- Title
- The social exclusion discourse and welfare reform
- Creator
- Cook, Beth
- Relation
- Australian Social Policy Conference 2009 (ASPC 2009). The Australian Social Policy Conference 2009: Refereed Papers (Sydney 8-10 July, 2009)
- Relation
- http://www.sprc.unsw.edu.au/events/aspc-2009
- Publisher
- Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2009
- Description
- Since the McClure report on welfare reform in 2000, the discourse of social inclusion/exclusion has been used as a justification for welfare reform in Australia. The Rudd Labor Government espouses social inclusion as a focus of policy and has established the Social Inclusion Unit and the Australian Social Inclusion Board to develop and implement policies and strategies to achieve social inclusion. Social inclusion requires that people have sufficient financial and other resources to participate in economic, social, cultural and political life. Against the backdrop of persistently high rates of labour underutilisation that have excluded large numbers of Australians from adequate access to paid work, this paper uses the conceptual framework of social exclusion developed by Levitas (2005) to investigate how the reality of welfare reform has conformed to the ideal of facilitating social inclusion. Welfare reforms are examined against the three discourses of social exclusion: the redistributionist discourse (RED), the moral underclass discourse (MUD) and the social integrationist discourse (SID). The paper concludes that the dominant discourses guiding welfare reform policies in Australia are MUD and SID that are compatible with neo-liberal policies and ignore structural issues.
- Subject
- welfare reform; social inclusion; social exclusion; redistributionist discourse; moral underclass discourse; social integrationist discourse
- Identifier
- uon:8939
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/919659
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