Much has been made of both the legitimacy and the high maintenance cost of the “welfare state.” Tanya Corrie argues in this policy analysis that reducing or eliminating income support leads to higher economic and societal costs through the entrenched disadvantage for people who rely on it, particularly women and their children.
Read MoreIn 1968 anthropologist Bill Stanner spoke of the Great Australian Silence in relation to the historical mistreatment of Indigenous peoples, a national myopia. The just announced 2016 Budget could be similarly termed ‘the Great Australian Fiscal Silence’, a fiscal myopia incommensurate with the level of need.
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Every year I do an analysis of the Indigenous provisions in the federal Budget. This is done in the light of current and past strategies, policies, programs and funding, and is supported, where this is possible, by data and information drawn from government agencies, reports and published papers.
This year’s analysis is now available on the University of Sydney e‐scholarship website where you can also find the analyses from previous years.
Read MoreIt has been widely publicized that women’s superannuation accrual is significantly below their male counterparts' and often inadequate to support women in their retirement years. This policy analysis identifies the current weaknesses in the legal structure and provides practical suggestions for rectifying the inequities.
Read MoreIn today's post Dr Lesley Russell unpacks the Burden of Disease study recently released by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Flagging gaps in the reported data, and a need for more investment in skills to translate research evidence into policy and practice, she argues that “at a time when there are major concerns about the ongoing impact and costs of chronic illness, Australia is missing out on significant opportunities in prevention.”
Read MoreThe economic argument for community legal centres is strong, and the Productivity Commission has recommended an immediate injection of cash to shore up their operations. Despite this, their funding is still being cut. Dr Chris Atmore (@ChrisPolicy; Senior Policy Adviser at the Federation of Community Legal Centres Victoria) outlines why CLC funding should be an election issue in the run-up to July 2.
Read MoreIn today's post, Dr Veronica Sheen covers the recent Australian Unemployed Workers' Union conference and casts a critical eye on Australia's current 'activation method' for reducing unemployment. "Standing up for rights through time honoured methods of protest, organising, and civil disobedience", she argues, "is sometimes the only way of getting action when governments fail to do what is right by segments of its citizenry".
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Continuing our theme of gender equality, childcare and relevant policy levers, this post reports on research that looks at the decisions Australian couples make about work and childcare after having their first child. George Argyrous (ANZSOG), Lyn Craig (UNSW) and Sara Rahman (ANZSOG) studied time-use data to see what impact earnings, gender role attitudes and other factors had on who went back to work, how much each partner worked, and who looked after the child. Unsurprisingly, they found a fairly traditional picture of work and home life!
Read MoreJulie Leask is a social scientist specialising in immunisation and a strong and popular advocate on mainstream and social media. She also posts regularly on her Human Factors blog. Last week she gave an engaging insight into her work, and the opportunities and challenges of research and advocacy, in a post that she has updated here. Follow her on Twitter at @julieleask.
Read MoreJoanna Cruickshank is a Senior Lecturer in History at Deakin University who has watched people of all ages and backgrounds respond powerfully to the compelling theatre production: Coranderrk: We Will Show the Country. The performance recreates a Victoria government inquiry in 1881, when a group of Aboriginal people from the Coranderrk Aboriginal Reserve fought for their right to self-determination.
She has now launched the History for Change crowd-sourcing campaign on Possible to bring the performance to high school students and to get a better understanding of how historical story-telling can educate students against racism. She explains the research project and the use of crowd-sourcing in the post below.
Read MoreThe gender pay gap, unpaid domestic work, and broken attachment to the labour market can result in 'serious consequences' for women's economic security across the life course, writes Dr Dina Bowman. Dr Bowman leads research and policy on Work and Economic Security in the Brotherhood of St Laurence Research and Policy Centre.
Read MoreConditional arrangements designed to ‘correct’ the ‘problematic’ behaviour of welfare recipients have become commonplace in the UK, Australia and other countries for many years. What’s missing from current debates about welfare conditionality, and how can this problem be thought about differently? Professor Peter Dwyer from the University of York, and head of the Welfare Conditionality: Sanctions Support and Behaviour Change project, offers his views in this email interview for Power to Persuade.
Read MoreNudging is the flavour of the moment in public policy, with the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet recently announcing they will follow NSW and establish a new high-level behavioural economics team in PM&C. But what are the risks, ethically and otherwise, of a focus on the psyche? And what can we learn from the experiences of international development practitioners in how we nudge our citizens at home? Elise Klein explores these questions, and more, in this new post.
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Gemma Carey & Lara Corr examine the orms and values of the Productivity Commission and how this influences the way PC reviews are conducted and the advice that is given to government. The full article is available online.
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Today's post comes to from the UK, specifically from Liam Stanley who is is an Associate Fellow, SPERI, & Lecturer in Politics, University of Sheffield. Liam notes the drmatic rise in the use of welfare and the negative connotations that accompany this rise. Sounds familiar right?
Read MoreLet’s start at the end
Let’s tell the story of health. And let us start at the end, because that – for reasons that will become apparent in the remainder of my argument – is how we do things in academia. ‘How we do things in academia’ is unspoken and intrinsic to curriculum design and implementation (and the tools we maintain to keep things as they are – rather than shake them up) and funding our research.
This post by Professor Evelyne de Leeuw was originally posted at the Global Health Consultants blog.
Read MoreAs we head towards the next Federal Budget and Federal Election, this post below from the London School of Economics and Political Science blog (@LSEpoliticsblog) provides a timely challenge to the term 'welfare dependency'. Paul Michael Garrett's post is focused on the United Kingdom but has much to offer the Australian context amid comments like 'the poor don't drive cars' from the former Treasurer Joe Hockey.
Read MoreAmid continuing talk of burgeoning health costs, particularly in the lead-up to the 2016 Federal Budget, Dr Lesley Russell says it is time to look at the impact of extended hospitalisation, on patients, carers and the health system. She warns we should not be so consumed with technological and surgical wonders that we miss their adverse impacts on the very patients whose lives they save.
Read MoreOn International Women's Day 2016, this post by UK academic Marie V. Gibert (@marievgibert) resonates across sectors and time as she prepares to leave formal academia. In the post, the first of two originally published on the PSA Women and Politics Group blog, she reflects on the combined challenges of parenthood and womanhood in academia, and how they strongly affect the career chances of academic mothers - and constrain the work they can do.
Read MoreEvidence-based policy only works if the evidence base itself is robust enough to inform decisions. Joseph Borlagdan (@borlagdanj), Iris Levin and Shelley Mallett of the Brotherhood of St Laurence started their review for ANZSOG's Evidence Base journal aiming to evaluate the evidence for the effectiveness of the youth foyer model. But after their literature search revealed an overall lack of rigour in evaluation studies, they realised they needed to take a different tack.
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