Books, book chapters and journal articles

Considine, M. (2022). The Careless State. Melbourne University Publishing.

The Careless State is a timely and forensic examination of the failures of the Australian government’s provision of social services. The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed—particularly through the publicised failures in aged care and employment services—the shortcomings in the way these services have been managed by successive governments. Following an introduction that grounds today’s social services models in their historical context—primarily in reform programs begun in the 1980s—author Mark Considine methodically outlines how employment services, vocational education and training, aged care and childcare have evolved over the past 40-odd years and their failure to look after often the most vulnerable people in our society. In most cases, the programs are both expensive and bad at doing what they set out to do. The root cause, Considine convincingly demonstrates, is the overemphasis on personal choice as the rationale for opening up services to private agencies. The subsequent scale of rorting by private companies and their dereliction of the provision of basic levels of care are staggering. The final three chapters, as well as the conclusion, are more optimistic: Considine highlights the success of Australia’s worker health and safety and maternal and child health programs, teasing out the reasons they contrast so starkly with other services, and suggesting how they can work as models going forward. Appropriately for his role as a political science professor, Considine avoids rhetoric in place of data and evidence, and the scope of his research is impressive. Unfortunately, this means the book is a little dry and a bit of a slog for casual readers. The book won’t have a universal audience but it is interesting for anyone curious about the failures of market interventions in the Australian public sector and a useful resource for advocates for humane social services.

O'Sullivan, S., McGann, M.  and Considine, M. (2021)  Buying and Selling the Poor, Sydney: Sydney University Press.

Buying and Selling the Poor ventures behind the scenes of the multibillion-dollar welfare-to-work system, offering new insights into how Australia responds to unemployment and disadvantage. As the authors tell the story of four local employment offices, they paint a vivid picture of a critically important social service which many people are aware of but which few properly understand. They also reveal the wider impacts that processes of marketisation and welfare reform have had on these frontline services over decades, and how the work of frontline staff and service providers has been transformed.

Buying and Selling the Poor looks closely at how these services operate, why some succeed where others fail, and what can be learned from the stories of staff and clients who have navigated the system. Three decades into this market experiment, how well are we doing in supporting our most vulnerable citizens to get back to work?

Book review: Buying and Selling the Poor: Inside Australia’s Privatised Welfare-to-Work Market on JSTOR

Considine, M., Lewis, J., O'Sullivan, S. and Sol, E. (2015), Getting Welfare to Work: Street-Level Governance in Australia, the UK and the Netherlands, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Getting Welfare to Work traces the radical reform of the Australian, UK, and Dutch public employment services systems. Starting with major changes from 1998, this book examines how each national system has moved from traditional public services towards more privately provided and market-based methods.

Considine, M. and O'Sullivan, S., (eds.) (2015), Contracting-out Welfare Services: Comparing National Policy Designs for Unemployment Assistance, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell

Contracting-out Welfare Services focuses on the design and overhaul of welfare-to-work systems around the world in the light of the radical re-design of the welfare system; internationally based authors utilise a national/program case study, considering employment services policy and activation practices.

McGann, M. (2023). The Marketisation of Welfare-To-Work in Ireland: Governing Activation at the Street-Level. Bristol Policy Press.

This book assesses how the practice of contracting-out public employment services via competitive tendering and Payment-by-Results is transforming welfare-to-work in Ireland.

It offers Ireland’s introduction of a welfare-to-work market as a case study that speaks to wider international debates in social and public policy about the role of market governance in intensifying the turn towards more regulatory and conditional welfare models on the ground.

It draws on unprecedented access to, and extensive survey and interview research with, frontline employment services staff, combined with in-depth interviews with policy officials, organisational managers and jobseekers participating in activation.

Book review: Book Review: The Marketisation of Welfare to Work in Ireland: Governing Activation at the Street Level by Michael McGann - Jay Wiggan, 2023 (sagepub.com)