Ben Spies-Butcher
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 245272 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Ben Spies-Butcher |
| PRENOMES | Ben |
| SOBRENOME | Spies-Butcher |
| ASSINATURA | BEN SPIES-BUTCHER |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Macquarie University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0427-5082 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 29 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 97 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 29 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2002 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Enduring realignment
Should we stay or should we go? Dilemmas arising from (new) corporate ownership of a digital public space
If a chauvinistic troll billionaire takes control of a digital platform, enabling hate speech and tailoring algorithms around their whims, how should higher education institutional accounts respond? To consider this question, our paper uses a collaborative listening approach to navigate diverse positionings and political imperatives: it presents both collective analysis and individual authored reflections from seven members (faculty and PhD stude…
Comparing asset-based welfare capitalism
The financialization of households complicates how we compare housing systems and welfare states. This article explores the shifting relationships between wealth inequality, welfare states and household risk, focussing on the roles of housing and mortgage markets. We show national regimes of capitalism continue to shape experiences of risk, but increasingly through asset-based welfare mechanisms, centred on housing ownership, that are inadequatel…
Flash in the pan or eureka moment? What can be learned from Australia's natural experiment with basic income during Covid‐19
The COVID‐19 pandemic led to widespread social and economic policy experimentation as governments sought to protect household finances while locking down economies. Cash transfers emerged as one of the most popular policy measures, leading many to reflect on new possibilities for enacting universal basic income through temporary or emergency interventions. We take Australia’s pandemic response, and particularly its Coronavirus Supplement, as an e…
Do independents like to party? The rise in independent and minor party MPs in Australian parliaments since 1970
From marketisation to self-determination
Movements for racial and Indigenous justice are targeting rapidly expanding budget allocations for prisons and police. In Australia, Indigenous Communities are seeking to redirect public money from the criminal justice system to Indigenous-controlled services and infrastructure through 'justice reinvestment'. This article explores the possibilities and tensions of justice reinvestment as a strategy for exercising Indigenous self-determination in …
A basic income for a complex society
Proposals for a Universal Basic Income (UBI) have a long history, but a surge of interest since the global financial crisis suggests a connection to growing inequality and insecurity. The pandemic intensified interest through the global explosion in the use of cash transfers. This special issue arose from pre-pandemic debates among Australian sociologists connecting global interest around UBI to emerging patterns of inequality and insecurity stem…
Come together? The unusual combination of precariat materialist and educated post-materialist support for an Australian Universal Basic Income
International studies using the European Social Survey (ESS) reveal higher support for Universal Basic Income (UBI) in poorer countries with less generous welfare systems, and among individuals with lower income and education, and leftist political leanings. We present data from the 2019−20 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes mirroring the ESS question. Australia falls in the middle of European opinion, with 51% supporting a UBI, increasing sli…
The Nordic Connection
This article examines the impact of recent European basic income experiments on the re-emergence of basic income in Australian public policy and political debate. We argue that while basic income experiments in general have garnered some attention in Australia, the Finnish basic income pilot has been particularly significant. We trace this influence back to the historical tendency of sections of the Australian Left to view Nordic industrial and s…
Integrating the retirement income system and aged care funding in Australia
Retirement incomes and aged care have both received considerable policy attention in Australia over the last three decades, but as in other countries, the two financing systems have remained largely separate in policy and practice. The problem is located at the intersection of wider policy debates about shifts from public to private welfare and concerns over intergenerational equity. This paper aims to integrate these related debates by incorpora…
Between universalism and targeting
