Sue Olney
Tuesday April 5th is Youth Homelessness Matters Day. As detailed in an accompanying blog, youth homelessness is on the rise due to a range of policy changes. Couch surfing is the predominant manifestation of youth homelessness, although largely hidden. Shorna Moore from WEstJustice has written before about young people’s experiences of couch surfing; today she provides a look into how couch surfing specifically places young women and their children in precarious situations.
Read MoreWith 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.
Read MoreAustralia offers an interesting analogue for England in thinking about how mental health treatment and illness prevention might develop. Inevitably there are limitations on what can be learnt and what can be transferred, but there are lessons. In the post below, Professor Paul Burstow looks at what Australia's approach to mental health can teach the English.
Read MoreWhen Labor came to power in 2007, then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd put homelessness at the top of the agenda, labelling it our ''national obscenity'' and ordering his ministers to spend a night in a homeless shelter to see how many people were being turned away.
In the post below, Dr Lesley Russell looks at the failure of political leadership on housing security since. She tracks its impact, particularly on health and wellbeing, and points to international models that are showing the way.
Read MoreOver 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.
Read MoreAhead of his visit next week to Australia, Dr Duncan Green, senior strategic adviser for Oxfam Great Britain, considers how agencies can respond to the rising tide of nationalism and populism globally, and suggests we need to look more and differently at the moments in people’s lives when social norms are formed or reformed, and the crucibles that forge them.
Read MoreHigh profile public health academic Professor Simon Chapman says there has never been a more important time for researchers all over the world to speak up about their work, its implications and how societies and governments should act on it.
Read MoreNext week at UNSW Canberra, a range of international and domestic experts are coming together for a workshop entitled 'Public management and policy implementation for public health policy – new directions for research and practice'. But what is the history of collaboration between these respective academic disciplines? Are they, as the cliche goes, a match made in heaven? Gemma Carey discusses below in advance of the workshop next week.
Read MoreScholars of public policy often seek to explain how particular policy ideas catch on. What is it that makes some ideas fly, and others flop? For social policy advocates, this is a crucial question. In this post, ANZSOG researcher Jo Luetjens suggests that understanding the role of the policy entrepreneur, and the strategies they use to create change, can help move us toward more effective advocacy strategies.
Read MoreThe NSW Legislative Council Inquiry into Child Protection yesterday released a report called Child Protection. It is yet another in a long list of reports into the child protection system telling us what we already know: game changing reform is needed. In today's post, Dr Kirsty Nowlan from the Benevolent Society discusses the implications of the report for the social services sector in Australia.
Read MoreDifferent strategies for using data are needed, depending on the institution, policy or individuals in question. In this post, Josh Powell, Chief Strategy Officer at the Development Gateway weighs in on the 'data and development' debate.
Read MorePreviously 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.
Read MoreJuanita 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.
Read MoreDeveloping strong recommendations is critical to ensuring that policy decisions are informed by evidence. In this post, Leandro Echt, General Coordinator of Politics & Ideas, offers some criteria to consider in developing good policy recommendations for decision-makers.
Read MoreThe inevitable chaos and unpredictability of politics makes trying to achieve policy change a real challenge. But that doesn’t mean academics should just give up. Drawing from policy analysis and public affairs lessons in the UK, James Lloyd, Director of the London-based think tank the Strategic Society Centre, recommends six steps to get researchers going in the right direction towards achieving policy change.
Read MoreHow can researchers have impact in a political landscape in which public opinion is shaped more by emotion and personal belief than evidence? Following the selection of ‘post-truth’ as the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016, Ruth Dixon takes inspiration from artist Grayson Perry’s plea that academics should cultivate greater emotional understanding of those with whom they disagree. It’s time for political scientists to question, with some humility, their own ‘deficit model’ of the public understanding of politics. This post originally appeared on the author's personal blog and was reposted on the LSE Impact Blog. It appears here with the author's permission.
Read MoreWhat 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.
Read MoreThe ninth annual International Social Innovation Research Conference (ISIRC 2017) will explore the theme Beyond Boundaries? Organisations, Systems and Social Innovation. Chris Mason and Robyn Keast are calling for submissions for the Public Policy and Social Innovation stream before 28 March 2017.
Read MoreImplementation of almost any policy now requires actions and engagement across multiple organisational domains with government, public, private and community partners. In today's post, Gemma Carey, Helen Dickinson and Sue Olney look to feminist theory for new ideas on how policy actors can navigate and influence the dynamic and increasingly complex policy implementation environment.
Read MoreSocial sciences can undoubtedly benefit from developments in computational tools for data collection and analysis, as well as the growing accessibility and availability of data sources. However, Marta Stelmaszak and Philipp Hukal flag the importance of continued careful reflection when using new forms of data and methods in this sphere, particularly reflection on and investigation of the mechanisms that generate and manipulate information up to the point of collection. It is this reflection and investigation, they argue, that sets social science apart from data science. This post was originally published on the LSE Impact Blog as part of its digital methodologies series.
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