There's can be a lot of disagreement of the exact definition of Neoliberalism.
A starting point:
The underlying idea is each individual is fundamentally a piece of capital, that can be developed, utilized and absorbed similar to all capital. So in other words ‘commodification.’ This leads onto concepts of net contributors and net beneficiaries, based on how much tax an individual is able to pay vs how much public expenditure they use.
So once you are dealing with a commodity, markets are considerably better than governments at both creating and allocating resources.
So a free market, competing against each other on price and availability, is preferable to one with rules about how things are produced.
Deregulation allows businesses to be more profitable and improves their ability to run those businesses.
The structures supplying goods, services, and people should preferably be privately owned, as the private sector is considered more efficient at running businesses.
Globalization leads to more investment and trade. If there is freedom of movement of capital between different locations, economic growth is expected to follow along with cheaper, better, access to resources.
The handmaidens of globalization are 'just in time production' and 'just in time delivery.'
These lead to what is called 'flexible accumulation' which requires flexible workers who don't need to be paid all the time, leading to 'temps' commonality of 'zero hours contracts' and self employed and 'arms reach' contractors.
The management of the economy should prioritize reducing inflation over unemployment.
Public expenditure should be reduced and taxes kept low by ensuring the costs of public services are met by those using them.
In turn reduction of concepts of 'society' or 'public good', following the concept that people are generally more motivated to work towards their own and their families well being than that of society, once given permission to do so. (Thatchers 'no such thing as society' "... I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.")
In line with reduced public expenditure, welfare and benefits should provide only basic levels of assistance against unemployment, ill-health, disability or poverty in old age.
A neoliberal welfare state focuses on "getting people to internalize market logic and accept personal responsibility for the need to find whatever means, however limited, to get by in the changing economy” (Sanford Schram)
From the end of the 70s on, most major western countries produced policies based on these ideas to larger or smaller extents, some more or less obvious or with more softeners than others. The main intergovernmental organizations such as the OECD, the IMF, the World Bank also adopted them affecting many developing countries.
HTH anyone trying to understand the 'why' of a lot of stuff.