IMAGE: Image shows colour photo of Bonegilla Migrant Hostel. The photo shows a row of single storey buildings. Courtesy of the Department of the Environment.
1972–2001 New movements
In 1972, after 23 years of Liberal-Country Party government of Australia, the Labor Party, led by Gough Whitlam, won government. Over the next three years an array of reforms were instituted by the Labor Government that reflected new ways of thinking about access to education, health and social welfare. In addition, there was a recognition, at least symbolically, of the land rights of Aboriginal Australians. The Labor Government introduced a universal free healthcare system – Medibank – which, though it did not survive the ensuing Fraser Liberal-Country Party Government, was revived as Medicare by Bob Hawke when he became Prime Minister in 1983. In addition, Whitlam introduced the Australian Assistance Plan to encourage development at local and regional levels of community participation in social planning. Although the Australian Assistance Plan was abolished by the Fraser Government, it established the idea in Australia of community development and social planning.200
IMAGE: Image shows the aftermath of Cyclone Tracy in Darwin. The photo shows a street which has suffered extreme cyclone damage. Power lines have fallen down, houses have been demolished and sheets of former roofing and building material is littered along the street. Creator Alan Dwyer. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia. PIC/8827/22 LOC nla.pic-vn3112074 Online access/nla.obj-148903700
The Fraser Government was elected to power amid growing inflation and unemployment in Australia. This was a unique situation in Australia’s economic history and, in fact, the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s presented the worst economic crisis in Australia since the Great Depression. Unemployment rose to 10.3% of the workforce in 1983. It would rise again to almost that much in the early 1990s.
The Labor Party returned to power in 1983. To battle both unemployment and inflation at the same time, they agreed to an accord with the Australian Council of Trade Unions, representing workers, that unions would forego additional claims for pay rises in return for a ‘social wage’. Implicit in the idea of a social wage was a return to a universal health insurance scheme – Medicare. Another trade-off for keeping wages down was the acceptance of the idea of superannuation – hitherto the preserve of the white collar workers and public servants – for all workers. The Labor Party further enshrined the spread of universal superannuation with a superannuation guarantee legislated for in 1992.
Attitudes, ideas and beliefs
In 1969 Australian women were finally granted equal pay with men after several decades of campaigns. The second wave feminist movement had been gaining momentum in Australia. The momentum for Aboriginal rights had also been building from the early 1960s, when Doug Nichols led a protest for the return of land to the people at Cumeroogunga Reserve in New South Wales and the Gurindji people walked off Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory in support of equal pay for Aboriginal workers.201 The 1970s saw a rise in the number of volunteer self-help groups in Australia.202 In this decade the United Nations focussed attention on the rights of people with a disability, passing the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 1975.
In the 1960s Professor Ronald Henderson of Melbourne University had studied poverty in Melbourne, establishing what he called a ‘poverty line’, the level of income below which people would not be living at an acceptable standard for Australian society.203 In the 1970s, on behalf of the federal government, he headed an inquiry into poverty in Australia. His poverty line would remain one measure of how well or not so well social security benefits supported Australian welfare recipients and families for the next four decades.204 Henderson’s inquiry found that in the early 1970s 6.9% of all family units could be classified as very poor.205 Yet, as unemployment rose in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were those who questioned the ‘entitlement’ of the unemployed, particularly the young, to unemployment benefits.
A new term, ‘dole bludger’, was applied by some in the media and federal government to label them, a return in some ways to the views expressed in the nineteenth century about the ‘idle’ poor.206
Major trends and influences of the period
In the 1970s, just as smaller sized units of out of home care for children, such as family group homes, were becoming the norm, a Committee of Inquiry into Child Care Services in Victoria argued against removing children from their families, if at all possible. Instead, every effort should be made to provide support to families to stay together. In the event that this was not possible, foster care was the best alternative for the child.207 Preferably, children in care should be located as close as possible to their own communities. These ideas were radical departures from the practices of many of the Australian states, which removed children and sent them to institutions far from home. At the same time, a renewed awareness of the incidence of child physical abuse and – recognised for the first time – sexual abuse from the 1980s led to stronger measures and legislation regarding the mandatory reporting of child abuse.
IMAGE: Image shows two women outside Trades Hall in Melbourne in 1969. The women are holding signs saying
"Unequal Pay is Sex Discrimination" - "Equal Pay is a Human Right". Courtesy of ACTU Worksite, worksite.actu.org.au, http://worksite.actu.org.au/equal-pay-equal-value/
The renewed emphasis on living in the community was not just expressed in relation to child and family welfare, but also in connection to psychiatric and disability services. There was a newly found emphasis on the location and servicing of welfare needs at the community level, with municipal governments as well as local support and interest groups seeing a role for themselves in supplying services.
Aboriginal activists, advocating for land, welfare and health rights, raised a new awareness in the Australian community of Indigenous rights. Some Aboriginal communities won back land rights and achieved equal opportunity under the law for the first time. Prime Minister Paul Keating publicly acknowledged past wrongs in a public speech delivered at Redfern in 1992. Yet the state of Indigenous health, educational status, equal rights and welfare, particularly in remote communities, remained a cause for urgent action.
