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Papers by Ben Spies-Butcher
Housing Studies, Mar 30, 2022
Recent decades have seen a growing consensus among scientists and the public that climate change ... more Recent decades have seen a growing consensus among scientists and the public that climate change is real, posing significant economic and social challenges (see IPCC 2007; CSIRO & BoM 2007). Over the same period policy debates have increasingly focused on market mechanisms to address the emissions that cause climate change. The rise of environmental concerns has coincided with a move towards market-based approaches to policy making more broadly (Pusey 1992; Manne & McKnight 2010). While climate change is widely acknowledged to result from market failures associated with the externalisation of environmental costs, recent policy debate has focused on mechanisms to internalize those costs, and correct the market (see Stern 2007; Garnaut 2008), rather than to displace market approaches to environmental management.
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space
Movements for racial and Indigenous justice are targeting rapidly expanding budget allocations fo... more Movements for racial and Indigenous justice are targeting rapidly expanding budget allocations for prisons and police. In Australia, Indigenous Communities are seeking to redirect public money from the criminal justice system to Indigenous-controlled services and infrastructure through ‘justice reinvestment’. This article explores the possibilities and tensions of justice reinvestment as a strategy for exercising Indigenous self-determination in a marketised policy landscape. Focusing on the case of Just Reinvest NSW and the Maranguka initiative in Bourke, we compare justice reinvestment to neoliberal ideas of social investment, exemplified by social impact bonds (SIBs). We identify three tools of marketisation in SIBs – liability budgeting, pricing evidence, and devolution to non-state providers – and analyse how these are being engaged, and contested, by Indigenous Communities through justice reinvestment. While incomplete, we discuss how Indigenous-run justice reinvestment initia...
Ageing and Society, 2018
ABSTRACTEconomists typically argue population ageing generates fiscal pressures by restricting th... more ABSTRACTEconomists typically argue population ageing generates fiscal pressures by restricting the tax base while increasing demands for social spending. Alongside other economic pressures associated with neoliberalism, this dynamic contributes to a politics of ‘enduring austerity’ that limits governments’ fiscal discretion. The politics of population ageing reflects modelling techniques, such as generational accounting (GA), which, anticipating future deficits, create demands for policy action today to address projected intergenerational inequalities. Taking Australia as a case study, this paper explores the politics of GA in public budgetary processes. While existing critiques reject GA by arguing it relies on ‘apocalyptic’ or unreliable demography, we focus on a different kind of contestation, which applies the techniques and even the categories of GA to frame different problems and promote different solutions. We identify three sites of partisan contest that refocus fiscal model...
Journal of Sociology, 2016
Despite growing evidence of significant impacts from human-induced climate change, policy respons... more Despite growing evidence of significant impacts from human-induced climate change, policy responses have been slow. Understanding this policy inertia has led to competing explanations, which either point to the need to build a consensual politics separated from economic partisanship, or which encourage solidarities between environmental and social movements and issues. This article analyses a recent successful mobilisation, leading to the passage of the Clean Energy Act in Australia, to explore the relationship between attitudes to environmental and social protection, particularly among the core constituency in favour of stronger climate action. Using social survey data from the Australian Election Study, the article finds evidence of independent associations between prioritising environmental concerns and support for welfare state expansion, and a realignment of materialist and post-materialist values. This we argue is consistent with Polanyian analysis that posits a link between s...
Housing Studies, 2015
Abstract Researchers have increasingly recognised a link between homeownership levels and retirem... more Abstract Researchers have increasingly recognised a link between homeownership levels and retirement policy, particularly in English-speaking welfare states. Housing is central to asset-based welfare policies, which may enable households to efficiently manage life course risks, but may exacerbate wealth inequality and expose them to market volatility. Australia presents an important case for understanding the dynamics of asset-based welfare, with its retirement approach combining high homeownership rates and a limited public pension. This paper investigates emerging generational differences in homeownership in Australia. Recent research has identified declining homeownership amongst younger cohorts. Using cross-sectional data, we explore alternative theoretical explanations for this trend. We find no evidence that declining homeownership reflects changing investment choices or delayed family formation. Instead, recent trends are consistent with intensifying inequalities based on class and care responsibilities. This casts doubt on the viability of Australia as a homeownership society and asset-based retirement policies in a financialised economy.
