For women and children fleeing violence, timely and effective social security support is vital

Last week, an important research report was launched by the National Social Security Rights Network. Entitled "How well does Australia’s social security system support victims of family and domestic violence?", author Sally Cameron lays out the many and complex ways the welfare system too often increases women’s financial insecurity following a separation due to domestic violence, and in the process compounds trauma. Today’s blog post provides a summary of the main findings from the report.

Womens Policy Action TankWomen's Policy Action Tank10 September 2018family violence, social welfare, welfare reform

The Cashless Debit Card: Flawed Beyond Technological Redemption

In this article, Dr. Shelley Bielefeld, Professor Eva Cox, and the Accountable Income Management Network Secretariat critique the Mindaroo Foundation’s report on the Cashless Debit Card (CDC). They cite the ‘cherry picking’ of results to support claims of success, a lack of attention to human rights, and security issues, among other points. Ultimately, they argue that the benefits of the CDC for communities are “negligible to negative” and that the proposed expansion of the trial would further marginalise those purported to benefit from the CDC.

Finance and economics, IssuesPower to Persuade16 August 2018social welfare, social inequalities

The marshmallow test and the crisis in social policy

Two very significant studies were published in May. On the face of it they had little relation to each other, but together they have shattered powerful myths that have brought our social policy to the point of crisis. In this post, Atif Shafique explores what all this might mean, and how we can use this moment to redesign social policy for the better. This post originally appeared on the RSA blog.

Policy and governancePower to Persuade6 July 2018social welfare

Reflections on the usefulness of the Lankelly Chase System Behaviours

Lankelly Chase is a UK-based charity that works to support organisations that address ‘severe and multiple disadvantage’ though an approach that is deeply and explicitly systemic, reflecting the interlocking nature of social harms such as mental illness, offending, homelessness, abuse, drug misuse, and the poverty that generates them. Recently Lankelly Chase has released a set of 'core behaviours' that they argue help systems function better for people facing severe and multiple disadvantage. In this post, Toby Lowe reflects on the behaviors and their implications for the social sector, a reflection that is just as relevant to Australia as it is to the UK. This post originally appeared on Toby's blog.

IssuesPower to Persuade6 July 2018social welfare, Disadvantage

Contracted employment services: obligations placed on single parents fails to help many

Since the early 2000s successive Australian governments have required single parents with school age children who are in receipt of income support payments to at a minimum engage in some form of planning to return to paid work or part-time paid work or education/training. Over time these “activation obligations” that have been placed on single parents have become more onerous. Currently the government requires parents in receipt of Parenting Payment Single to seek a minimum of 30 hours of paid work per fortnight once their youngest child turns six.

Financial inclusion, basic bank accounts, and the Cashless Debit Card

The Cashless Debit Card Symposium was held at both the University of Melbourne and the Alfred Deakin Institute on Thursday, the 1st of February 2018. The Power to Persuade is running a series of blogs drawn from the presentations made on the day. In this piece, David Tennant of FamilyCare Shepparton and Policy Whisperer Susan Maury (@SusanMaury) of Good Shepherd Australia New Zealand assess the Cashless Debit Card (CDC) as a tool for promoting financial inclusion, and find it comes up well short.

My experiences of the Cashless Debit Card

Nothing illuminates policy in the same way that individual stories of lived experience can. The Cashless Debit Card Symposium was held at both the University of Melbourne and the Alfred Deakin Institute on Thursday, the 1st of February 2018, and the Power to Persuade is running a series of blogs drawn from the presentations made on the day. In this piece, Jocelyn Wighton, a citizen of Ceduna and one of the many who were forced onto the Cashless Debit Card, shares some of her experiences and frustrations with the CDC.

Policy and governancePower to Persuade10 April 2018indigenous issues, social welfare, welfare reform

Straightjacketing evaluation outcomes to conform with political agendas – an examination of the Cashless Debit Card Trial

The Cashless Debit Card Symposium was held at both the University of Melbourne and the Alfred Deakin Institute on Thursday, the 1st of February 2018. The Power to Persuade is running a series of blogs drawn from the presentations made on the day. In this piece, Susan Tilley of Uniting Communities shares the findings of a discourse analysis of the ORIMA evaluations of the Cashless Debit Card Trials (CDCT), reporting that the evaluations are deeply imbued with government ideology.

Human Rights and the Cashless Debit Card: Examining the Limitation Requirement of Proportionality

The Cashless Debit Card Symposium was held at both the University of Melbourne and the Alfred Deakin Institute on Thursday, the 1st of February 2018. The Power to Persuade is running a series of blogs drawn from the presentations made on the day. In this piece, Shelley Bielefeld from Australia National University analyses the Cashless Debit Card initiative to ascertain whether the concept of proportionality can justify the curtailing of certain human rights for communities subjected to the CDC.

Policy and governancePower to Persuade23 March 2018indigenous issues, social welfare, human rights

The impact of political determinants of health must be recognised for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women

The role of government policy is to support its citizenry to thrive. By this measure, Australian policy is failing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, and women are bearing the brunt of failed policy through seriously compromised health and wellbeing. In today’s analysis, Vanessa Lee from the University of Sydney applies a lens of political determinants of health to illuminate policy failure for Indigenous women and their communities, and calls for the government to be held accountable to the outcomes of generations of harmful policy. This piece is drawn from an article that ran in the Journal of Public Health Policy in 2017.

