It is frequently argued that we are living through a new era of welfare state ‘convergence’. Under the impact of increasingly globalized international economic forces, governments everywhere are said to be driven to adopt much the same policy agenda of retrenchment and retreat. In this paper, we test the plausibility of this expectation by considering the recent experience of welfare state reform in three English-speaking nation states–Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. We find that whilst all three nations have faced common challenges and have had recourse to similar sorts of policy instruments, there is enough diversity in their experience to suggest that ‘politics still matters’ and that suppositions of ‘convergence’ need to be heavily qualified.