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Commercialisation of social services, cost recovery (fees for services)
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Universal public services, e.g. UNICEF school fee abolition initiative, WHO-Bank Universal Health Coverage
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Reforms social security and welfare systems, targeted safety nets, pensions privatisation
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Social protection floors for all and universal public social security systems, reversing pension privatisation
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Privatisation of public assets, services/ minimalist government
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Building state capacity to promote development, public investment, technology.
The new ‘structural adjustment’ envisaged here will clearly demand very different theoretical approaches and institutions for policy development than that which we have experienced in Australia over the last two decades. A defining feature of that period was the intellectual rigidity and inability of the Treasury–PC policy community to engage creatively with the worlds of social and political (and economic) knowledge beyond the narrow confines of what now appears as neoclassical fundamentalism. In Part Two I shall show how this seeming rigidity was part and parcel of its original remit to assume that social institutions might be treated just like economic markets in the quest for greater productivity. By putting social and political goals on a par with the market, inclusive growth will change these rules of inquiry fundamentally. In this context government does have to seriously consider whether the Productivity Commission will be fit for the new challenges of inclusive governance. We already have indications that this potentially dangerous anomaly of economists presiding over social governance reform may well be ending. The New Zealand Productivity Commission, for example, recommended that social service governance reform in that country be led by a ‘Ministerial Committee for Social Service Reform’ heading up agencies representative of the social services; while the Australian Labor Party (ALP)’s Growing Together proposes an ‘independent social policy oversight body’.
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Unravelling the current, belated, Australian push for dissolving social services into ‘human service markets’ will almost certainly require the creation of some such social service agency with the appropriate knowledge base, links to social sector practice, authority and resources to replace the Productivity Commission as the agency best placed to advise governments on how to progress inclusive governance.
Part Two Part One of this contribution to the Social Service Futures Dialogue proposed that we are currently in the midst of an economic policy model change from ‘market efficiency’ to ‘inclusive growth’ that will inevitably impact our thinking on social governance as equal weight is given to fairness and equality alongside market efficiency. While others are providing much needed discussion of marketisation failure in the social services and community sector, I want to look ahead to the principles and practices which might shape an inclusive governance model. And it is not as though we have time to waste – in a year when the Annual Report of the Council of Economic Advisers (2016) to the President of the United States begins with ‘Inclusive Growth in the United States’ the idea of an economic model change is not loose talk. A policy window is opening and we need to be talking right now about the new inclusive governance agenda if we want to influence this policy transition. As social policy scholars we should be trying to develop a new conversation about what constitutes fairness, equality and inclusion. Fast becoming the Australian political question of the moment, it is one which the policy discourse of productivity and efficiency simply cannot address – as SpiesButcher comments elsewhere in Social Service Futures Dialogue. Interestingly, this challenge is to be taken up in the 2016 UN Development Report with a major focus on what we mean by choice (there being a world of difference between Milton Friedman’s market constructed ‘Freedom to Choose’ and Amartya Sen’s understanding of ‘Development as Freedom’). As United National Development Programme (UNDP) Report Director, Selim Jahan writes, this discussion demands that we recapture the normative dimension of development: ‘social justice, fairness, equality, tolerance, cultural diversity, non-violence and democracy’.