Housing and the Gig Economy

Many of the same forces delivering insecurity and growing economic inequality within labour markets have also been brought to bear on Australian housing markets. In this article, Ben Spies-Butcher examines the relationship between the growth of the gig economy, it's relationship to social security and growing instability in housing.

IssuesPower to Persuade28 November 2017employment, housing and homelessness, social welfare

Women leaving prison and the impacts of debt

The Women’s Policy Action Tank recently published a special issue of the Good Policy newsletter, exploring three areas of policy with a gender lens: women and the criminal justice system, Indigenous women, and women’s experience of employment. Each topic is explored using a dialectical approach, in which two authors approach a topic from a different angles. We will be publishing the paired articles on our blog over the coming three weeks. This week: Exploring the gendered impacts of incarceration on women. This article is a companion piece to The national tragedy of female incarceration, by Jacki Holland.

Income management and Indigenous women

The Women’s Policy Action Tank recently published a special issue of the Good Policy newsletter, exploring three areas of policy with a gender lens: women and the criminal justice system, Indigenous women, and women’s experience of employment. Each topic is explored using a dialectical approach, in which two authors approach a topic from a different angles. We will be publishing the paired articles on our blog over the coming three weeks. This week: read about the impacts of the welfare system on Indigenous women.

7 Questions: Why doesn’t child support add up?

On March 1st, the first of Good Shepherd Australia New Zealand’s Good Conversations[i] was held to discuss child support policies with an expert panel. Today’s policy piece provides a summary of the 7 primary questions on child support that were raised and why they are critical policy areas that need urgent addressing. Collectively, single mothers experience poverty at an alarming rate, and Australia’s child support system is partly to blame. This summary has been co-authored by Kathy Landvogt (Good Shepherd Australia New Zealand), Terese Edwards (National Council for Single Mothers and their Children - NCSMC), and Kay Cook (Swinburne University).

Youth homelessness is reaching crisis levels

With the recent vote by Melbourne City Council to ban rough sleeping, homelessness has been in the public eye. In honour of this week’s Youth Homelessness Matters day, today’s blog provides a practitioner view of youth homelessness in Victoria. Megan Kennedy and Ebony Canavan, with the Youth Homelessness Service at Good Shepherd Australia New Zealand, explain how recent policy changes are impacting on their clients.

IssuesDr Susan Maury4 April 2017housing and homelessness, young people, social welfare

Higher child support doesn’t lead to welfare dependency for single mums

Over the past months we have run several blogs on single mothers and how welfare policies manage to both keep them on the brink of poverty and also create convoluted bureaucratic processes in their quest to move from welfare to work. It was heartening, therefore, to come across the research findings shared here by Haley Fisher, which reports that more generous child support both reduces poverty and increases rates of return to work for single mothers. It may seem contrary, but keeping families on the brink of poverty does not provide the right incentives for re-entering employment. This article originally appeared in The Conversation, and can be viewed in its original format here.

When volunteering isn’t valued: Welfare to Work and mutual obligation requirements

Previously we have published 2 blogs (here and here) written by Juanita McLaren, a student intern with the Women’s Research, Advocacy and Policy (WRAP) Centre at Good Shepherd Australia New Zealand. As a part of her research, Juanita is interviewing single mothers who are registered with the JobActive (Welfare to Work) scheme. Here Juanita relates “Gloria’s” (not her real name) story, who simultaneously won a community award for her volunteerism while also failing to adhere to Centrelink’s requirements for volunteer service.

Single parent support and the feminisation of poverty

Juanita McLaren, interning with Good Shepherd, has written previously about her experience as a single mother of Centrelink policies (see her posts here and here). On International Women's Day (8 March 2017), she was interviewed by Rayna Fahey on the radio show The Renegade Economists on 3CR, discussing the feminisation of poverty in Australia and the role that government policy plays.

Citizens are happier in countries where the government intervenes more frequently in the economy

What types of public policy promote greater happiness among citizens? Many governments justify pro-market policies on the basis of offering their citizens ‘choice and control’. Today’s post by Patrick Flavin, Alexander C. Pacek and Benjamin Radcliff presents results from an analysis of survey data across 21 industrialised democracies between 1981 and 2007. They find that in countries where governments intervene more frequently in the economy, insulating citizens from market fluctuations, there is a higher degree of self-reported happiness among citizens. While the authors note that these findings cannot strictly be taken as evidence that social democratic policies are better in a normative sense overall, the results suggest that more research is needed on the impact of a country’s political context on the happiness of its citizens. This article was originally published on the LSE EUROPP - European Politics and Policy – blog.

Policy and governancePower to Persuade9 March 2017markets in public services, social welfare

New Zealand’s Child Support reforms - an opportunity lost

While there are many similarities in child support policies between Australia and New Zealand, there are also some critical differences – differences which put low-income single mothers at greater disadvantage, while making it harder for them to re-enter the workforce. Today’s policy analysis Identifies critical areas that need review in order tobetter support single mothers and their children. Michael Fletcher will be speaking on this topic at the upcoming Good Conversations event: Child Support Policy and Its Impacts on Women’s Economic Security.

Women's Scorecard, Womens Policy Action TankWomen's Policy Action Tank27 February 2017social welfare, gender

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