Abstract
This thesis examines social policy during New Zealand’s era of neoliberal transformation, the fourth Labour government of 1984-1990, followed by the fourth National government of 1990-1999. It traces the shift from a protectionist state, which supported a gendered division of paid and unpaid labour, to a neoliberal state, which promoted a genderless paid worker as its citizenship ideal. This shift meant that unpaid work was no longer valorised. Unpaid work lost its former legitimacy as the basis of a claim to financial support from the state (for example, the Domestic Purposes Benefit).
These changes gave rise to what is termed the ‘social reproduction dilemma’. This asks: if paid work is the defining activity of the genderless neoliberal citizen, and is an expression of economic rationality, then who ought to do unpaid work and why would they do so? The social reproduction dilemma was influenced by the particular characteristics of New Zealand’s neoliberal reforms: the pace and theoretical purity with which neoliberalisation took place, its commencement by a government of the left, and a relative lack of moral conservatism (although this increased over the course of the National government, particularly as National was joined by a coalition partner, New Zealand First).
Although unpaid social reproduction work was no longer supported by the state, the state’s interest in ensuring this work continued, intensifying as the ill effects of reforms, particularly the 1991 benefit cuts, became more entrenched, and social distress became more visible.
Labour combined economic liberalisation with a libertarian stance (emphasising personal freedom) on social issues, including feminism, and so was reluctant to suggest that unpaid work was the domain of women. However, National tentatively embraced moral conservatism, one aspect of which was a greater willingness to intervene in the home lives of beneficiaries through authoritarian social policy. These interventions tended to be focused on female-headed sole parent families.
In the context of these changes, I use a governmentality approach to examine how the social dilemma was repeatedly posed, but not solved, by successive neoliberal governments. The thesis is in two parts. The first part sets out historical context, events and policies, and the second part applies critical discourse analysis to three case studies, each of which illustrates different moments in the development of neoliberal social policy in New Zealand.