the context of the New Zealand state’s policy responses to feminist
demands during this period. There was no state-sanctioned expectation that women would
return to work when their child was two or three, there was no systematic funding of longday, quality child care and no paid maternity leave forthcoming. Nor was the benefit for single
mothers (the domestic purposes benefit) universally supported.
It may well be that collective ideas about equal opportunity and ameliorating the vagaries
of the market, particularly their impact on low income families have, alongside the claims for
individual rights before the law, produced an enabling state that benefitted a broadly socially
liberal feminist project – albeit unintentionally at times – but one that was not explicitly social
democratic. We know that women’s economic citizenship – their material well-being and
economic independence – were key ideas for feminist activists throughout the 20th century, and
58
Revisiting Social liberalism and feminism in New Zealand
although perhaps radical around the edges at different points in time, were largely socially liberal
in seeking a solution (Nolan 2000; 2002). The solution was state-led reform, for although women
had entered trade unions and female membership had increased, unions were not seen to be the
natural home for gender-specific claims or strategies.
Given Labour’s intermittent and rare stays in government post 1949 this may have been
a sensible if not planned strategy. Labour Party policy ideas were stymied by long periods of
National government, and labour union strategies that engaged in corporatist-style policy
development around labour market equality for women, in pay, access and support (through
child care and paid parental leave), evident elsewhere, were near impossible, assuming they were
desirable. This doesn’t mean that the New Zealand labour movement’s collective (gender-blind)
strategies like centralised wage bargaining did not help families and lead to some reduction in
the gender pay gap. However, comparative research demonstrates feminist strategies in the name
of women, are also required to address women’s specific claims around economic equality, and
it is these, female-centred feminist claims that the liberal state found difficult to process in New
Zealand in the 1970s (Curtin 1999).
For feminists it was unfortunate that the welfare state innovations of the first half of the
decade later began to falter (Castles 1985) compounded by the almost complete dominance of
a conservative National government during most of the period when social movement activism
took hold in New Zealand. But perhaps more significantly, the social-liberal consensus that
guided citizens’ expectations of an enabling state was to collapse almost completely under the
weight of neo-liberal ideational turn in the 1980s.
The Neo-liberal turn, and the future of feminist politics
Labour and National governments elected in the 1980s and up until the mid-1990s proceeded
with speed and spectacular boldness to deconstruct and bury many of New Zealand’s social
liberal foundations. It is ironic perhaps that the early Liberals ‘enabling state’ initiatives and
Labour’s extension of these into a modern welfare state should be dismantled by a long-awaited
Labour government elected in 1984 (Oliver 1989). New Zealanders witnessed a comprehensive
adoption of neoliberal economic and new public management principles. These new policy
settings led to radical shifts in the direction of regulatory, social and labour market policies.
Yet, again we witnessed a contradictory moment of import: new market-liberal policies
were introduced by the state at a time when Labour feminists were ready to seek gender specific
policy reforms through an increased number of women representatives in parliament, through
the presence of committed feminists in the hierarchy of the party machine and cabinet, and
through the establishment of a Ministry of Women’s Affairs. It is the case that some policy
wins were made by women during this time, in terms of economic citizenship claims, but
financial deregulation, state sector restructuring and the slow shift to a more decentralised wage
Jennifer Curtin
59
bargaining framework, undermined these initiatives. Moreover, historically social liberal ideas
had linked economic and social rights. This link mattered for women as they were employees of
the state as well as beneficiaries of centralised wage bargaining and family allowances. As such,
their economic wellbeing was intimately woven into a socially liberal state that ensured market
freedom did not undermine the civic standing of women as individuals.
During the term of the fourth Labour government the connection between social and
economic rights was unclipped and women were disadvantaged as a result (Curtin and Devere
2006; McLelland and St John 2006). The Bolger-led National government picked up the baton of
market liberalism, embracing it wholeheartedly including significant cuts to and reorganisation
of social services. This ensured that in just one generation (from 1984-1999) the New Zealand
state’s core tenets of social liberalism, were stripped away, lost, to become part of history and
open to claims of mythology. In its place came the ideas that informed the classical liberalism
that George Grey and other liberals of the 19th century had hoped to forestall.
Perhaps we could argue that the fifth Labour government led by Helen Clark (1999-2008)
reimagined a version of social liberalism – that invoked a more social democratic feminist
thinking with women’s economic independence becoming a central platform. And there was
an explicit recognition by Labour that women were permanent labour market participants, that
economic conditions required them to work, but that many were also choosing to work, and
that the market alone was unable to sufficiently support working mothers. The boosting of child
care support, paid parental leave, benefits for working families, and welfare to work policies were
core parts of Labour’s agenda in the 21st century. There was some re-regulation of the labour
market, although legislated pay equity and fully centralised wage setting mechanisms remained
historical relics and not all feminists were happy (Curtin and Devere 2006; St John 2013; Wilson
et al 2013). Moreover, Labour’s renewal of social liberalism was reimagined in the context of
co-existing with market liberalism, with the latter somewhat anaesthetised but not replaced. And
with the arrival of a National government in 2008, ideas that market liberalism should somehow
be constrained and state intervention to reduce poverty enhanced once again were considered
heresy, labelled as radically left, belittled by mainstream media. The concern with growing
inequality, inadequate minimum wages and increasing child and family poverty remains, but
champions of a new social liberal project in parliament are difficult to find.
