publications

ABSTRACT: During the 2020 COVID-19 wave, the Australian Government made an additional $550 Coronavirus Supplement available for people receiving social security payments, and temporarily suspended mutual obligation requirements. By doing so, the government effectively gave people who had been long stigmatised and subject to punitive conditionality to compel them into the labour market, financial security and their time back. Drawing on survey responses from people who received the $550 Supplement and had their mutual obligation activities suspended or reduced, this research examines how people used their time during this period and whether it differed from pre-pandemic government policy. We find that the increase in payments through the Supplement and the suspension of mutual obligations impacted positively on people's lives including the (1) the ability of respondents to meet basic needs and improve their long-term financial security, (2) improvements to physical and emotional well-being, (3) increased labour market engagement and (4) engagement in other forms of unpaid productive work.

ABSTRACT: This article is concerned with the recent (2017–2018) basic income experiment in Finland. This experiment attracted global attention, not least because of its break from the conditionalities and sanctions associated with social security payments in workfare states. This article stresses, however, that it is critical to understand how the Finnish basic income experiment was part of a broader programme of government-led reform in Finland. As well as establishing the experiment as a preferred mode of policymaking, this programme contained a range of strategies aimed at restructuring labour supply. The article shows how the basic income experiment should be understood as a behavioural intervention designed to enhance the wellbeing of unemployed populations at a time when wellbeing is emerging as a value-producing capacity.

ABSTRACT: Workfare is an exemplar of neoliberal welfare reform generating precarity. In response, critics have sought to advance a politics of universalism, through either a return to social democracy or the embrace of a universal basic income. Yet, these responses invoke different understandings of universalism. This paper explores the politics of universalism in the context of neoliberal reform to benefit systems. Using Australia as a case study, it applies a variegated understanding of neoliberalism to identify two distinct reform trajectories for family payments and unemployment benefits. While appearing to follow a common template of liberalization, in practice each trajectory fostered distinct social outcomes and political dynamics. I argue the more inclusive restructuring of family benefits reflected the influence of social movement pressure intersecting with an increasingly pro-competition and technocratic state, producing new, hybrid, patterns of universal social provision similar to forms of basic income. However, in reflecting on these political dynamics I highlight how the mobilization of universalism is contingent on existing welfare institutions, suggesting dangers in applying these lessons more broadly.

ABSTRACT: Despite growing interest in proposals for a universal basic income, little advance has been made in implementation. Here we explore policy options for an Australian Basic Income. Our analysis responds to concerns that Basic Income is both too expensive and too radical a departure from existing welfare state structures to be a feasible policy option. Drawing on policy and Basic Income scholarship we identify changes to Australia’s current means-tested benefits structures that move substantially towards Basic Income while remaining consistent with historic policy norms, which we call ‘affluence testing’. Using microsimulation we explore fiscal and distributional trade-offs associated with the implementation of an affluence-tested Basic Income. Our results suggest Basic Income has the potential to significantly reduce inequality and poverty while also requiring taxes to rise substantially. Placing these trade-offs in international context we find the policy would reduce inequality to levels similar to Nordic welfare states while increasing overall taxation to approximately the OECD average.

ABSTRACT: This book brings together scholars from the fields of politics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and economics, to explore pathways towards implementing a Basic Income in Australia. It is the first book of its kind to outline avenues for implementation of a basic income specifically for Australia and responds to a gap in the existing basic income literature and published titles to provide a distinct standpoint in the exploration of basic income within the Australian contemporary policy landscape. The first section of the book outlines some of the continuing substantive and philosophical issues regarding BI implementation. In the second section of the book, authors offer practical strategies and models for progressing BI in Australia.

ABSTRACT: Universal basic income – the idea of guaranteeing a minimum level of income for all – has a long history of been framed as a radical proposal, a way to address issues ranging from wealth distribution and economic justice through to degrowth and gender equality. Yet an increasing number of proponents, especially in international development and public policy circles, see basic income as an efficient technological solution to poverty and economic insecurity. Critical development studies scholars have overwhelmingly problematized such ‘rendering technical’ of complex social, economic and political issues. In this paper, we use a critical development lens to point to two areas of particular danger to the transformative potential of basic income: coloniality and class relations. We do so through two case studies: a proposed basic income for Indigenous Australians and the support of UBI by high-net-worth individuals in California’s Silicon Valley. Using these two cases, we argue that despite best intentions, without critical engagement and nuance around questions of power, the radical potential of basic income may be jeopardized, with basic income becoming another technological quick-fix of development and policy interventions.