The tireless work of feminist advocates, scholars and their supporters has culminated in the establishment of the Royal Commission into Family Violence. The Royal Commission’s report, due to be released in February 2016, holds the promise of delivering what the family violence service sector has been demanding for decades – a system that recognises the harm that domestic/family violence causes, acknowledgement that it is everyone’s responsibility to prevent it, and provides adequate resources for services that provide the critical and often life-saving support to victims. Although it has already been a long journey, this is just the start. Yvonne Lay, Safety & Resilience Development Lead with Good Shepherd Australia New Zealand, outlines the essential next steps as advocated in Good Shepherd’s submission to the Royal Commission.
Read MoreWomen in Australia, particularly single mothers, still face discrimination in the workforce after giving birth despite the Sex Discrimination Act prohibiting direct family responsibilities discrimination. The recent Australian Human Rights Commission Report highlights the need to review current protections and the complexity of current regulation that is in place. However, as Alexandra Heron, Research Associate Women and Work Research Group, University of Sydney Business School notes in this blog originally published http://blogs.reading.ac.uk/, it will also require the right political environment and cultural change.
Read MoreIf you're anything like us at Power to Persuade, you consider yourself a master of the dark arts of tweeting. Now it is time for you to level up and get some awesome Indigenous tweeting in your life.
Read MoreToday feels like a good day to highlight the range of amazing Indigenous people out there doing great things in our community.
Read MoreParticipation in evaluation, actually participation in everything to do with social policy, is frequently seen as time-consuming and expensive. But does it have to be? Leslie Groves and Irene Guijt identify the common perceived barriers for the use of participatory methods in evaluation, and suggest that our resistance to participation in evaluation runs deeper than we think.
Read MoreHappy Monday! Something a bit left-of-centre for your Monday morning read. An essay by the famous (and controversial!) political scientist Francis Fukuyama, which outline his views around the decay of the public administration (and public policy) in the United States.
(We hesitate to mention that we are not endorsing his views by publishing, only offering them up for reflection.)
This post is a reblog from the website Foreign Affairs.
Read MoreCo-design, co-production and other terms which emphasise that governments cannot solve social problems from a top down-perspective are becoming increasingly common place. However, given the power differences involved can we truly 'co-create'? Below, Mark Evens explores the emerging popularity of co-design. Professor Evans is the Director of the Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis, University of Canberra. His piece originally appeared on the Policy Space.
Read MoreYesterday we outlined the problem which PTP aims to address. Below, we explain how PTP is working to fill skill and knowledge gaps in policy networks. This is an extract from a forthcoming article on PTP's framework and the lessons it offers for other 'boundary spanning' initiatives.
Read MoreAustralia has experienced a number of high profile policy implementation failures in recent years, such as the 'Pink bats' scheme. Implementation, as a separate part of the policy process and as a scholarly endeavour, is creeping back onto the radar (thankfully). Today's post by Charlotte Sausman, Eivor Oborn and Michael Barrett discus orignally appared on the Politics and Policy Journal Blog as an overview of the paper - Policy translation through localisation: implementing national policy in the UK
Read MoreWith the next Power to Persuade Symposium coming up, we thought it would be useful to revisit why this initiative exists and what it is we do. This will be a two part post, the first (below) focuses on the problem PTP aims to address. The next post outlines our vision and mission of how we do this.
Read MoreIn the latest Social Policy Whisperer, Dr Ben Spies-Butcher discusses the implications of the perceived (and sometimes rhetorical) differences between "social" and "economic" policy. How do we bring these two debates together?
Read MoreIncreasing employment participation is critical to improving living standards, individual well-being, and equality. In this post, Michael Keating (former Head of the Department of Employment and Industrial Relations) looks at concrete proposals to boost employment participation. This post originally appeared on the Pearls and Irritations blog.
Read MoreHow do we determine who has a legitimate claim to income support - their 'deservingness'? And how can we reduce stereotyping while increasing workforce participation? In this post, social and economic policy analyst Peter Davidson looks to international research for some clues. This post originally appeared on Peter's Need to Know blog.
Read MoreIn this post, Alex Baumann, from University of Western Sydney, examines how programs aimed at 'empowering' or 'engaging' public housing tenants and other service users too often ignore the experience and perspective of the people they are intended to support, and how the failure of poorly designed or implemented programs is unfairly blamed on service users
Read MoreJeff Thompson is community development manager at a disability service provider in the ACT. In this post he explains the implications of the NDIS for existing service providers in an environment that favours the “new” over the known.
Read MorePeople who are unemployed can be made to feel worthless, stigmatised, unwanted and lonely. Tracey Robbins discusses how we can seek to understand the loss of identity and loneliness people can feel as a result of being unemployed, and reset the way we work together as a community to help people find a way out of loneliness and possibly, find work too.
Read MoreThis year’s ACOSS conference – Towards the Common Good – took place at Technology Park, Sydney, June 24–26. Rik Sutherland from St Vincent de Paul reports.
Read More“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Almost 300 years later, this proverbial insight by Benjamin Franklin has lost none of its pertinence. On the contrary: in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia we want to show not only that preventative policy pays off in Benjamin Franklin’s sense, but that prevention can help us to avoid social follow-up costs. This post is by Hannelore Kraft is premier of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and first appeared on the Policy Network.
Read MoreThe 'new' nanny trial has been hailed as a solution for flexible child care by the Federal government. But is it a solution and for whom? What do children, families and nannies need to make this 'solution' work well? Our guest today, Elizabeth Adamson (@eama221) from the Social Policy Research Centre, explores these issues as she takes us through details of the nanny trial.
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