Conditional income transfers and choice in social services: Just more conditions and more markets?

Privatisation is not the only force re-sculpting the rights, power and dignity of recipients of welfare in Australia. As predicted by Peter Dwyer’s idea of the ‘conditional welfare state’ for social security (Dwyer 1998, 2004, 2008), Australian social security payments are becoming more conditional, restricting individual choice (Carney 2011), whereas welfare services are expanding consumer choice (Needham 2011) along with greater reliance on market forces in service delivery. Drawing on the examples of the increasing conditionalisation of social security and the ‘personalisation’ of aged care in Australia, this chapter illustrates this convergence towards a middle ground between respect for individual choice and state paternalism and a rebalancing of the tension between the state and markets. Social policy writers have long observed that conditions on income support payments can run from negligible, such as Britain’s early history of having, ‘but generally not applying’, a work test on the unemployed (Wikeley 1989, p. 296), to very burdensome, as under contemporary ‘activation’ policies in many countries (Handler 2009, pp. 81–87). Changes in the degree and intensity of such conditions can