Despite growing interest in proposals for a universal basic income, little advance has been made in implementation. Here we explore policy options for an Australian Basic Income. Our analysis responds to concerns that Basic Income is both too expensive and too radical a departure from existing welfare state structures to be a feasible policy option. Drawing on policy and Basic Income scholarship we identify changes to Australia’s current means-te…
Bringing finance inside the state
Income-contingent loans are increasingly used by governments around the world to finance the costs of higher education. We use the case of income-contingent loans to explore how states are bringing the architecture of financial markets inside the state, disrupting conventional understandings of marketisation that are linked to concepts of commodification. We argue that income-contingent loans are hybrid policy instruments that combine elements of…
Advancing Universalism in Neoliberal Times? Basic Income, Workfare and the Politics of Conditionality
Workfare is an exemplar of neoliberal welfare reform generating precarity. In response, critics have sought to advance a politics of universalism, through either a return to social democracy or the embrace of a universal basic income. Yet, these responses invoke different understandings of universalism. This paper explores the politics of universalism in the context of neoliberal reform to benefit systems. Using Australia as a case study, it appl…
Mobilising alternative futures
Economists typically argue population ageing generates fiscal pressures by restricting the tax base while increasing demands for social spending. Alongside other economic pressures associated with neoliberalism, this dynamic contributes to a politics of ‘enduring austerity’ that limits governments’ fiscal discretion. The politics of population ageing reflects modelling techniques, such as generational accounting (GA), which, anticipating future d…
Accounting for Income-Contingent Loans as a Policy Hybrid
Income-contingent loans (ICLs) are becoming widely adopted across higher education sectors internationally, and increasingly proposed for other policy domains. This article explores why this policy form has gained such wide popularity in the context of fiscal austerity and greater financialisation of social policy. It argues ICLs act as a policy hybrid, combining elements of a tax and a loan. The article traces the development of ICLs in their or…
The decline of a homeowning society? Asset-based welfare, retirement and intergenerational equity in Australia
Researchers have increasingly recognised a link between homeownership levels and retirement policy, particularly in English-speaking welfare states. Housing is central to asset-based welfare policies, which may enable households to efficiently manage life course risks, but may exacerbate wealth inequality and expose them to market volatility. Australia presents an important case for understanding the dynamics of asset-based welfare, with its reti…
After New Labour
Growing global integration, combined with the collapse of Soviet Communism, created major challenges for centre-left politics in the democratic world. This article considers two transformative Labour Party-led experiments that refurbished the welfare states of Australia and the United Kingdom, respectively. In Australia, this includes the Hawke–Keating (1983–1996) and Rudd–Gillard (2007–2013) Governments, and in the United Kingdom, the ‘New Labou…
Climate change and the welfare state? Exploring Australian attitudes to climate and social policy
Despite growing evidence of significant impacts from human-induced climate change, policy responses have been slow. Understanding this policy inertia has led to competing explanations, which either point to the need to build a consensual politics separated from economic partisanship, or which encourage solidarities between environmental and social movements and issues. This article analyses a recent successful mobilisation, leading to the passage…
Marketisation and the dual welfare state
Australian social policy has seen apparently contradictory developments over the period of economic restructuring. Social spending has increased based on a highly redistributive model while inequality has grown. This article explores the relationship between Australia’s experience of economic restructuring and the political dynamics of an emerging ‘dual welfare state’. Importantly, the article argues that Australian reformers did not reject the s…
Wage‐Earners' Welfare after Economic Reform
A ustralia and N ew Z ealand developed distinctive ‘wage‐earner welfare states’, with social protection largely delivered through high breadwinner basic incomes and residual social policies. Market reforms then pursued in both countries during the 1980s and 1990s retrenched important elements of the Antipodean model. Our article offers a novel characterization of major reforms to both welfare states from the mid‐1990s to the early 2010s. We focus…
Market Society
Market Society: History, Theory, Practice explores the social basis of economic life, from the emergence of market society in feudal England to the complex and interwoven markets of modern capitalist society. This lively and accessible book draws upon a variety of theories to examine the social structures at the heart of capitalist economies. It considers how capitalism is constituted, the institutions that regulate economic processes in market s…
