LEGAL POLICY AND ORGANISATIONAL FRAMEWORK

Legal Policy and Organisational Framework

Legal Policy and Organisational Framework

The modern welfare state evolved in most rich nations in the post-war era. It was an answer to three foremost traumas. First, there was the interwar despondency, in which the brutality of unconstrained capitalism developed an answer of a kinder, gentler way of coordinating society. Secondly the conflict itself directed to upheaval in many European countries. The welfare state was seen as a means of integrating people back into nations struggling with the chaos of their recent past, in order to generate a degree of social cohesiveness (Ashton, 1993, 55).

Question A

The welfare states replaced older ways of social protection is perhaps harder to understand in New Zealand because (outside of Maori society) there were no existing institutions, however antiquated, for the settlers in a new country. That is why New Zealand was early in the development of a welfare state, for there was no older social structure to fall back upon (Braae, 1983, 15). New Zealand could not use the parish-based provision of Britain, because it had no apt parishes, while the commitment to a secular state - a state without an established church - intended that parishes could not be by artificial means created. Nineteenth century European New Zealand even lacked sufficient of that fundamental unit of Victorian virtue, the family (Castles, 1985, 66). Most of the vintage and indigent at the end of the years had no young kids or, if they did, their young kids did not reside near them. Thus New Zealand had to create means of community support in a scheme outside the family or the locality. Although New Zealand was among the earliest of welfare states, elsewhere industrial society was undermining the traditional systems of the more established societies, replacing them with state-administered systems of support (Douglas, 1993, 20).

Yet by the early 1990s there was a sense in which the welfare state was in withdraw, or at least under critical pressure to modify. New Zealand's welfare state may be under greater pressure because its economy has stagnated over the last decade while GDP among all the OECD countries has grown on average by around 20% (Esping-Andersen, 1995, 60).

Question 2

The post-war German town was founded on the concept of a 'social state', occasionally rendered as a 'social market economy'. The first, cantered standard was that economic development was the best way to accomplish communal welfare. The structure of communal services had to reflect this priority. The principle is represented most clearly in the close relationship of services to people's position in the labour market (Mitchell, 1992, 12). Social advantages are earnings-related, and those without work records may find they are not covered for significant contingencies. Less clear, but probably even more important, is the general concern to ensure that public expenditure on welfare is directly compatible with the need for economic development and growth (Overbye, 1995a, 147).

Second, the German economy, and the welfare system, developed through a corporatist structure (Overbye, 1995b, ...