Prior to this amendment the only social services provision was s51(xxiii) that gave power to legislate for invalid and old-age pensions.

The proposal was to introduce s51(xxiiiA), which reads:[1] (xxiiiA) the provision of maternity allowances, widows' pensions, child endowment, unemployment, pharmaceutical, sickness and hospital benefits, medical and dental services (but not so as to authorize any form of civil conscription), benefits to students and family allowances;Federal legislation already existed on a number of these issues despite the lack of a clear constitutional basis: child endowment payments were introduced in 1941, widow's pensions in 1942, and unemployment benefits in 1945.

However, in the first Pharmaceutical Benefits Case constitutional questions were raised about the validity of Commonwealth social security legislation based on s81.

[5] In 1920 the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed the Emergency Powers Act 1920 which stated that the regulations could not impose "any form of compulsory military service or industrial conscription".

[14] The meaning of the exception of "civil conscription" was considered by the High Court in General Practitioners Society v Commonwealth where Justice Gibbs took a narrow view of the exception, holding that civil conscription, in the context of medical and dental services, "refers to any sort of compulsion to engage in practice as a doctor or a dentist or to perform particular medical or dental services" and distinguished that from the permissible "regulation of the manner in which a service is performed" if the benefit is to be obtained".