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Access to early childhood services is widely considered to be an important means of supporting vulnerable children and families. Yet the evidence that access to such services automatically makes a difference for vulnerable families is mixed at best. The growing presence of for-profit early childhood services may have an impact on the sector's capacity to provide the enhanced education and care to those most likely to benefit. What are the current and future possibilities for early childhood services to benefit vulnerable children and families? What resources are required to build the capacity of early childhood settings in supporting vulnerable families, and are these likely to differ between for-profit and not-for-profit settings? This paper will explore these questions using a Benevolent Society project, Partnerships in Early Childhood, funded through the Commonwealth's Stronger Families and Communities Strategy, Invest to Grow, as an illustrative case study. Researchers from the Social Policy Research Centre evaluated the first three years of the project, which involves a number of not-for-profit early education and care providers. The paper describes the implementation of PIEC as an attempt to improve the quality of early education and care services to vulnerable children, and lessons that can be drawn for the future of similar interventions. We conclude that time, support for staff and partnerships between different organisations appear to be critical for the success of these interventions, and that the capacity of for-profit services to provide these resources deserves attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's poverty has long been a central concern for policy makers and policy researchers. The body of extant research conducted and the range of programmatic interventions undertaken by successive governments in this and other countries is extraordinary. Nevertheless, children remain in poverty. Clearly there are many reasons for this, not least of which is the maintenance and intensification of market capitalism with its attendant blatant inequalities. Even so, the moral, political, social and economic imperatives for developing workable responses to children's poverty remain. This paper argues that we, in Australia, should adopt an approach increasingly taken in the UK. Drawing on, among other things, the new sociology of childhood, this approach begins not with the expertise of adult researchers and policy makers, but with that of children. In doing so, the case is made for why children's perceptions and experiences of poverty are key concerns for policy. The paper outlines in theoretical terms why children's voices matter. Invoking the new sociology of childhood and the sociology of identity, a conceptual framework for understanding why policy scholars and makers should carefully attend to the voices of their subjects is sketched - in this case, the subjects are children. Finally, some methodological implications of this for undertaking policy research informed by this approach are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past three decades, thousands of young families have moved from large cities to non-metropolitan areas of Australia. Various policies, particularly housing policies, have played a significant role in this trend. Despite the various impetuses towards relocation, little is known about how young families fare once they have relocated to non-metropolitan areas. In this paper we draw on a study about families relocating to three distinct non-metropolitan areas. From our qualitative analysis of the observations of service providers in education, health, and community support services, we present a model of how relocation to non-metropolitan areas can contribute to the increased vulnerability of some young families to social exclusion. We discuss some ways in which policy makers can intervene to reduce this risk for young families at each phase of the relocation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper relates to the Australian government's community awareness campaign, as part of the Action Plan to Eradicate Trafficking in Persons, which was announced in October 2003 in response to evidence of human trafficking in Australia. The authors explore the challenges that are likely to be encountered during the implementation of the campaign using empirical data from two Victorian studies, the first of which explored community awareness of trafficking and the second of which examined Victoria Police and local government's responses to trafficking. We conclude that there are significant barriers to both the community and authorities identifying suspicious activities and acting on reports by community. In addition, institution challenges faced by Victoria police and local government in dealing with referred information appropriately will jeopardise the success of the initiative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social policy appeared to be a key battleground at the 2004 Australian Federal election. Opposition Leader Latham announced major policies on Medicare, family support and taxation, and schools funding during the election campaign. Using sample survey data from the Australian Election Study 2004, this paper analyses how these policies may have influenced voters. In brief, although a significant proportion of electors identified these issues as being extremely important to them when they were deciding about how to vote, many made up their mind abouthow to vote around the time of the announcement of the election or before. This mitigated the potential effect that these major policies could have on the election outcome. Nevertheless, these policies were important and Labor had a significant policy advantage amongst those who were late deciders about how to cast their vote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 1980s Australian public policy has undergone the most major transformation since Federation. This transformation has been underwritten by two key principles: liberalism - the view that citizens are autonomous individual actors whose interests are best served when they are free from coercive government interventions into individual action; and marketisation - the belief that free markets are arenas which best enable individual autonomy and produce efficient economic outcomes. These principles define ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘hard liberalism’. After summarising the major policy changes identified with neoliberalism in Australia, the paper introduces a new research project that examines its impact on socioeconomic inequality, gender inequality and politics and culture. Inspection of relevant data indicates that there are important