Implementing a Basic Income in Australia, 2019
This chapter explores a “stepping stones” approach to Basic Income in the Australian context. It ... more This chapter explores a “stepping stones” approach to Basic Income in the Australian context. It identifies two policy changes that would mark a partial shift away from Australia’s highly means-tested transfer system towards a more universal model of income support.
The Economic and Labour Relations Review
Despite growing interest in proposals for a universal basic income, little advance has been made ... more 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 l...
The Economic and Labour Relations Review
Critical Sociology
Workfare is an exemplar of neoliberal welfare reform generating precarity. In response, critics h... more 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...
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space
Income-contingent loans are increasingly used by governments around the world to finance the cost... more Income-contingent loans are increasingly used by governments around the world to finance the costs of higher education. We use the case of income-contingent loans to explore how states are bringing the architecture of financial markets inside the state, disrupting conventional understandings of marketisation that are linked to concepts of commodification. We argue that income-contingent loans are hybrid policy instruments that combine elements of a state-instituted tax and a market-negotiated debt. We understand this hybrid construction in terms of the actors and mechanisms characteristic of what Polanyi identified in patterns of ‘redistribution’ and ‘exchange’. We then follow the contested mutations of income-contingent loans in Australia, England and the United States along three axes of hybridity that produce a variegated landscape of higher education finance: determining debt, charging interest and enforcing repayment. Our analysis reveals how, as processes of marketisation inte...
Social Policy & Administration, 2013
ABSTRACT Australia and New Zealand developed distinctive ‘wage-earner welfare states’, with socia... more ABSTRACT Australia and New Zealand developed distinctive ‘wage-earner welfare states’, with social protection largely delivered through high breadwinner basic incomes and residual social policies. Market reforms then pursued in both countries during the 1980s and 1990s retrenched important elements of the Antipodean model. Our article offers a novel characterization of major reforms to both welfare states from the mid-1990s to the early 2010s. We focus on industrial relations, as a form of wage-earner welfare, and expansions to social provision for families and retirees that may be viewed as responding to the evolving needs of wage-earners as family patterns diversify and populations age. Policy reversals complicate the picture of the long-term path of industrial relations. Voters rejected the Employment Contracts Act in New Zealand in 2000 and WorkChoices in Australia in 2007, with incoming labour governments moderating policy to favour wage-earner expectations of decent wages and fair bargaining. Alongside this, governments expanded both paternalistic social policies and private social provision. We argue these changes taken together produced a ‘hollowing out’ of wage-earner welfare in both countries, accompanied by increasingly stratified welfare, which marginalizes and stigmatizes many outside the workforce. But, we also note persistent differences, reflecting the more radical and ‘pure’ New Zealand experiment, its relatively centralized politics and stronger liberal tradition. Hence, Australia retains more progressive taxation and family support less connected with employment status, while making greater use of tax expenditures to support private welfare.
Progressive ideas in the neo-liberal ascendency, 2014
Housing Studies, Mar 30, 2022
Recent decades have seen a growing consensus among scientists and the public that climate change ... more Recent decades have seen a growing consensus among scientists and the public that climate change is real, posing significant economic and social challenges (see IPCC 2007; CSIRO & BoM 2007). Over the same period policy debates have increasingly focused on market mechanisms to address the emissions that cause climate change. The rise of environmental concerns has coincided with a move towards market-based approaches to policy making more broadly (Pusey 1992; Manne & McKnight 2010). While climate change is widely acknowledged to result from market failures associated with the externalisation of environmental costs, recent policy debate has focused on mechanisms to internalize those costs, and correct the market (see Stern 2007; Garnaut 2008), rather than to displace market approaches to environmental management.
