Winners and Losers: The pursuit of social justice in Australian history
ISBN: 9781003118404
Platform/Publisher: Taylor & Francis / Routledge
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Social Sciences; Sociology & Social Policy;

What is a fair wage? Is there a right to work? Is there a right to shelter or to good health? What are the entitlements of those who cannot work? Can opportunities be equal? For women? For Aborigines?

For more than a century, Australians have addressed expectations of social justice to their governments and have had to live with the consequences.

This book looks at how changing circumstances have generated changing popular aspirations, and how these in turn have been translated into public policy. It argues that social justice has no single meaning and is in fact the site of conflicting and divergent endeavours. Precisely for this reason it has a special relevance for the age of consensus.

The first part of this book uses these shifting interpretations of social justice as a lodestar to chart a new course through the history of this country. The second part shows how it operates today as a focus of debate in areas ranging from education to Aboriginal land rights.

The book therefore offers a new perspective on the past and a trenchant analysis of the present. It draws together a wide range of material and presents it by means of case studies that assume no specialist knowledge. It will appeal to students of Australian history, public policy and social welfare; and it is addressed to all readers with an interest in the future of their country.

Stuart Forbes Macintyre was born on April 21, 1947 in Melbourne, Australia. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Melbourne, his Master of Arts from Monash University and his PhD for the University of Cambridge. He is a historian and a former Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne.

His awards include Premier of Victoria's Literary Award for Australian Studies (1986), Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (1987), Redmond Barry Award (1997), The Age Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award (1998)for his book The Reds, Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (1999), Premier of New South Wales' Australian History Prize (2004)for the History Wars (co-written with Anna Clark), Officer of the Order of Australia (2011), and the Ernest Scott Prize (2016) for his book Australia's Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s, and the Premier New South Wales' Australian History Prize (2016) for Australia's Boldest Experiment.

(Bowker Author Biography)


hidden image for function call