Competing Capitalisms: Australia

Abstract

Australia since the 1980s has become an important laboratory in which to study the impact of neolibcral reform. Not only does the enthusiastic embrace by Australian policy-makers of market-driven restructuring provide an important test case of the efficacy of neoliberalism, but it also illustrates just what is involved in the shift from one political rationality to another. The period since the 1980s has witnessed an historic shift from a Keynesian-inspired form of social welfarism to a neoliberal economic order in which market mechanisms have become the principal determinants of economic outcomes. More fundamentally, individualism has increasingly replaced collectivism as the underpinning rationale of government. It is a process that has necessitated a transformation of some of the key institutional structures and patterns of organization in Australian society. In addition — at least as far as many policymakers and influential commentators are concerned — it has involved a similar attitudinal shift on the part of the population at large.