From Defeat to Landslide Loss
The 2011 NSW election produced the largest two-party swing in recent Australian election history, ending 16 years of Labor government. It raises the prospect of the end of Labor's dominance of NSW politics. This paper focuses on the consequences of ALP instability for the Party's electoral opportunities and strategy in the lead-up to its 2011 defeat. The authors single out the mass departure of Labor MPs prior to the election and the loss of Gree…
Population Ageing and Tax Reform in a Dual Welfare State
Traditionally, older people have been the key targets of Australia’s targeted welfare state. Flat rate pensions and widespread home ownership have ensured relative equality in older life. However, in response to perceived fiscal pressures generated by population ageing, Australia has increasingly shifted its policy settings, encouraging private savings over public risk pooling. Private savings are increasingly supported by public subsidy through …
Suburban Affairs
According to recent international research, political mobilisation at the local level no longer reflects socioeconomic divisions in society, but is instead based on a post-material oriented ‘politics of choice’. This proposition is applied to group politics within six Sydney communities. We broaden the examination of political activity undertaken by local groups to include lobbying, advocacy and community organising. This leads us to find that th…
Universal Welfare by 'Other Means'? Social Tax Expenditures and the Australian Dual Welfare State
International debates about the comparative institutional structures of welfare states have focused on social expenditure and the inclusiveness of social policy. However, these debates have not accounted for the significant rise of fiscal welfare and, in particular, social tax expenditures (STEs) in our understanding of welfare regimes. The growth of STEs has been particularly significant in Australia. While there has been recognition that STEs c…
The decline of a homeowning society? Asset-based welfare, retirement and intergenerational equity in Australia
Researchers have increasingly recognised a link between homeownership levels and retirement policy, particularly in English-speaking welfare states. Housing is central to asset-based welfare policies, which may enable households to efficiently manage life course risks, but may exacerbate wealth inequality and expose them to market volatility. Australia presents an important case for understanding the dynamics of asset-based welfare, with its reti…
Universal Welfare by 'Other Means'? Social Tax Expenditures and the Australian Dual Welfare State
International debates about the comparative institutional structures of welfare states have focused on social expenditure and the inclusiveness of social policy. However, these debates have not accounted for the significant rise of fiscal welfare and, in particular, social tax expenditures (STEs) in our understanding of welfare regimes. The growth of STEs has been particularly significant in Australia. While there has been recognition that STEs c…
Targets and Taxes
Australia's welfare model – targeted payments alongside low but progressive taxation – exemplifies the targeted approach, prioritizing the needs of poorer citizens within the constraints of low taxation. But does this approach match the welfare orientations of Australia's voters? Does the public hold other views about welfare, emerging out of competing interests in welfare debates? We consider results of two questions included in the Australian S…
Bringing finance inside the state
Income-contingent loans are increasingly used by governments around the world to finance the costs of higher education. We use the case of income-contingent loans to explore how states are bringing the architecture of financial markets inside the state, disrupting conventional understandings of marketisation that are linked to concepts of commodification. We argue that income-contingent loans are hybrid policy instruments that combine elements of…
Do independents like to party? The rise in independent and minor party MPs in Australian parliaments since 1970
Accounting for Income-Contingent Loans as a Policy Hybrid
Income-contingent loans (ICLs) are becoming widely adopted across higher education sectors internationally, and increasingly proposed for other policy domains. This article explores why this policy form has gained such wide popularity in the context of fiscal austerity and greater financialisation of social policy. It argues ICLs act as a policy hybrid, combining elements of a tax and a loan. The article traces the development of ICLs in their or…
Wage‐Earners' Welfare after Economic Reform
A ustralia and N ew Z ealand developed distinctive ‘wage‐earner welfare states’, with social protection largely delivered through high breadwinner basic incomes and residual social policies. Market reforms then pursued in both countries during the 1980s and 1990s retrenched important elements of the Antipodean model. Our article offers a novel characterization of major reforms to both welfare states from the mid‐1990s to the early 2010s. We focus…
