Brotherhood of St Laurence lunchtime seminar: Just deserts? Retirement incomes policy and the transformation of social rights in Australia

Over the last few decades, changes in retirement incomes policy and provision for old age in Australia and a number of other countries have seen governments encourage individuals to provide for their own old age from private means. In Australia, this has involved a shift from the non-contributory publicly funded age pension towards an increasing emphasis on self-provision through mandated occupational superannuation. This paper situates these changes within the history of retirement incomes policy and broader social rights in Australia and the long-standing tension in the system between the objectives of meeting need and rewarding deservingness. In particular, it draws attention to the way that this tension has played out in debates about the means test on the age pension. It reveals the way in which the historical tension between need and deservingness has created policy legacies that have shaped contemporary reform. For example, as a result of this tension, the growing emphasis on superannuation and its associated taxation concessions, rather than undermining the status of the age pension as a social right, has been constructed as a concurrent or complementary “right” to state support in old age. Finally, it reflects on how these historical tensions may shape opportunities for future retirement incomes policy reform.

Myra Hamilton is a Research Associate at the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. Her PhD in sociology from the University of Sydney was a comparative analysis of retirement incomes policy in Australia and Britain that situated retirement incomes policy in wider processes of welfare reform, and drew on the conceptual traditions of citizenship and the social contract to understand these reform processes. Her main research interests and subjects of publication are the principles underpinning retirement incomes and welfare reform, the service needs and experiences of people with caring responsibilities, and the perceptions and management of social risks over the lifecourse. Recent projects include research on the attitudes and expectations of the baby boomer generation towards retirement, and research on the needs and experiences of children and young people who provide care for a family member with a disability or long term illness. From March to October 2011, Myra was a visiting Lecturer in Public Policy at the University of Bristol in the UK.