From pluralism to populism - the impacts of 40 years of neo-liberal governance of the third sector in Australia

• In Event: Country studies on the impact of New Public Management on the third sector

Abstract

The Third Sector and accompanying civil society organisations (CSOs) are well-established and examined features of modern liberal democracies, particularly within pluralist conceptions, where CSOs act as proxies for people and communities in a series of decentralising interactions with market and state institutions (Dahl 1978). While ideas of pluralist democracy certainly resonate with the social changes and governance practices in democracies like Australia’s in the post-WWII decades between 1950 and the late 1970s, governance practices from the 1980s to 2020s have instead been dominated by a countervailing ideology - in governance terms described as New Public Management (NPM) (Hood 1991) - more reflective of the dominance of neoliberalism as the dominant economic ideology during that forty year period. Like neoliberalism, NPM is underpinned by a belief that people make decisions based on their individual self interest and thus need to be incentivised to act in a way that benefits the greater good through mechanisms such as competition and performance management. This governance trend can be expected to have impacted the Australian third sector, particularly those CSOs whose primary activities - in particular charitable service and systemic advocacy - are reliant on or respond directly to the state. Thus, in order for CSOs to fulfil their potential in meeting the major challenges faced by liberal democracies, in particular the threat of right-wing populism (Mouffe 2019), we need to understand how NPM as an ideology and practice may have impacted organisations within the third sector.

This paper explores how Australian Governments’ pursuit of NPM-style policies impacted the Australian Third Sector between 1983 and 2023, resulting in a significant reconfiguration of how Australian civil society organisations approach systemic advocacy and service delivery. In terms of advocacy, this includes the impact of the 1983 Prices and Wages Accord between the left-wing Labor Government and the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) which traded collective advocacy around wage rises for a variety of economic policies aimed at reducing inflation (Humphrys 2019). It also includes various attempts by Liberal/National Governments to undermine public trust in CSOs and restrict their ability to take part in systemic advocacy (Phillips and Murray 2023). When it comes to service delivery, NPM heralded an explosion of government-funded CSOs in Australia through outsourcing and the marketisation of public service delivery, funding which came with increasing restrictions on what activities CSOs could perform (Goodwin and Phillips 2015). Overall, the impacts of these and related policies can be seen to undermine the strength of Australia’s third sector in a pluralist setting and, along with general declining levels of public trust in the Australian Government government (Cameron 2020), pave the way for emergent challenges to Australia’s democratic stability from right-wing populism.

References

Cameron, S. (2020). Government performance and dissatisfaction with democracy in Australia. Australian Journal of Political Science, 55(2), 170–190.

Dahl, R. A. (1978). Pluralism Revisited. Comparative Politics, 10(2), 191–203.

Goodwin, S., & Phillips, R. (2015). The marketisation of human services and the expansion of the not-for-profit sector. In S. Goodwin & G. Meagher (Eds.), Markets, rights and power in Australian social policy (Vol. 1, pp. 97–114). Sydney University Press; JSTOR.

Hood, C. (1991). A Public Management for all Seasons? Public Administration, 69(1), 3–19.

Humphrys, E. (2019). How Labour Built Neoliberalim: Australia’s Accord, the Labour Movement and the Neoliberal Project. Haymarket Books.

Mouffe, C. (2019). For a left populism. Verso.

Phillips, R., & Murray, I. (2023). The third sector and democracy in Australia: Neoliberal governance and the repression of advocacy. Australian Journal of Political Science, 1–20.

Author

• Mark Riboldi, University of Technology Sydney, UTS Business School