Climate change and the welfare state? Exploring Australian attitudes to climate and social policy
Despite growing evidence of significant impacts from human-induced climate change, policy responses have been slow. Understanding this policy inertia has led to competing explanations, which either point to the need to build a consensual politics separated from economic partisanship, or which encourage solidarities between environmental and social movements and issues. This article analyses a recent successful mobilisation, leading to the passage…
Comparing asset-based welfare capitalism
The financialization of households complicates how we compare housing systems and welfare states. This article explores the shifting relationships between wealth inequality, welfare states and household risk, focussing on the roles of housing and mortgage markets. We show national regimes of capitalism continue to shape experiences of risk, but increasingly through asset-based welfare mechanisms, centred on housing ownership, that are inadequatel…
Advancing Universalism in Neoliberal Times? Basic Income, Workfare and the Politics of Conditionality
Workfare is an exemplar of neoliberal welfare reform generating precarity. In response, critics have sought to advance a politics of universalism, through either a return to social democracy or the embrace of a universal basic income. Yet, these responses invoke different understandings of universalism. This paper explores the politics of universalism in the context of neoliberal reform to benefit systems. Using Australia as a case study, it appl…
Mobilising alternative futures
Economists typically argue population ageing generates fiscal pressures by restricting the tax base while increasing demands for social spending. Alongside other economic pressures associated with neoliberalism, this dynamic contributes to a politics of ‘enduring austerity’ that limits governments’ fiscal discretion. The politics of population ageing reflects modelling techniques, such as generational accounting (GA), which, anticipating future d…
Tracing the Rational Choice Origins of Social Capital
The New South Wales Election of 24 March 2007
Flash in the pan or eureka moment? What can be learned from Australia's natural experiment with basic income during Covid‐19
The COVID‐19 pandemic led to widespread social and economic policy experimentation as governments sought to protect household finances while locking down economies. Cash transfers emerged as one of the most popular policy measures, leading many to reflect on new possibilities for enacting universal basic income through temporary or emergency interventions. We take Australia’s pandemic response, and particularly its Coronavirus Supplement, as an e…
From marketisation to self-determination
Movements for racial and Indigenous justice are targeting rapidly expanding budget allocations for prisons and police. In Australia, Indigenous Communities are seeking to redirect public money from the criminal justice system to Indigenous-controlled services and infrastructure through 'justice reinvestment'. This article explores the possibilities and tensions of justice reinvestment as a strategy for exercising Indigenous self-determination in …
Tracing the Rational Choice Origins of Social Capital
The New South Wales Election of 24 March 2007
Pragmatist and Neo‐Classical Policy Paradigms in Public Services
Principal‐agent theory alerts principals to their problematic relationship with agents. The former are encouraged to take deliberate action to counter asymmetries in knowledge, moral hazard etc. To avoid this, principals should determine outcomes and contracts and incentives should be designed to achieve them. This approach has influenced the form of purchaser‐provider arrangements, including the Job Network. This article reviews impacts, which i…
Targets and Taxes
Australia's welfare model – targeted payments alongside low but progressive taxation – exemplifies the targeted approach, prioritizing the needs of poorer citizens within the constraints of low taxation. But does this approach match the welfare orientations of Australia's voters? Does the public hold other views about welfare, emerging out of competing interests in welfare debates? We consider results of two questions included in the Australian S…
Suburban Affairs
According to recent international research, political mobilisation at the local level no longer reflects socioeconomic divisions in society, but is instead based on a post-material oriented ‘politics of choice’. This proposition is applied to group politics within six Sydney communities. We broaden the examination of political activity undertaken by local groups to include lobbying, advocacy and community organising. This leads us to find that th…
Universal Welfare by 'Other Means'? Social Tax Expenditures and the Australian Dual Welfare State
