Social security reform is a second key aspect of neoliberalisation. This chapter considers whether the shift from ‘welfare’ to ‘workfare’ made New Zealanders less likely to support the social right to economic and social security. Central to New Zealand's comprehensive social security system established in 1938, this right was further endorsed by the Royal Commission on Social Security's (RCSS, 1972) recommendation that benefit recipients enjoy a sense of belonging and participation, irrespective of the cause of their dependency. It reflected growing concern about the inadequacy of benefits and poverty among those living on low incomes during the 1970s and 1980s. In this context, Muldoon's National government resisted cutting social spending, instead funding an increased range of work and wage subsidy schemes (Wright, 1981; Higgins, 1997; Roper, 2005).

By the early 1980s, however, the political opposition increasingly framed formal work testing as necessary for ameliorating the negative and potentially intergenerational social and psychological effects of unemployment (Adcock, 1981). Chapter Three indicated how the 4th Labour government abandoned work creation schemes and introduced work expectations to encourage the ‘right’ skills and behaviours among the unemployed, opening the way for National's benefit cuts in the early 1990s and for conditionality to be applied to all means-tested benefits by the end of the decade. The Labour-coalition government relaxed conditionality in the early 2000s but it had strengthened again by 2008, when National regained power and implemented further social security reforms. Given this context, the first section of this chapter explores whether the New Zealand public still believed that the government had a responsibility for assisting the unemployed and should spend more government funds on this group by 2011. It also considers whether New Zealanders believed the unemployed have a responsibility to work in return for their benefits.

A second section examines public support for broader neoliberal discourses around individual responsibility, welfare dependency and individualist causes of need. National governments in the 1990s were strongly influenced by American neopaternalist views that the welfare system creates dependency, leading to an intergenerational culture of worklessness (Murray, 1984; Mead, 1997). These views were reflected in the government-sponsored Beyond Dependency conference and the proposed Code of Family and Social Responsibility but were challenged by alternative public discourses in the late 1990s.