Flexible working: innovations and issues

Australia’s Fair Work Act 2009 provides employees in the national workplace relations system with a legal right to request flexible working arrangements. And while this practice is welcomed by employers, it may be more difficult to implement in practice. UNSW Canberra’s Public Service Research Group academics Dr Sue Williamson and Dr Meraiah Foley, as well as Central Queensland University’s Dr Linda Colley, explain some of the policy’s innovations and challenges experienced by employers when they assist employees in achieving balance between work and their personal lives.

This article was originally published on The Mandarin.

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Innovation, Issues, Policy and governancePower to PersuadeFlexible Work
Developing and recruiting the future public servant
Developing and recruiting the future public servant

Public service workforce reform has been on the minds of public administrators, especially in light of high profile reviews such as the Independent Review of the Australian Public Service. UNSW Canberra’s Public Service Research Group academics Professor Deborah Blackman, Dr Samantha Johnson, Associate Professor Helen Dickinson and Dr Linda Dewey delve into this issue in greater detail from a development and recruitment perspective. They suggest that there are four distinct elements in social learning that can serve as a framework for building workforce capability and supporting change within the public service.

A full version of their thoughts can be found in Reimagining the Future Public Service Workforce.

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Innovation, Issues, Policy and governancePower to PersuadeWorkforce Reform, Public Servants, Development and Recruitment
Policymaking amid complex systems: finding the levers of influence

Finding the right levers to influence policies in a complex environment can be very difficult. The Mandarin’s David Donaldson sought and consolidated the views of three academics, including that of UNSW Canberra’s Public Service Research Group professor Deborah Blackman, on policymaking in complex systems.

This article was originally published on The Mandarin.

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Policy and governancePower to Persuadepolicy making, Governance, government
Back-to-back MoGs induce ‘dysfunction’, warns APS review submission

Professor Deborah Blackman, Associate Professor Helen Dickinson, Dr Karen Gardner, Dr Fiona Buick, Dr Samantha Johnson and Dr Sue Olney from UNSW Canberra’s Public Service Research Group believe that machinery of government changes are often poorly planned, disruptive and costly. Their APS review submission outlines five priority areas for reform.

This article was originally published on The Mandarin.

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Innovation, Policy and governance, IssuesPower to Persuadegovernment, Governance, Reform, Machinery of Government
A woman’s struggle: how our system fails to address discrimination at work
A woman’s struggle: how our system fails to address discrimination at work

Australia has many documented barriers to achieving gender parity in the workplace, and while a statistical overview of the pay and superannuation gap, differences in part-time and full-time positions held, and/or the percent of women in senior management or board positions is a good dashboard indicator, the most revealing view is to examine how things sit for women who face multiple barriers to achieving workplace equity. In today’s importance analysis, Catherine Hemingway[1] (@cathehemingway) of WEstjustice (@WesternCLC) shares findings from her Not Just Work report, which explores the high levels of discriminatory actions that recently-arrived women experience in their work places.

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Womens Policy Action TankWomen's Policy Action Tankhuman rights, work, discrimination, CALD communities
For women and children fleeing violence, timely and effective social security support is vital
For women and children fleeing violence, timely and effective social security support is vital

Last week, an important research report was launched by the National Social Security Rights Network. Entitled "How well does Australia’s social security system support victims of family and domestic violence?", author Sally Cameron lays out the many and complex ways the welfare system too often increases women’s financial insecurity following a separation due to domestic violence, and in the process compounds trauma. Today’s blog post provides a summary of the main findings from the report.

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Womens Policy Action TankWomen's Policy Action Tankfamily violence, social welfare, welfare reform
Social policy has changed, and so has social policy research. That’s not all bad news

Continuing the discussion on the future of social policy research in Australia, Deputy Director of the UNSW Social Policy Research Centre kylie valentine explains how work in the field has adapted to changes in funding and stresses the importance of multiple disciplines, epistemologies, intellectual traditions, conceptual frames and partnerships in researching the causes and effects of social inequality.