In the 2014 election, Labour appeared unsure about how best to reengage with its social
liberal and social democratic traditions; yet in some ways the Mixed Member Proportional
electoral system should allow the party to do just that. There were a number of parties to
Labour’s left that took up the cause of the impoverished and the marginalised – Māori, Pacifica,
young people and others who have not benefitted from the trickle down promised decades ago.
And feminists were also more visible in the 2014 campaign than in 2011. Their projects were
diverse, their list of claims long, and there was a battle for the small space that is given to social
policy claims. This was made most obvious when the Advisory Group on Child Poverty argued
that increased funding for paid parental leave would be better spent on children. For a brief
60
Revisiting Social liberalism and feminism in New Zealand
moment there was talk of the possibility of a progressive left coalition, but this did not result,
with some shock expressed at the low vote for the left of centre parties (Curtin 2014).
Nevertheless, the possibility of a progressive left coalition is an important imagining – and
one that Labour needs to engage with in much more depth leading into the 2017 election. There
is no longer any consensus on what social liberalism in New Zealand should look like, but nor
does the New Zealand electorate believe that unfettered market liberalism and corporate welfare
is the answer. So what might a project of social liberal – social democratic – feminist renewal
involve in 21st century New Zealand?
First, we should remember that ideas about equality between the sexes in law in the name of
women can be made under liberal National governments. This has happened with matrimonial
property, some domestic violence legislative reforms and we know that some National women
MPs and ministers have been liberal feminists at heart (Chappell and Curtin 2013; Curtin,
2014a; Curtin and Teghtsoonian, 2010). The critical point is that in the post-1990 environment
such initiatives must have no economic implications for the state. However, legal reform can be
an important instrument in conservative times to advance women’s rights as individuals.
Second, contemporary demands for a ‘living wage’, for a focus on family (widely defined)
and for other means to address child poverty (and poverty more generally) have disproportionate
benefits for women as well as children. They also resonate with our foundational social liberal
discourses. History reveals that it took an economic depression for citizens to come in behind
social liberalism in force. And social liberal ideas in New Zealand have had at their core a belief
that the amelioration of poverty is the state’s responsibility. Claims for a living wage have the
potential then to reignite citizens’ expectations that both state and market design work fairly and
ethically in the material interests of (women) workers and their families.
Third we need to remember that the idea of a ‘just’ taxation system has a long tradition
in New Zealand social liberal thought. George Grey was intent on ensuring tax was applied
to absentee capitalists and speculation, a principle (reflecting Mill’s doctrine of the ‘unearned
increment’) that would mean in current times that multinational corporations and developers
should be taxed at appropriate levels (Wilson 1954, 25). A Capital Gains Tax is but one
contemporary version of a potentially ‘just’ tax, although Labour was unsuccessful with winning
significant voter support for its version in 2014. While new taxes and tied grants are unpopular
amongst governments, voting surveys demonstrate that respondents want state involvement in key
areas like health and education, and do not always understand why it is that budgets do not allow
it. A progressive political party could appeal to New Zealand’s distinctive social liberal tradition,
which would enable it to recall a period when tax was used to undermine rather than exacerbate
class and wealth divides, and in this way to re-engage the politics of a ‘just’ taxation system.
Finally, it is evident that some social democratic ideas around economic independence
through labour market participation can be rejuvenated to sit alongside the traditions of social
Jennifer Curtin
61
liberalism, particularly when Labour-led governments are elected. New Zealand’s Working for
Families policy is by no means perfect, but it has become a policy that is difficult for the right
to dismantle, while paid parental leave has been extended, and (less generous) state-supported
day care is accessible and normalised. These incremental gains gives feminists leverage to pursue
incremental reforms that may have the potential to radicalise women’s equality in decades to
come, as they have before (see Nolan 2000).
I don’t want to play Pollyanna and I am no economist. The chances of a Labour win in
September 2014 were always slim, and it is not evident that even if they had won, a progressive
social liberal reform project would have been forthcoming. Unfortunately it appears that Labour
is struggling to (re)define itself in relation to what might be considered the progressive left and
is bound up in left-right internal factional politics that are less formalised than in Australia but
are nevertheless equally poisonous and make the electorate nervous. And it is of concern that in
New Zealand the left has not managed to engage in productive pre-election coalition politics that
signals to voters that policy ideas and debates on the role of the state will feature in campaigns.