trends in inequality, public opinion and political behaviour that warrant this investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A review of research on transnationalism shows that diasporas with transnational orientations and connections tend to have a strong attachment to local and global identities but a weak attachment to the nation state. In addition, it is argued that territorial nation states are losing their authority in an increasingly globalised and interconnected world. Governments in western democracies have responded by tightening restrictions on citizenship and placing more emphasis on social cohesion and integration rather than multiculturalism. Using the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (2003), this paper examines attachment to cultural conceptions of national identity among the Asian Australian diaspora and examines the existing literature about the relationship between transmigrants and the nation state. Findings from the study reveal a number of social determinants behind variation in emotional attachment to cultural conceptions of national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anna Yeatman and Joanna Penglase (August 2004) provide a useful review of the literature on ‘Looking After Children’ (LAC), a guided practice system for children living in out-of-home care. In summarising the polarised debate, the authors point to an unresolved situation in which advocates have uncritically adopted individualised care planning, as a way of improving outcomes in child welfare while critics have not offered alternatives for systemic reform. This is an area of troubled social policy and the debate cannot rest here. This paper suggests a number of pressing research questions to be addressed. The urgency of the issues and the characteristics of local service systems mean LAC needs to be evaluated in the Australian context, taking into account the local experience and participation of children, families and their social workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health policy was an integral component of the post-war welfare state, which represented a nationally based class compromise providing concessions in the form of income support and service provision outside the ambit of the market. In Australia, development of a universal health system was delayed until the introduction of Medibank, and subsequently Medicare. Since its inception, Medicare has been subjected to retrenchment pressures that have dominated welfare state developments since the mid 1970s. This paper traces developments in the Australian health system, revealing that the major trends, privatisation and the transfer of responsibility from the collective to the private sphere, represent a movement towards a more residual system that threatens the Medicare goal of equitable access to quality medical treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Outcomes of social policies have always been mediated by the discretionary agency of front-line staff, processes which nevertheless have received insufficient attention in policy evaluation and in the social policy literature more broadly. This article takes the case example of the policy reforms associated with the Australian government's welfare-to-work agenda. Drawing on two discreet research projects undertaken at different points in the policy trajectory, the practices of social workers in Centrelink - the Commonwealth government's primary service delivery agency involved in welfare-to-work - is examined. Centrelink social workers have been and remain one of the core groups of specialist staff since the Department's inception in the late 1940s, working to improve the well being of people in receipt of income security. Their experiences of the recent past and their expectations of the future of their professional practice as welfare reform becomes more entrenched are canvassed. In summary, the discretionary capacity of the Centrelink social workers to moderate or shape the impact of policy on income security recipients is steadily eroding as this group of professionals is increasingly captured by the emerging practices of workfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores issues arising from the welfare reform process in the United States and Australia. The involvement of faith-based organisations in both countries has evolved in different historical, social, political and cultural contexts. The paper will explore three main themes. First, it examines the relevance of the term 'faith-based' to describe the nature of the relationship between charities and churches in the mixed economy of welfare in the Australian context. Second, it provides a critical analysis of the reform processes, suggesting implications for the future of church-based organisations. Third, it maps directions for cross-comparative research of church-based social services provision in both countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) scheme is an unusual labour market and social development program for Indigenous people. Currently the CDEP scheme employs around 36,000 Indigenous Australians and accounts for over one-quarter of total Indigenous employment. Despite the significance of the CDEP scheme, in recent times, relatively little attention has been given to the potential for the scheme to be used as an instrument for economic and social development in remote areas of Australia. This article present new evidence on the impact of the CDEP scheme on economic and social outcomes for Indigenous people in remote areas of Australia. It is concluded that the scheme has been successful in generating positive economic and community development outcomes at minimal cost to the Australian taxpayer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on various social themes dealt by the "Australian Journal of Social Issues." The journal's writers have not necessarily understood each paper as situated within a tradition of concerns about issues that are inescapably part of democratic social policy, concerns about professional authority, academic representation and the encouragement or inhibition of various kinds of individual and collective agency. One of the earliest themes identified in the journal was professional representation. That is, there is much comment on the process by which social phenomena become social issues and thus enter the domains of academic commentary and of the human services professions. In a variety of ways, the journal's writers have considered how social policy could or should be an expression of the values of Australians. A third theme called citizens and social capital, the relationship between state and civil society agencies, and how they interact to construct the agency of individuals and communities.

