2025 wrapped - holiday reading from Power to Persuade

In 2025, Power to Persuade’s team of moderators sourced and published seventy seven articles that offered insights into the design and delivery of social policy, and its impact on people, from a range of perspectives. In addition to our regular call for contributions, as we watched the rights of particular groups of people being eroded by decisions made by governments around the world, we invited articles on the theme of the relevance of rights for 21st century policy.  

The authors of posts we published this year included policy experts, research teams, advocates, early career researchers, and people navigating or trying to navigate government service systems. 

Here’s a selection of those posts to reread or discover while our volunteer team takes a break.

Thank you to our readers, our writers, and our moderating team for 2025. We wish you happy and safe holidays and look forward to bringing you new food for thought on social policy in 2026. 

Here’s a selection of the most-read posts published on Power to Persuade in 2025, and some posts to discover, before the blog returns in 2026. 

• Do High-Consumption Lifestyles Violate Our Ethical Obligations to the Planet? - Roger Chao

• Human Rights: Reclaiming the Foundational Policy Intent - India de Vienne

• Why sociology is needed in social policy - Athena Charanne Presto

• How policy intentions shift: Research on NDIS implementation - Eloise Hummell

• Decades in the Making: The Rise and Fall of Melbourne’s Public Housing Towers - Cordelia Attenborough and Elroy Dearn

• The Australian Government's Contradictory Stance on Undocumented Migrant Workers - Evelyn Dowling

• The rights of migrant women in Australia: addressing gendered exploitation in temporary work - Ananya Doundiyal

• Sindoor and the Symbolism of Strength: Gender, Identity, and Strategic Narrative in the 2025 India-Pakistan Conflict (Indian Perspective) - Akrti Tyagi

• The Quiet Crisis: Challenges, changes and co-production to hear the voices of healthcare staff -Sukhwinder Essie Kaur

• Police contact deaths for those with poor mental health - Michael Brown

• Measuring the hidden costs of disability in Australia - Sue Olney and Sophie Yates

• With yet another Aboriginal death in police custody, the lethal intersections of colonial violence, racism and ableism have never been more obvious. - Jane Chen

• International Feminist Spaces: Who Gets to Belong? - Sidhant Maharaj

• No Wrong Door: Why Every Family Deserves a Wendy in the First 1,000 Days - Bernadette Black

• Gen Z and the Ballot Box: Rethinking Political Inclusion in Australia - Planning Saw and Cham Kim

• "If we all speak, they cannot deny what is happening to us": the power imbalance in mutual obligation for young jobseekers - Anonymous

• The ripple effects of Online Food Delivery Services on human and planetary health: Policy actions for healthy and sustainable future - Adyya Gupta

• Planting the seeds of prevention: How green spaces can transform public health - Rongbin Xu, Tingting Ye and Yumin Guo

Whether you’re a policymaker, a practitioner, a researcher, or someone whose life is shaped by social policy, we encourage you to share your experiences and expertise with Power to Persuade in the year ahead. You can find out more about submitting an article for publication with us here.

Content moderator: Sue Olney