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space
Movements for racial and Indigenous justice are targeting rapidly expanding budget allocations fo... more Movements for racial and Indigenous justice are targeting rapidly expanding budget allocations for prisons and police. In Australia, Indigenous Communities are seeking to redirect public money from the criminal justice system to Indigenous-controlled services and infrastructure through ‘justice reinvestment’. This article explores the possibilities and tensions of justice reinvestment as a strategy for exercising Indigenous self-determination in a marketised policy landscape. Focusing on the case of Just Reinvest NSW and the Maranguka initiative in Bourke, we compare justice reinvestment to neoliberal ideas of social investment, exemplified by social impact bonds (SIBs). We identify three tools of marketisation in SIBs – liability budgeting, pricing evidence, and devolution to non-state providers – and analyse how these are being engaged, and contested, by Indigenous Communities through justice reinvestment. While incomplete, we discuss how Indigenous-run justice reinvestment initia...
Ageing and Society, 2018
ABSTRACTEconomists typically argue population ageing generates fiscal pressures by restricting th... more ABSTRACTEconomists typically argue population ageing generates fiscal pressures by restricting the tax base while increasing demands for social spending. Alongside other economic pressures associated with neoliberalism, this dynamic contributes to a politics of ‘enduring austerity’ that limits governments’ fiscal discretion. The politics of population ageing reflects modelling techniques, such as generational accounting (GA), which, anticipating future deficits, create demands for policy action today to address projected intergenerational inequalities. Taking Australia as a case study, this paper explores the politics of GA in public budgetary processes. While existing critiques reject GA by arguing it relies on ‘apocalyptic’ or unreliable demography, we focus on a different kind of contestation, which applies the techniques and even the categories of GA to frame different problems and promote different solutions. We identify three sites of partisan contest that refocus fiscal model...
Journal of Sociology, 2016
Despite growing evidence of significant impacts from human-induced climate change, policy respons... more Despite growing evidence of significant impacts from human-induced climate change, policy responses have been slow. Understanding this policy inertia has led to competing explanations, which either point to the need to build a consensual politics separated from economic partisanship, or which encourage solidarities between environmental and social movements and issues. This article analyses a recent successful mobilisation, leading to the passage of the Clean Energy Act in Australia, to explore the relationship between attitudes to environmental and social protection, particularly among the core constituency in favour of stronger climate action. Using social survey data from the Australian Election Study, the article finds evidence of independent associations between prioritising environmental concerns and support for welfare state expansion, and a realignment of materialist and post-materialist values. This we argue is consistent with Polanyian analysis that posits a link between s...
Housing Studies, 2015
Abstract Researchers have increasingly recognised a link between homeownership levels and retirem... more Abstract Researchers have increasingly recognised a link between homeownership levels and retirement policy, particularly in English-speaking welfare states. Housing is central to asset-based welfare policies, which may enable households to efficiently manage life course risks, but may exacerbate wealth inequality and expose them to market volatility. Australia presents an important case for understanding the dynamics of asset-based welfare, with its retirement approach combining high homeownership rates and a limited public pension. This paper investigates emerging generational differences in homeownership in Australia. Recent research has identified declining homeownership amongst younger cohorts. Using cross-sectional data, we explore alternative theoretical explanations for this trend. We find no evidence that declining homeownership reflects changing investment choices or delayed family formation. Instead, recent trends are consistent with intensifying inequalities based on class and care responsibilities. This casts doubt on the viability of Australia as a homeownership society and asset-based retirement policies in a financialised economy.
Implementing a Basic Income in Australia, 2019
This chapter explores a “stepping stones” approach to Basic Income in the Australian context. It ... more This chapter explores a “stepping stones” approach to Basic Income in the Australian context. It identifies two policy changes that would mark a partial shift away from Australia’s highly means-tested transfer system towards a more universal model of income support.
The Economic and Labour Relations Review
Despite growing interest in proposals for a universal basic income, little advance has been made ... more 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 l...
