Some have argued that social welfare should be about promoting recipient wellbeing. However, others have argued that in recent times welfare programs are more about controlling the behaviour of welfare recipients. This essay will examine the history of welfare programs to women since the initiation of the post-war welfare state under Labour Prime Minister Chifley to ascertain whether recent development in these programs are more about providing for recipient’s wellbeing or rather about trying to make them comply with certain standards of accepted behaviour.

Chifley argued that it was the “duty and responsibility of the community, and particularly those more fortunately placed, to see that our less fortunate fellow citizens are protected from those shafts of fate which leave them helpless and without hope”. He continued the labour movement would fight to ensure a future “free from want, insecurity and misery” (Chifley, quoted in Beilharz, 1994). Chifley was stating that those in need should be the recipients of welfare without them having to comply with any requirements to perform to certain behavioural standards.

This approach set the scene for the expansion of the welfare state from the post-war period through its expansion in the Whitlam years until its principles were challenged by the Howard Government in the 1990s. During this time welfare benefits grew and were extended to new groups of people considered in need. The labour party supported the notion of deservedness as it acknowledged the fact that there were people in society who were unfortunate (i.e. disability, illness, old age, misfortunate or other factors that make it hard for a person to cope etc.) and therefore could not compete in the free market. There was a reasonable degree of consensus in the community that this was the main purpose of the welfare state.

However in the 1980s and