To finish the week, we continue to explore the theme of young people’s rights this time through a piece by Ananya Awasthi, research assistant at the Centre for Human-AI Information Environments (CHAI) at RMIT University and Master of Public Policy graduate. In this blog, Ananya writes about crossover kids who are children involved in both the child protection and criminal justice systems and makes the case for greater communication lines and information sharing between these areas.
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Continuing our theme on young people’s rights, Zaina Zulfiqar, Policy Advisor for FORE Good and recent Master of Public Policy (RMIT) graduate, argues for the need for Australian policy to uphold international students’ rights by ensuring that they are provided with appropriate support, protection and care.
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Last week, we published a blog about how financial pressures are impacting the lives of young Australians. This plays out in various ways, one of which is by creating barriers for young people to accessing secure and affordable housing. Below Kylie Smith, Operations Manager of MCM Housing and Master of Public Policy graduate from RMIT, makes the case for Australia’s Housing First for Youth Policy, emphasising the importance of housing ‘rights’ over housing ‘readiness’.
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Across Australia and globally, disability policy increasingly promises to give people with disability a voice. Yet, as many people with disability can attest, having a voice is not the same as being heard. Recent research by Dr Laura Davy and Molly Saunders at the Australian National University explores radical listening as a potentially transformative approach to strengthening participatory democracy in everyday spaces.
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In 2025, Power to Persuade has invited articles on the theme of the relevance of rights for 21st century policy. This post from Everyday Human Rights, an independent, non-political human rights educational consultancy, argues for the continued relevance of human rights frameworks as a tool for policy makers.
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Temporary work should be a pathway to dignity and opportunity — not a source of risk. In this important piece, Ananya Doundiyal shows how visa settings, employer dependency, and weak enforcement create conditions where wage theft, coercion, and sexual harassment thrive — especially in feminised sectors like care, cleaning, hospitality, and horticulture.
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In today’s post, Cordelia Attenborough and Elroy Dearn from RMIT University give insight into the history of public housing in Victoria. This blog is written in the context of the Inquiry into the redevelopment of Melbourne’s public housing towers
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In complex healthcare systems, staff voice is vital for ensuring healthcare professionals and service providers uphold safe, ethical and high-quality care. When staff are unable to voice concerns about patient safety or their own wellbeing, mistakes and misconduct are more likely to go unaddressed, allowing scandals to happen or last longer. Organisations such as the National Health Service (NHS) have been long aware of these risks and currently use “speaking up” policies to combat the silencing or neglect of staff concerns. After 9 years of speaking up policy many NHS staff still find themselves unheard or silenced. Now, the U.K. government’s Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), which oversees the NHS, proposes new plans to remove these existing policies and introduce new staff voice policy under the NHS Fit for the Future strategy (NHS England, 2025). In this blog post Sukhwinder Essie Kaur unpacks the failings of Speaking Up and explores how co-production research may be a key player in designing new policies and mechanism that better support NHS staff to voice their concerns.
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