So what hope is there for future feminist revivals? Will feminist lobbying and the claims
of women’s groups survive another National term in government? Will they be able to convince
Labour that supporting women as workers, mothers and citizens is substantively more than
‘identity’ politics? Melanie Nolan (2000, 299-305) argues that JS Mill’s conception of liberal
citizenship proved a useful tool for feminist demands of the developing state. In particular,
their claims around the rights of women to be equal with men, before the law and in terms of
their material wellbeing fostered an outpouring of support from new women voters. She also
suggests there has been an important maternalistic discourse that featured historically– one that
demands the state support women in the home as well as in the labour market. She concludes
that women in New Zealand want to be able to have the material freedom to choose and balance
paid work and motherhood, and this should be a choice that all women can make, not restricted
to those on high incomes. A progressive feminist project that engages again with ideas on how to
reconcile these two competing demands would, I suspect, gain much traction with New Zealand
women. And it is a project that would fit with a renewed social liberal social democratic project
for progressive parties on the centre-left that are brave enough to think beyond the next election.
62
Revisiting Social liberalism and feminism in New Zealand
References
Abbott, A. (1992) ‘From causes to events: note on narrative positivism,’ Sociological Methods and Research 20, pp. 428-455.
Atkinson, N. (2003) Adventures in Democracy. A history of the vote in New Zealand, Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago Press.
Belich, J. (2001) Paradise Reforged. A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000, Auckland, New Zealand: Allen Lane/Penguin Press.
Blyth, M. (2002) Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, B. (1962). The Rise of New Zealand Labour. A history of the New Zealand Labour Party from 1916-1940, Wellington, New Zealand: Price Milburn.
Buthe, T. (2002), ‘Taking temporarility seriously: Narrative, general theory, and historically specific theory,’ American Political Science Review 96 pp. 481-493.
Castles, F.G. (1985) The Working Class and Welfare. Reflections on the political development of the welfare state in Australia and New Zealand 1890-1980, Wellington/Sydney: Allen and Unwin/Port Nicholson Press.
Castles, F.G. (1989) The Comparative History of Public Policy, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Castles, F.G. and Mitchell, D. (1993) ‘Worlds of Welfare and Families of Nations’ in F.G. Castles (ed.), Families of Nations. Patterns of Public Policy in Western Democracies, Aldershot, UK: Dartmouth Publishing, pp. 93-128.
Chappell, L. and Curtin, J. (2013) ‘Does Federalism Matter? Evaluating State Architecture and Family and Domestic Violence Policy in Australia and New Zealand’, Publius. The Journal of Federalism 43 (1) pp. 24-43.
Clayworth, P. (2014) ‘Social sciences - Forerunners of the social sciences’, Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, retrieved from <http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/
cartoon/45758/secretary-for-labour-edward-tregear-1910>
Cox, R.H. (2004) ‘The path dependency of an idea: why Scandinavian welfare states remain distinct’, Social Policy and Administration 38 pp. 204-219.
Curtin, J. (1999) Women and Trade Unions. A Comparative Perspective. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
Jennifer Curtin
63
Curtin, J. (2014) ‘The Rise and Rise of the Right in New Zealand?’ Inside Story, 23 September, retrieved from http://insidestory.org.au/the-rise-and-rise-of-the-right-in-new-zealand
Curtin, J. (2014a) ‘Conservative Women and Executive Office in Australia and New Zealand’ in K. Celis and S. Child (ed.), Gender, Conservatism and Representation, Essex, UK: ECPR Press.
Curtin, J. and Devere, H. (2006) ‘Global Rankings and Domestic Realities: Women, Work
and Policy in Australia and New Zealand’, Australian Journal of Political Science 41 (2)
pp. 193-208.
Curtin, J. & Teghtsoonian, K. (2010) ‘Analysing Institutional Persistence: The Case of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs in Aotearoa/New Zealand’ Politics and Gender 6 (4) pp. 545-572.
Dalziel, R. (1986) ‘The Colonial Helpmeet. Women’s role and the vote in nineteenth century New Zealand,’ in B. Brookes, C. Macdonald and M. Tennant (eds.), Women in History. Essays on European Women in New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand: Allen and Unwin/
Port Nicholson Press, pp. 55-68.
Dalziel, R. (1989) ‘Towards Representative Democracy: 100 years of the modern electoral system’, in A. Anderson and D. Green (eds.), Towards 1990. Seven leading historians examine significant aspects of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand: GP Books, pp. 49-63.
Grimshaw, P. (1987) Women’s Suffrage in New Zealand. Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press.
Grimshaw, P. (1987a) ‘Tasman Sisters: lives of ‘the Second Sex’, in K. Sinclair (ed.), Tasman Relations, Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press, pp.224-245.
