ACOSS’s difficult relationships, especially with federal governments, are a major theme of this book by Philip Mendes, senior lecturer in Social Policy and Community Development in the Faculty of Medicine at Monash University. Inside the Welfare Lobby, the first history of ACOSS, describes its development from a coordinator of voluntary welfare agencies in the mid-1950s to the social advocacy group it is today. The first five chapters of the book provide detailed accounts of ACOSS’s activities, funding arrangements, government relationships, policy successes and failures. This material is structured chronologically in periods that coincide roughly with changes in the political complexion of federal government. The last three chapters of the book analyse ACOSS’s relationships with the federal Labor Party, the federal Liberal Party and the trade union movement. One academic commentator has predicted that the book will be a useful resource for university students, and I agree. Though Mendes doesn’t tell us that the book was intended for students, the ‘questions for discussion’ at the end of each chapter make this clear.

‘Suggested questions for discussion’ are one thing, but more curious is that the book’s coverage trails off around 2003, despite the promise of Chapter Five’s title, ‘Protecting the Welfare Safety Net, 1996–2006’. By the time I had reached this part of the book, Mendes’s information-rich account of decades of ACOSS activism had made me eager to get to the welfare-to-work and industrial relations changes of the recent past. Alas, only a few paragraphs are devoted to them. Mendes’s Australia’s Welfare Wars (2003) was unlikely to shed any more light on recent events, but it does contain a chapter about ACOSS’s role in defending the welfare state. It looked very familiar. To be fair, the new IR laws didn’t come into effect until mid-2006, when Inside the Welfare Lobby was in publication, but these laws had been mooted for some time, and ACOSS would have been fairly buzzing with defensive preparations. Mendes’s silence on this is puzzling. That said, his history of ACOSS until 2003 is informative and analytical enough to help us better understand the present. It will have been clear to most of us for some time that ACOSS is now a political outsider with little access and influence in the Howard government. But what I found enlightening about Mendes’s history is how it portrays ACOSS’s relations with federal governments as conflict-ridden, even when these governments have been led by its ‘natural allies’ in the Labor Party. Mendes suggests that tensions with the ALP could be related to expectations: ACOSS expects more from an ALP it takes to be ideologically sympathetic, and Labor expects more loyalty and understanding from ACOSS. The ACOSS that Mendes paints for us is determinedly bipartisan, even foolishly so; he believes its schmoozing with the Coalition over the GST in 1996 was a strategic mistake which also severely damaged its relationship with the ALP.

While the book explores ACOSS’s external relationships quite well, it doesn’t take us inside ACOSS to show us how it manages its broad base of members and affiliates – in particular, how it develops and decides its policies and priorities. Given the book’s title, I was expecting more of an ‘inside story’ about how these processes work. We do not discover whether there are any tensions in ACOSS between (or within) professional groups and church-based charities about what ACOSS should be doing, though we suspect that such tensions must exist. In fact, Mendes suggests as much when he refers, briefly, in Australia’s Welfare Wars to the variety of views within churches about the propriety of engaging with certain social issues. One of the principal points of difference would be whether agencies (not only faith-based ones) prefer to advocate for broad social change or to undertake more traditional, charitable roles. These latter may not be world-changing, but they have their material and spiritual satisfactions. (I am not referring here to the possibility of lucrative government contracts.) As Bertolt Brecht wrote in ‘A Bed for the Night’: ‘It won’t change the world / It won’t improve relations among men / It will not shorten the age of exploitation / But a few men have a bed for the night / For a night the wind is kept from them / The snow meant for them falls on the roadway.’

This modest history won’t change the world, but it will serve. Students of political science, social policy and social work in Australia, the United Kingdom and maybe even the United States will read it, and it will help them to fashion essays about lobby groups and society. Who knows, one of these students may go on to write another history of ACOSS, one that tells us a bit more about how it operates and what it did next to make Australia a fairer place to live.