Is Australia’s education system adequately developing our children for the jobs of the future? Incept Labs’ Dr Robert Kay argues that under the current system, our children will not prepared for the next wave of workforce changes that the World Economic Forum’s Professor Klaus Schwab has dubbed the ‘fourth industrial revolution.’ His solution? Education 3.0 and a new mindset for the teachers of tomorrow.
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It can be argued that time is the crucial element in securing gender equality. Women work longer hours than men, but most of these hours are unpaid. Meanwhile, men spend increasingly long hours at work, resulting in promotions and pay rises unrelated to productivity or competence. In today’s federal election series, Sara Charlesworth of RMIT (@RMITCPOW) shares an overview of the Australian Work + Family Roundtable’s election benchmarks, which provides an evidence-based framework for addressing the root causes of inequalities.
Read MoreScholars have, for decades, suggested that organisational amnesia can negatively impact the effectiveness of government agencies. So why do they forget? Maria Katsonis has summarised the findings of Alastair Stark (University of Queensland) for why public institutions may be unable - or unwilling - to access and/or use past experiences to help deliver better public outcomes.
Read MoreGrattan Institute’s Stephen Duckett and Matt Cowgill unpack a glaring gap in Australia’s public health system: universal access to dental care.
Read MoreThe use of evidence in public policy decision-making is not new, though fully embedding the practice across the public sector has been challenging. On the eve of a trip to Australia to share the learnings from the UK What Works centres with interested government and philanthropic audiences, Jonathan Breckon (Director of The Alliance for Useful Evidence) joined with Dr Robyn Mildon (Executive Director of The Centre for Evidence and Implementation) to outline some common issues for anybody setting up a new evidence centre – and ideas on how to surmount them.
Read MoreThe concept of the ‘middle class squeeze’ has been around for more than a decade, with the term dating back to November 2006, when US Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi used it to provide context to the domestic agenda of the U.S. Democratic Party. This issue has yet to subside, with a recent report from the OECD noting that middle incomes have grown less than the average in many OECD countries, and in some they have not grown at all. The Mandarin’s David Donaldson explains how this trend affects Australia’s middle class, and outlines OECD’s recommendations for how governments can act to support this shrinking group.
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Poverty in Australia appears to be entrenched for many marginalised groups, and this is a concern which is regularly raised in the lead-up to the Federal election – is Australia “fair”? However, one policy area on which there is resounding silence is child support. In today’s federal election series, Kris Natalier (@KrisNatalier) of Flinders University and Terese Edwards (@Terese_NCSMC) of the National Council for Single Mothers and their Children argue that child support reform is urgently needed to reduce poverty levels and improve financial and psychological wellbeing for some of Australia’s most disadvantaged families.
Read MorePublic funding of private schools has been a contentious issue in Australia. While those in favour of private schools receiving government funding sometimes claim that students studying in private institutions receive better education outcomes, analysis from Southern Cross University‘s David Zyngier and Monash University’s Pennie White seems to disagree.
Read MoreDespite high associated costs, Australia’s Better Access Program is unable to provide adequate support to those struggling with mental health issues, especially in the long-run, Sebastian Rosenberg writes.
Read MoreThe University of Queensland’s Romy Listo reports on the United Nations 63rd Commission on the Status of Women held 11-23 March in New York. She draws attention to the commitment on Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) which is supported by Australian delegates. Despite support for these commitments by the Federal Government, in practice the actual implementation of CSE by Australian states and territories does not meet the inclusive and expansive ideals being championed. Investment and strategies are needed to bring the right to CSE into Australian classrooms.
Read MoreClimate change is back on the political agenda and public support for action on climate change is at its highest level since 2007. But can we expect our political institutions to be able to respond in the time and scale needed given their past failures? Rather than merely policy reform do we need to reform the system of government itself? In today’s post Celia Green and Andrew Joyce discuss how cognitive science research could be used in the redesign of our political institutions to enable better decision making processes.
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Few Australians experience more pain from government policy than Indigenous populations, and too often it is Indigenous women who bear the brunt. In today’s federal election piece, Zoe Staines (@Zoettes) of The University of Queensland places a gender lens over the troubling Welfare to Work remote community incarnation known as the Community Development Programme, and explains how it differentially disadvantages women.
Read MoreBridging the evidence-policy gap is a recognised challenge for researchers and policy makers alike. In today’s blog post Hannah Badland, a Principal Research Fellow at the Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University, talks about the value of inter-sectoral partnerships to solve complex problems. Using the example of a new global framework, The New Urban Agenda, she discusses how agendas that draw on cross-sectoral collaborations can help advance policy action in complex policy areas such as the social determinants of health.
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Election season is on us again, and Twitter feeds and daily news updates are full of potential elected leaders making policy promises and giving warnings about how the opposing parties won’t be able to bring us the Australia we need.
But how do we know what the Australia we need is? Depending on political leaning and personal values, this is going to vary from voter to voter. But when deciding on which policies to support, it can be useful to try and have a framework by which to evaluate platforms and the societies they are wishing to create. Megan Weier suggests that, if we want an Australia in which there is a ‘fair go for all’ (the classic Australian dream), the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a useful benchmark to look to.
Read MoreIn today’s post, Professor Catherine Needham argues that low tolerance for public servants to test new ways of working is hampering meaningful change in the way government works with citizens. This post was originally published on the 21st Century Public Servant blog.
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As the portion of Australia’s older population continues to grow, there is increasing focus in policy on issues pertaining to ageing, demonstrated most recently in the Liberal Budget papers. However, much of these policies appear to be designed with little input from those who are struggling most to age well – older women. In today’s election series piece, co-authors Susan Feldman and Harriet Radermacher provide a summary of their recently-published research in which they heard from older women in the greater Melbourne area on issues of importance to them.
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In this post, Zoe Callis, Ami Seivwright, and Paul Flatau of the Centre for Social Impact, University of Western Australia write about the practice of outcome measurement in Western Australia, including its facilitators and barriers. This media release provides a snapshot of the major findings, but readers are encouraged to peruse the entire series. Their research suggests that while efforts to measure social outcomes has increased in the last year, the actual practice has decreased. The main barrier? Funding. But, there are others…
Read MoreWith the Coalition’s ‘woman problem’, representation of women in Australia’s Parliament has been at the forefront. While Labor has a self-imposed gender quota (see page 6) that means women are at near-parity in Parliamentary representation at 46.3 per cent, the Liberals are at 22.9 per cent (percentages calculated in January 2019). With an overall female representation in Parliament of 33.2 per cent, here’s the question: does representation matter? One way to answer this is to look to countries which have a quota system, to identify any changes to policymaking. In today's analysis, Quentin Lippmann of the Paris School of Economics provides evidence from France. This summary draws on Quentin’s presentation at the Australian Gender Economics Workshop in February of this year; his full presentation notes can be found here.
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