The Economic and Labour Relations Review
Critical Sociology
Workfare is an exemplar of neoliberal welfare reform generating precarity. In response, critics h... more 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...
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space
Income-contingent loans are increasingly used by governments around the world to finance the cost... more Income-contingent loans are increasingly used by governments around the world to finance the costs of higher education. We use the case of income-contingent loans to explore how states are bringing the architecture of financial markets inside the state, disrupting conventional understandings of marketisation that are linked to concepts of commodification. We argue that income-contingent loans are hybrid policy instruments that combine elements of a state-instituted tax and a market-negotiated debt. We understand this hybrid construction in terms of the actors and mechanisms characteristic of what Polanyi identified in patterns of ‘redistribution’ and ‘exchange’. We then follow the contested mutations of income-contingent loans in Australia, England and the United States along three axes of hybridity that produce a variegated landscape of higher education finance: determining debt, charging interest and enforcing repayment. Our analysis reveals how, as processes of marketisation inte...
Social Policy & Administration, 2013
ABSTRACT Australia and New Zealand developed distinctive ‘wage-earner welfare states’, with socia... more ABSTRACT Australia and New Zealand developed distinctive ‘wage-earner welfare states’, with social protection largely delivered through high breadwinner basic incomes and residual social policies. Market reforms then pursued in both countries during the 1980s and 1990s retrenched important elements of the Antipodean model. Our article offers a novel characterization of major reforms to both welfare states from the mid-1990s to the early 2010s. We focus on industrial relations, as a form of wage-earner welfare, and expansions to social provision for families and retirees that may be viewed as responding to the evolving needs of wage-earners as family patterns diversify and populations age. Policy reversals complicate the picture of the long-term path of industrial relations. Voters rejected the Employment Contracts Act in New Zealand in 2000 and WorkChoices in Australia in 2007, with incoming labour governments moderating policy to favour wage-earner expectations of decent wages and fair bargaining. Alongside this, governments expanded both paternalistic social policies and private social provision. We argue these changes taken together produced a ‘hollowing out’ of wage-earner welfare in both countries, accompanied by increasingly stratified welfare, which marginalizes and stigmatizes many outside the workforce. But, we also note persistent differences, reflecting the more radical and ‘pure’ New Zealand experiment, its relatively centralized politics and stronger liberal tradition. Hence, Australia retains more progressive taxation and family support less connected with employment status, while making greater use of tax expenditures to support private welfare.
Progressive ideas in the neo-liberal ascendency, 2014
Reinventing the Basic Income Trial Conference Presentation to Basic Income Earth Network Congres... more Reinventing the Basic Income Trial
Conference Presentation to Basic Income Earth Network Congress, Tampere, 2018
Dr Ben Spies-Butcher (Macquarie University), Troy Henderson (University of Sydney)
The merits of Basic Income (BI) trials or pilot programs divide BI researchers. The Negative Income Tax trials in North America during the 1960s and 1980s remain important case studies in the history of BI but the usefulness of small-scale BI trials in the current period is a point of contention. On the one hand, trials are the product of – and help to magnify – political and public interest in BI. On the other hand, trials can be viewed as a diversion from the real task of implementing BI on a society-wide and ongoing basis. This paper outlines a middle path between the two poles of small-scale trials involving a few thousand individuals and a truly universal scheme.
We outline a model of “affluence-tested” BI for 20-24 year-olds using Australia as a case study. This youth BI model would target those transitioning between education and work and includes a cohort of 300 thousand individuals in Year 1, increasing to 1.5 million individuals in Year 5 of the trial. We envisage a trial gradually extending eligibility by age in 1 year increments, for example first including 20 year-olds, then 20-21 year-olds, and then 20-22 and so on, over a period of 5 years. It is important the model extend payments for several years to allow recipients to plan and experiment on the basis of the payment. Phasing-in the model also allows the experiment to capture some of the effects of younger people (in late high school) anticipating access to the payment as they make study and work plans. We include some preliminary costings of this model for Australian case study.
