COMPARING THE AUSTRALIAN AND SCANDINAVIAN WELFARE STATES

This paper compares and contrasts the Australian and Scandinavian welf are states with a view to demonstrating that, whilst the extent of wel fare expenditures and the instruments of social policy vary quite mark edly in these countries, policy outcomes in terms of levels of inequal ity and poverty and social protection are much more similar. In the co urse of this comparison, the paper casts serious doubts on the usefuln ess of both the prevailing paradigms for evaluating welfare state perf ormance: measures of expenditure effort and measures of welfare decomm odification. Instead, it is argued that welfare state performance can only be properly assessed, as Richard Titmuss pointed out many years a go, by evaluating the impact of fiscal and occupational welfare in add ition to the extent and character of the explicit expenditures of the state. When we broaden our conception of social policy in this way, Au stralia appears much less of a welfare state laggard than it is often taken to be and the oft mooted Scandinavian claim to welfare superiori ty is, perhaps, rather less compelling than is sometimes argued.