Dude Where’s My Dole? Governmentality in the 21st-century welfare state

Joel Duggan

Graduate Panel 2

Dude Where’s My Dole? Governmentality in the 21st-century welfare state 

Abstract: In recent Australian history, economic policymaking has taken an almost uniquely “rational” form. Yet, Australia entered the 20th century as the democratic laboratory of the world. Drawing upon the Hegelianism of the British idealists, the state was conceived as constituent in human flourishing, an idea ultimately leading to the birth of the world’s first “living wage.” By the end of the 20th century, any such notion was lost. What Michael Pusey called “economic rationalism” had taken hold, and all politics since has taken place in its shadow.

What the Australian case represents is a paradigm shift in governmentality, unique in the sense that we went from among the most aspirational of nation-building states to among the most rigidly positivist. Putting Foucault in dialogue with Weber and Wolin, I argue that since the 1980s, governance in Australia has come to exemplify a pastoral power that subordinates social welfare policy to the imperatives of modern Staatsräson. I pose that the uneasy tension (or harmony?) between this pastoral power and the founding social-liberal ideas of Australia’s welfare state is pivotal to any theory attempting to understand three recent policy crises in Robodebt, the mutual obligations system and the National Disability Insurance Scheme. 

Bio: Joel is a writer and honours student researching in political theory at the University of Melbourne. He has written for Arena, The Conversation and Farrago, and he blogs at pseudrealism on Substack.

**Times listed are for panel times as order of presentations in each panel may differ from the schedule.