Recipients of welfare Women
Perhaps the last piece of the ‘safety net’ of social security benefits offered to Australians was put in place when the Whitlam Government introduced the Supporting Mother’s Benefit in 1973 for those mothers who did not qualify for a widows’ pension. The Supporting Mother’s Benefit provided an avenue whereby single mothers, who overwhelmingly had found it difficult to keep their children in the face of family disapproval, the pressure to give their babies up for adoption, and lack of financial support, could now keep their children. The effect of the pension was dramatic. Within two years of the passing of the legislation, about 80% of the single mothers giving birth at Melbourne’s Royal Women’s Hospital were taking home their babies, a huge increase on the 35% taking their babies home in 1969.208 The achievement of this pension was largely the result of the work of a self-help and lobby group, the Council of Single Mothers and their Children, pioneered by Rosemary West, mother, student and journalist, in 1969.
People with a mental illness
In the 1980s most of the ‘lunatic asylums’ that had been established in the Australian colonies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were still in use as psychiatric hospitals, and their numbers had increased with the addition of more hospitals. The anti-institutional movement of the 1970s and 1980s coincided with the development of the use of medications such as chlorpromazine and lithium to treat psychosis in the 1950s and 1960s, which had allowed many patients’ symptoms to be modified enough for them to function in the community outside of hospital, using the recently developed community health and mental health services for support.209 The number of psychiatric beds occupied in Australia dropped from 30 000 in the 1960s to about a quarter of that in 1992.210
In 1992 a National Mental Health Strategy, to which all states were signatories, agreed to aim to work towards providing as much mental health care as possible outside of the institutional setting. There would still be a need to provide some psychiatric care within institutions, but, even so, it was agreed that existing institutions needed to be modified or replaced to cater for those patients needing long-term care.211 Psychiatric wards in general hospitals would serve other patients. Victoria had already closed its oldest asylum, Kew Mental Asylum, and was the first state to embrace the opportunity to close the others. Tasmania closed its only psychiatric hospital, the Royal Derwent Hospital (formerly New Norfolk Asylum), in 2000. Other longstanding psychiatric hospitals, such as Brisbane’s Woolston Park, and Adelaide’s Glenside Hospital, remain on their original sites.
Children and young people
In most of the state departments responsible for children’s welfare there was an increasing professionalism from the 1970s, as trained social workers replaced the ‘inspectors’ of earlier eras. Fewer children were coming into the care of the state. But many of those who were in state care needed care and protection. Some states had long had clauses within their children’s welfare legislation spelling out the illegality of abusing children. But from 1977, when New South Wales passed amended legislation, until 2009, when Western Australia did, each state legislature passed laws requiring the mandatory reporting of abuse of children by professionals in contact with children.
Most of the states, apart from New South Wales, abandoned most of their own care facilities for children in the last couple of decades of the twentieth century, relying increasingly on non-government agencies to provide services, including the organisation of foster care – now the much preferred form of care for children in all the states. Nevertheless, the ‘difficult’ nature of some children coming into care having experienced abuse meant that residential facilities for ‘hard to place’ children were still required. These most often took the form of family group homes, but in some states, such as New South Wales, larger facilities lingered into the 1990s.212 Although some states, such as Victoria, moved more quickly to regionalise their departmental staff to bring them closer to the ‘clients’, this does not appear to have occurred in the other states in the twentieth century – though Western Australia moved in this direction after the passing of its Children and Community Services Act 2004. Far less generously funded than the other state children’s departments in the 1990s,213 the staff of the Queensland Department had little time to devote to attempting to support families to prevent their children coming into care.2141 Indigenous youths were over represented in Queensland juvenile justice centres.215 By the 1970s Aboriginal people in some states had taken the initiative and formed their own child care agencies to provide culturally appropriate care for Aboriginal children.216
IMAGE: Image shows a painting of the Lunatic Asylum building in Adelaide, South Australia. The building is a large three storey building. Charles Summers. Watercolour. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia pic an5836920
As Australian children moved out of the older institutional forms of out of home care in the late twentieth century, the trend for children with a disability was to not enter institutions in the first place.217 Unlike the beginning of the previous century, when disabled children were hidden away, by the beginning of the twenty-first century few Australian children with disabilities entered residential institutions, nor even attended ‘special’ schools at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Between 1981 and 1993 the number of severely disabled young people (under 30) living in care dropped dramatically, from an average of 15.9 per 100 households to an average of 3.1 per 100 households.218 This fall was largely attributable to the peak bodies that acted as advocates for disabled people and their parents, because it was these bodies that had lobbied the federal government to introduce the Carer Allowance, which was legislated for in 1999.219
Providers of welfare
The peak bodies were an example of a new form of ‘provider’ of welfare in Australia in the late twentieth century. Along with self-help groups and activists, they worked alongside government and the traditional charities and voluntary providers with the aim of achieving social justice. Local community groups began to take action
to promote the welfare of those within their local area – both at a municipal council level, but also at the grassroots level of providing services to meet the needs of local groups.
Women activists focused a spotlight on the problem of domestic violence during this period and provided practical assistance. In 1973 members of the Sydney Women’s Liberation group, led by Anne Summers, opened Australia’s first women’s refuge for victims of domestic violence. The house, in Glebe, was known as Elsie (that was the name on the nameplate of the house). Within five years there were one hundred women’s refuges around Australia.220
Despite federal and state governments providing social security benefits, funding welfare programs and supporting initiatives in health and welfare, in the period from the 1970s, there was an increasingly complex method of delivery of welfare. Some voluntary and religious charitable agencies that had traditionally delivered welfare programs, such as child care, withdrew from the fields of supporting children and families who had moved out of institutions. Many religious orders, for instance, withdrew from the field, leaving the work to an increasingly professionalised lay workforce. Those agencies that remained in the field, however, found themselves increasingly having to adapt their work to changing government priorities in both funding and delivery of care.
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