Hall, P. (1989) The Political power of economic ideas: Keynesianism across nations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Howe, K.R. (2012) ‘Tregear, Edward Robert’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, retrieved from <http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/
biographies/2t48/tregear-edward-robert>
Howlett M. and Rayner, J. (2006) ‘Undestanding the historical turn in the policy sciences: A critique of stochastic, narrative, path dependency and process-sequencing models of policy-making over time,’ Policy Sciences 39, pp. 1-18.
McLelland A. and St John, S. (2006) ‘Social policy responses to globalisation in Australia and New Zealand, 1980-2005’. Australian Journal of Political Science 41 (2) pp. 177-191.
64
Revisiting Social liberalism and feminism in New Zealand
Nolan, M. (2000) Breadwinning. New Zealand women and the state, Christchurch, New Zealand: Canterbury University Press.
Nolan, M. (2002) ‘Gender and the politics of keeping left: Wellington Labour women and their community 1912-1949’, in B. Brookes and D. Page (eds.), Communities of Women: Historical Perspectives, Dunedin, NZ: University of Otago Press, pp. 147-162.
Oliver, W.H. (1989) ‘100 Years of the Welfare State?’ in A. Anderson and D. Green (eds.), Towards 1990. Seven leading historians examine significant aspects of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand: GP Books, pp. 82-90.
Olssen, E. (1989). 100 years of the Union Movement, in A. Anderson and D. Green (eds.), Towards 1990. Seven leading historians examine significant aspects of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand: GP Books, pp. 64-81.
Pember Reeves, W. (1902). State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand, London, UK: Grant Richards.
Rochon, T. (1998) Culture Moves: Ideas Activism and Changing Values, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Sawer, M. (2003) The Ethical State? Social Liberalism in Australia, Carlton, Victoria: University of Melbourne Press.
Shaw, R. (2012) ‘Public service - What is the public service?’, Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, retrieved from http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/photograph/33011/department-
heads-edward-tregear-secretary-for-labour
Sinclair, K. (1967) The Liberal Government, 1891-1912, Auckland, New Zealand: Heinemann Educational Books.
St John, S. (2013) ‘Preventing, Mitigating or Solving Child Income Poverty? The Expert Advisory Group 2012 Report’, Institute of Policy Studies Quarterly Review 9 (2) pp. 47-55.
Sullivan, B. (1994) ‘Contemporary Australian Feminism: A Critical Review’, in G. Stokes (ed.), Australian Political Ideas, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, pp. 152-167.
Sutch, W.B. (1942) The Quest for Security in New Zealand, Harmondsworth UK: Penguin Books.
Wilson, T.G. (1954) The Grey Government, 1877-9. An episode in the rise of liberalism in New Zealand, Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University College Bulletin No. 45.
Jennifer Curtin
65
Wilson, S., Spies-Butcher, B., Stebbing, A. and St John, S. (2013) ‘Wage-Earners’ Welfare after Economic Reform: Refurbishing, Retrenching or Hollowing Out Social Protection in Australia and New Zealand’, Social Policy & Administration 47 (6) pp. 623-646.
1 M
y thanks go to Anna Yeatman, Marian Sawer and Margaret Wilson for including me in this project
and for their insights and feedback on my first presentation of this essay. Thanks also to Linda Trimble,
Carol Johnson and other participants at the Whitlam Institute workshop in August 2014.
2 M
y interest in policy history has been stimulated by the numerous works of Francis G. Castles whose
body of work was celebrated at a special panel at the New Zealand Political Studies Association
Conference in December 2014.
3 P
akeha is a Māori term and refers to white skinned New Zealanders. This essay should be read as a
Pakeha-focused analysis of what might comprise a social-liberal project.
4 T
regear’s influence was also affected by Seddon’s death in 1906 and Premier’s Hall and then Ward were
less populist and less sympathetic to Tregear’s views.
5 A
lthough this was not framed as compulsory repurchase. Later, in 1882 John Ballance, founder of the
Liberals, and a member of Grey’s ministry, drafted a National Land Policy that advocated the state
incrementally purchase agricultural land from large land owners, which could then be leased. This
would undermine future private ‘monopolisation’. A distinction was made between Māori and Crown
land in these discussions, although it is not evident that Māori were consulted on the development of
this policy platform. For more information see http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Stout67-t11body-d1-d3.html
6 Th
e National Party was formed in 1936 as a result of a merger between the former Liberals (that had
become the United Party) and the Reform Party.
66
Revisiting Social liberalism and feminism in New Zealand
Female Orphan School
UWS Parramatta Campus
Cnr James Ruse Drive & Victoria Road
Rydalmere NSW Australia 2116
Locked Bag 1797
Penrith NSW Australia 2751
T + 61 2 9685 9187
F + 61 2 9685 9110
[email protected]
Wwhitlam.org
68