Basic Income (BI) has achieved greater prominence in public debate since the 2016 Swiss referendu... more Basic Income (BI) has achieved greater prominence in public debate since the 2016 Swiss referendum and the Finnish BI trial that commenced in 2017. Politicians, union leaders, businesspeople, and other public figures, have increasingly taken a position on the policy, whether for or against. BI researchers can make an important contribution to this public policy debate by examining different " pathways to basic income " that seek to bridge the divide between present political and economic circumstances and the goal of a truly universal and unconditional BI. This paper explores one such pathway to BI in the Australian context. It identifies two policy changes that would mark a partial shift away from Australia's highly means-tested transfer system towards a more universal model of income support. Specifically, we propose a combination of a genuinely universal age pension for which the eligibility age is gradually lowered together with an unconditional Youth BI paid to those aged 20-24 based on a negative income tax model. These proposals are used to explore two conceptual questions. The first is through consolidation of Australia's 'dualised' retirement incomes system, which combines a means-tested public pension with generous tax concessions for private superannuation. The paper explores how universalism can be funded through more consistent taxation, potentially allowing the retirement age to be lowered. The second is how the cost of a BI might be managed through integration with the tax system, specifically by reconceiving part of marginal taxation as a 'claw back' of the payment itself. We argue that this is logically identical to a universal BI, but with a much reduced fiscal impact. We argue together these proposals allow for an alternative to the neoliberal politics of population ageing, addressing emerging intergenerational inequalities in Australia's current dualised model.
Implementing a Basic Income in Australia: Pathways Forward, 2019
Basic Income (BI) can be viewed as a “pragmatic-utopian reform” (Henderson, 2017) aimed at establ... more Basic Income (BI) can be viewed as a “pragmatic-utopian reform” (Henderson, 2017) aimed at establishing a universal social right to a regular cash payment sufficient to meet basic needs. The high fiscal cost of such a policy, together with the cultural force of the “work ethic”, and the specific institutional character of national tax and transfer systems, presents as significant obstacles to this reform. Therefore, we argue that a “stepping stones” approach may offer a way forward in terms of thinking through the intermediate steps between current institutional arrange- ments and the implementation of a truly universal and adequate BI.
Australia’s system of targeted cash payments is one of the most redis- tributive in the world. An influential argument in Australia has been that by directing resources to those with limited means, more can be done to address inequality and poverty with limited resources. Given the targeted nature of the existing system, any move towards universalism is likely to reduce the degree of redistribution per dollar spent, and if done in isola- tion, may even reduce the total level of redistribution of social payments by only extending additional assistance to those with more resources.
There is, however, reason to believe that Australia’s targeted payments system creates new problems, particularly by increasing tax resistance. The “paradox of redistribution” thesis (Korpi & Palme, 1998) claims that by targeting resources only to the poor, welfare programmes become stigmatised, middle class voters see little benefit, and thus the programmes lose the political support necessary to access fiscal resources. While the international evidence is mixed, the thesis is consistent with recent dynamics in Australia. The most targeted payments, especially the Newstart Allowance, have the greatest degree of stigma, have faced consistent erosion and have become subject to new punitive forms of conditionality. Alternatively, the more universal payments, the age pension and family benefits, have enjoyed much greater political support, have had much easier access and more generous indexation and have even seen discretionary increases in payment levels.
These existing institutional structures and cultural dynamics highlight opportunities—and likely points of resistance—in relation to shifting Australia’s system of income support in the direction of BI. In this chap- ter, we first outline the “stepping stones” approach in general. Second, we examine how a combination of a more universal age pension and an unconditional Youth BI (YBI) might serve as an example of the “stepping stones” approach in practice. We conclude by noting how such an approach can help address emerging intergenerational inequalities.
About Implementing a Basic Income in Australia: Pathways Forward
Edited by Klein, Mays and Dunlop
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.