Acquiescent market citizens? Age and redistributive policy attitudes in Australia

ABSTRACT

As in other advanced industrial democracies, tax and welfare policies in Australia over the last few decades have tended to preserve benefits for some groups of citizens while the safety net for others is weakened. Young people, including children, are among those bearing increased social risks which tend to be exacerbated rather than ameliorated by redistributive policies. There is little evidence of discontent about the overall redistributive policy context, suggesting it broadly aligns with public opinion. The research described in this paper set out to explore the factors underpinning the attitudes of young adult and senior Australians towards redistributive policy, whether there were differences between the two age groups, and if there was any support for policy reform. The results suggest that the young participants’ habituation to neo-liberal policy settings, particularly their adherence to individualistic norms, made them less likely than the seniors to express negative attitudes towards existing policy settings or to advocate reform.

KEYWORDS:

• policy attitudes
• neo-liberalism
• inequality
• redistributive policy
• welfare reform

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Australia’s after-housing elderly poverty rate is low by OECD standards, but it is considerably higher for age pensioners who are renting (Yates and Bradbury 2010; CEPAR 2018, 23–24).

2 The Government made changes in mid-2018 to strengthen penalties for job seekers who don’t meet their requirements and proposed another raft of new compliance measures in 2019 (Henrique-Gomes 2019).

3 Many age pensioners appear not to consider themselves members of the ‘transfer classes’. Analysis of Australian Survey of Social Attitudes data has found an association between being a welfare recipient and holding negative views of welfare recipients (Schofield and Butterworth 2015).

4 Currently half of the Age Pension budget goes to retirees with net wealth of over $500,000 and $6b to households worth more than $1m (Coates 2018, 18).

5 In 2017–18 this programme amounted to a huge $74b in benefits for homeowners and foregone revenue for the Australian Government (Commonwealth of Australia 2018, 19).

6 In the 2019–20 Budget papers, the Australian Government reported net debt of over 19% of GDP ($374b) (Commonwealth of Australia 2019, 6–7).

7 The University of Adelaide is a member of Australia’s higher-status ‘Group of Eight’ universities, although it is considerably further down in global rankings than some other universities in this group.

8 Adelaide has a history of social progressivism compared to some other areas of Australia, such as regional Queensland.

9 On August 2019 figures, South Australia’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 7.3%, compared to an Australia-wide average of 5.3% (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2019).