@Ilandar @vividspecter The short answer is yes.

Basically, up until the late 1970s and early 1980s, Australia's official government policy was to have full employment. There was a minor scandal when unemployment skyrocketed to around 3% under Fraser.

Especially after the oil shocks that followed the Suez canal crisis, inflation was running quite high through the late '70s and early '80s.

Partly to try to curb this high inflation, US, UK, and Australia all adopted a range of neoliberal economic policies advocated by people like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek.

The thinking was that if there was no or low unemployment, when inflation rose, workers would demand higher wages, and those wages would put further pressure on inflation, creating a cycle.

So one of the main ways the Hawke Labor government sought to stop this inflation cycle was by stopping wage growth.

As part of this policy shift, The Australian government walked away from the idea of guaranteeing full employment.

As part of a set of policies called the Accord, the unions basically agreed to wage increases below the rate of inflation, in exchange for the introduction of Medicare.

The Australian dollar was floated, instead of having the Reserve Bank set it each morning like it used to. The Reserve Bank got an independent board that would raise Interest rates if inflation got above 2-3%.

Importantly, if unemployment rates ever fell too low, the Reserve Bank would see it as an inflationary risk, and raises interest rates to increase unemployment to stop inflation.

So instead of seeking full employment, the idea that there's a "natural rate of unemployment" (as economists call it) became part of our economic system.

But, instead of properly explaining this to the public, governments from Hawke and Keating onwards essentially blamed the victims and called them "dole bludgers".

In the early '90s, the Keating government followed this up by bringing in a limited form of work for the dole as part of his Working Nation policy.

Around this time, in the US, Bill Clinton, and in the UK, Tony Blair, brought in tough new welfare policies.

In the late '90s and early 2000s, the Howard government followed in the footsteps of these crackdowns.

He also privatised a lot of the old Commonwealth Employment Service, outsourcing its training services to private "Jobs Network" providers. What was left over became Centrelink.

If you're interested, there's a lot more details about how mutual obligation came about under Howard here: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jan/01/where-mutual-obligation-began-john-howards-paradigm-shift-on-welfare

And there's also in this government research paper from 1999: https://aifs.gov.au/research/family-matters/no-54/welfare-reform-britain-australia-and-united-states