International debates about the comparative institutional structures of welfare states have focused on social expenditure and the inclusiveness of social policy. However, these debates have not accounted for the significant rise of fiscal welfare and, in particular, social tax expenditures (STEs) in our understanding of welfare regimes. The growth of STEs has been particularly significant in Australia. While there has been recognition that STEs c…
Population Ageing and Tax Reform in a Dual Welfare State
Traditionally, older people have been the key targets of Australia’s targeted welfare state. Flat rate pensions and widespread home ownership have ensured relative equality in older life. However, in response to perceived fiscal pressures generated by population ageing, Australia has increasingly shifted its policy settings, encouraging private savings over public risk pooling. Private savings are increasingly supported by public subsidy through …
Market Society
Market Society: History, Theory, Practice explores the social basis of economic life, from the emergence of market society in feudal England to the complex and interwoven markets of modern capitalist society. This lively and accessible book draws upon a variety of theories to examine the social structures at the heart of capitalist economies. It considers how capitalism is constituted, the institutions that regulate economic processes in market s…
From Defeat to Landslide Loss
The 2011 NSW election produced the largest two-party swing in recent Australian election history, ending 16 years of Labor government. It raises the prospect of the end of Labor's dominance of NSW politics. This paper focuses on the consequences of ALP instability for the Party's electoral opportunities and strategy in the lead-up to its 2011 defeat. The authors single out the mass departure of Labor MPs prior to the election and the loss of Gree…
Wage‐Earners' Welfare after Economic Reform
A ustralia and N ew Z ealand developed distinctive ‘wage‐earner welfare states’, with social protection largely delivered through high breadwinner basic incomes and residual social policies. Market reforms then pursued in both countries during the 1980s and 1990s retrenched important elements of the Antipodean model. Our article offers a novel characterization of major reforms to both welfare states from the mid‐1990s to the early 2010s. We focus…
Marketisation and the dual welfare state
Australian social policy has seen apparently contradictory developments over the period of economic restructuring. Social spending has increased based on a highly redistributive model while inequality has grown. This article explores the relationship between Australia’s experience of economic restructuring and the political dynamics of an emerging ‘dual welfare state’. Importantly, the article argues that Australian reformers did not reject the s…
The decline of a homeowning society? Asset-based welfare, retirement and intergenerational equity in Australia
Researchers have increasingly recognised a link between homeownership levels and retirement policy, particularly in English-speaking welfare states. Housing is central to asset-based welfare policies, which may enable households to efficiently manage life course risks, but may exacerbate wealth inequality and expose them to market volatility. Australia presents an important case for understanding the dynamics of asset-based welfare, with its reti…
After New Labour
Growing global integration, combined with the collapse of Soviet Communism, created major challenges for centre-left politics in the democratic world. This article considers two transformative Labour Party-led experiments that refurbished the welfare states of Australia and the United Kingdom, respectively. In Australia, this includes the Hawke–Keating (1983–1996) and Rudd–Gillard (2007–2013) Governments, and in the United Kingdom, the ‘New Labou…
Climate change and the welfare state? Exploring Australian attitudes to climate and social policy
Despite growing evidence of significant impacts from human-induced climate change, policy responses have been slow. Understanding this policy inertia has led to competing explanations, which either point to the need to build a consensual politics separated from economic partisanship, or which encourage solidarities between environmental and social movements and issues. This article analyses a recent successful mobilisation, leading to the passage…
Accounting for Income-Contingent Loans as a Policy Hybrid
Income-contingent loans (ICLs) are becoming widely adopted across higher education sectors internationally, and increasingly proposed for other policy domains. This article explores why this policy form has gained such wide popularity in the context of fiscal austerity and greater financialisation of social policy. It argues ICLs act as a policy hybrid, combining elements of a tax and a loan. The article traces the development of ICLs in their or…
Mobilising alternative futures
Economists typically argue population ageing generates fiscal pressures by restricting the tax base while increasing demands for social spending. Alongside other economic pressures associated with neoliberalism, this dynamic contributes to a politics of ‘enduring austerity’ that limits governments’ fiscal discretion. The politics of population ageing reflects modelling techniques, such as generational accounting (GA), which, anticipating future d…