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Power to Persuade
Improving disabled people’s employment and pay: changing patterns of campaigning and influencing

Liz Sayce - Joseph Rowntree Research Fellow in Practice at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and former Chief Executive of Disability Rights UK -   explores tensions in campaigning for rights to work and rights to social protection for people with disabilities and calls for patterns of campaigning and influencing to change to avoid different groups working at cross-purposes. This post was originally published on the LSE Equity, Diversity and Inclusion blog.

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AdvocacyPower to Persuadedisability
Don’t believe what they say about inequality. Some of us are worse off

Professor Peter Whiteford examines the Productivity Commission research paper Rising inequality? A stocktake of the evidence released last week and cautions us not to believe the media spin that all Australians are better off. To tackle inequality, he argues, we need both policies that generate economic growth and policies that ensure it’s well spread. This piece was originally published in The Conversation on 31 August 2018.

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Finance and economics, IssuesPower to Persuadesocial inequalities
Beyond the brick wall of policy implementation
Beyond the brick wall of policy implementation

Despite being touted the dismal science, the theory of implementation has much to offer. Today we look to policy studies and the way that policy studies researchers think about policy implementation. Lachlan McKenzie (@McKenzie_LD) and Catherine Althaus (@AlthausCat) of ANZSOG argue that policy implementation studies are stuck in a success-failure binary, and with that theoretical stagnation, has hit a ‘brick wall’ in terms of advancement. What lies through the window of such a wall?

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Power to Persuade
Bushfire safety: What’s gender got to do with it?
Bushfire safety: What’s gender got to do with it?

The tenth anniversary of the Black Saturday bushfires is fast approaching. This is a useful time for further analysis of what happened during one of the worst peacetime disasters in Australia’s history, and to reflect on what has changed since, particularly in terms of policy and safety approaches. Dr Meagan Tyler (@DrMeaganTyler) and Dr Ben Reynolds argue that thinking about how gendered expectations and assumptions have affected both policy and practice in this space can be a useful way forward.

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Womens Policy Action TankPower to Persuadeenvironment, gender, policy making
Cracking the collaboration code

Calls for collaborative solutions to difficult policy problems have recently become louder and more insistent. In 2016 the Australia and New Zealand School of Government and the John Curtin Institute of Public Policy at Curtin University co-invested in a comparative case study of five collaborative initiatives in Australia and New Zealand.

The team’s purpose was to identify important factors influencing the success of collaborative approaches. Here, Dr John Butcher shares a few “take homes” from this research.

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Policy and governancePower to PersuadeCollaboration
The Cashless Debit Card: Flawed Beyond Technological Redemption

In this article, Dr. Shelley Bielefeld, Professor Eva Cox, and the Accountable Income Management Network Secretariat critique the Mindaroo Foundation’s report on the Cashless Debit Card (CDC). They cite the ‘cherry picking’ of results to support claims of success, a lack of attention to human rights, and security issues, among other points. Ultimately, they argue that the benefits of the CDC for communities are “negligible to negative” and that the proposed expansion of the trial would further marginalise those purported to benefit from the CDC.

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Finance and economics, IssuesPower to Persuadesocial welfare, social inequalities
Can a whole human services sub-sector transform its practice and reduce chronic homelessness?

The ACT specialist homelessness sector has been exploring how it can respond to the research that suggests that 100% of people engaging with services have been impacted by trauma. In this post, Rebecca Vassarotti explores what some of the research suggests and how human services sub-sectors can engage with practice approaches such as trauma-informed practice.

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IssuesPower to PersuadeCollaboration, housing and homelessness, mental health
ASIC’s MoneySmart is encouraging women to have regular money conversations

Women face specific challenges when it comes to managing money. They tend to spend more time out of the paid workforce to care for others and this impacts on their ability to generate wealth. The Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) is aiming to address this issue by normalising conversations about money. Check out these interviews where ASIC’s Laura Higgins chats with five influential and inspirational Australian women about their experiences with money.

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Finance and economics, IssuesPower to Persuadegender, social inequalities