Between universalism and targeting
Despite growing interest in proposals for a universal basic income, little advance has been made in implementation. Here we explore policy options for an Australian Basic Income. Our analysis responds to concerns that Basic Income is both too expensive and too radical a departure from existing welfare state structures to be a feasible policy option. Drawing on policy and Basic Income scholarship we identify changes to Australia’s current means-te…
Bringing finance inside the state
Income-contingent loans are increasingly used by governments around the world to finance the costs of higher education. We use the case of income-contingent loans to explore how states are bringing the architecture of financial markets inside the state, disrupting conventional understandings of marketisation that are linked to concepts of commodification. We argue that income-contingent loans are hybrid policy instruments that combine elements of…
Advancing Universalism in Neoliberal Times? Basic Income, Workfare and the Politics of Conditionality
Workfare is an exemplar of neoliberal welfare reform generating precarity. In response, critics have sought to advance a politics of universalism, through either a return to social democracy or the embrace of a universal basic income. Yet, these responses invoke different understandings of universalism. This paper explores the politics of universalism in the context of neoliberal reform to benefit systems. Using Australia as a case study, it appl…
The Nordic Connection
This article examines the impact of recent European basic income experiments on the re-emergence of basic income in Australian public policy and political debate. We argue that while basic income experiments in general have garnered some attention in Australia, the Finnish basic income pilot has been particularly significant. We trace this influence back to the historical tendency of sections of the Australian Left to view Nordic industrial and s…
Integrating the retirement income system and aged care funding in Australia
Retirement incomes and aged care have both received considerable policy attention in Australia over the last three decades, but as in other countries, the two financing systems have remained largely separate in policy and practice. The problem is located at the intersection of wider policy debates about shifts from public to private welfare and concerns over intergenerational equity. This paper aims to integrate these related debates by incorpora…
A basic income for a complex society
Proposals for a Universal Basic Income (UBI) have a long history, but a surge of interest since the global financial crisis suggests a connection to growing inequality and insecurity. The pandemic intensified interest through the global explosion in the use of cash transfers. This special issue arose from pre-pandemic debates among Australian sociologists connecting global interest around UBI to emerging patterns of inequality and insecurity stem…
Come together? The unusual combination of precariat materialist and educated post-materialist support for an Australian Universal Basic Income
International studies using the European Social Survey (ESS) reveal higher support for Universal Basic Income (UBI) in poorer countries with less generous welfare systems, and among individuals with lower income and education, and leftist political leanings. We present data from the 2019−20 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes mirroring the ESS question. Australia falls in the middle of European opinion, with 51% supporting a UBI, increasing sli…
Comparing asset-based welfare capitalism
The financialization of households complicates how we compare housing systems and welfare states. This article explores the shifting relationships between wealth inequality, welfare states and household risk, focussing on the roles of housing and mortgage markets. We show national regimes of capitalism continue to shape experiences of risk, but increasingly through asset-based welfare mechanisms, centred on housing ownership, that are inadequatel…
Flash in the pan or eureka moment? What can be learned from Australia's natural experiment with basic income during Covid‐19
The COVID‐19 pandemic led to widespread social and economic policy experimentation as governments sought to protect household finances while locking down economies. Cash transfers emerged as one of the most popular policy measures, leading many to reflect on new possibilities for enacting universal basic income through temporary or emergency interventions. We take Australia’s pandemic response, and particularly its Coronavirus Supplement, as an e…
Political science (25 obras) · Economics (24 obras) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (20 obras) · Law (17 obras) · Politics (17 obras) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (17 obras) · Political economy (14 obras) · Market economy (12 obras) · Sociology (12 obras) · Welfare (12 obras)