Australian public policy makers are presently confronted with significant demographic changes that will profoundly affect the formulation of rational economic and social policy over the long term. This paper seeks to outline the potential impact of this demographic change and place it in historical perspective. The challenges posed by an ageing population for fiscal policy are explored and it is stressed that policy inertia will invite severe costs in future. It is argued that an appropriate policy stance should be developed in the context of a framework for inter-temporal fiscal balance not only to focus on long-run fiscal sustainability, but also to include considerations of intergenerational equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social capital and community capacity have become key concepts in social policy responses to marginalised individuals and communities. Policy making has occurred in the context of heated debate about the roles of government and business institutions in strengthening community capacities. In this paper, we wilt explore theoretical positions about the role that these institutions play in building local social capital. We argue that the dominant conceptions of social capital in Australia fail to recognise the potential for non-local institutions to strengthen local community capacity. Drawing on a study of four geographically diverse communities we show that a substantial proportion of community members were disconnected from non-local government and business institutions. We conclude with some initial suggestions for extending the social capital discourse to recognise and build the role of non-local institutions in strengthening local communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Care is a fundamental condition of human existence, an inherently social activity. Yet surprisingly, care has only recently begun to receive serious attention from social researchers and the public. Despite the fact that care has become a public issue over the past twenty-five years or so, current thinking in policy and advocacy for carers has developed an overtly narrow and self-limiting focus with a strong emphasis on the plight of primary or sole carers, with care being seen predominantly as a burden, From looking at Australian policy on carers, it may be concluded that care is essentially understood as a private, individual concern, a one-way activity in which the active agent, the carer, does something to the other, passive, recipient. The challenge posed in this paper is to move beyond this approach to that of a more social conception of care. Following a review of the uses of the terms 'care' and 'carers' in the current Australian policy context, a discussion of the meaning of the term 'care' is presented and an. alternative understanding of the term, with the potential of recognising and promoting care as a complex, social outcome is advanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deinstitutionalisation is represented as a major step toward social inclusion through the resettlement of disabled people residing in segregated large-scale institutions into community-based homes. By promoting the right to live in ordinary community residential settings, deinstitutionalisation fundamentally changes both the support services and housing arrangements of former institutional residents. In Australia, as in many western countries, debates on community care have tended to focus on the location and nature of non-housing supports for people leaving dependent care. This focus, however, overlooks the fact that deinstitutionalisation involves a radical rehousing of people in care. This paper explores the character and implications of deinstitutionalisation in Australia as a rehousing process. It is based on a recent national research project that has examined the housing futures of people with intellectual disabilities who have been, or will be, deinstitutionalised. The paper considers the increasingly divergent socio-political perspectives that have emerged in recent discussions about social inclusion, institutional reform and independent living and their implications for housing and community care policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reviews the usefulness of the concept of social exclusion for Australian social housing policy. We draw on recent theoretical and empirical research from Europe and the UK to develop a critique of the concept of social exclusion. It is argued that any assessment of social exclusion needs to distinguish between its utility as an academic explanatory concept and its political deployment to justify new forms of policy intervention. Policy targeting anti-social behaviour through increasingly more punitive means, for instance, is often justified on the basis that it ameliorates the problems of social exclusion experienced by tenants residing in public housing estates. We conclude that, in spite of the limitations of social exclusion as an analytical concept, for political and pragmatic reasons it is likely to become an important component of the emerging Australian housing policy agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article assesses the experiment with mutuality within employment services and social security in Australia. Coercion of clients has increased under the Job Network, the new Australian employment service, as manifested in the growth of breach actions due to difficulties in the governance of mutual obligation. The new environments created by the contraction of job matching services have also changed the clients' rights. Moreover, it is the market sector that controls the system of mutuality in the country and the government's equity and fairness of administration is therefore needed.

The article focuses on the continuities of mutual obligation with extant social policy in Australia. It notes some results of researcher Will Sanders' study of the administration of unemployment payments. He also illustrates the tension between equality and difference in Australian social administration. Cape York Institute director Noel Pearson's view of social participation, obligation, and reciprocity and Australian author Patrick McClure's opinions on indigenous Australians are also tackled. McClure and Pearson want governments to aid the five classes of people, by altering conditions on which they acquire welfare income. McClure also suggests an individualized management in rehabilitating people, whose social involvement is at risk.

This paper examines the changes in the terms of citizen-state relations that are coded in Australia's current program of welfare reform. It argues that welfare reform entails a shift from welfare as a limited social right of citizenship to welfare as a form of support conditional upon completing specified obligations, and from the provision of support as a cash payment to support coupling cash with personal services. Together, these shifts have the scope transform the relation between citizen and state fundamentally. This is no less than a shift from social policy citizenship in which claimants are presumed to act on their own behalf to paternalistic support and care directed to reforming character and values as well as to meeting need. The paper argues that this shift violates the fundamental equality essential to social policy citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problems being experienced on the roads, of continued fatalities, serious injury and infringements, are currently being evaluated through a cognitive approach which focuses on the individual. The paper outlines the main features of this approach and argues for an alternative approach which investigates driving as a culture and which offers a method of dealing with the appropriateness of the attitudes, beliefs and expectations embodied within that culture. A cultural approach involves looking at how driving as a culture is constructed and maintained. It thus represents a focus which is much more socially oriented and aimed at influencing the culture of driving rather than merely punishing the individual driver. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the importance of reconstituting community in the era of globalization, and the ideological dimension of the politics of community in Australia. Shift in focus of Australian social policy from issues of social justice to questions of social order; Consideration of the community as a dynamic terrain of political contention; Relationship between the community and the state.

The increasing number of migrant women and girls in Australia affected by female genital mutilation (FGM) presents a significant challenge for public policy. Addressing FGM requires an understanding of the practice, its incidence and consequences; as of the cultural patterns and belief systems that underwrite it in those countries where it is commonly practised. Australian policy and programmatic responses to FGM are placed in the context of both international initiatives and those in other countries of settlement, and the underlying principles that guide effective FGM policy development identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of calls for a 'third way' which proposes the abandonment of many of the social democratic and statist commitments of the postwar era, this paper reviews both the responsibilities accepted by peak bodies such as ACOSS and those that ought to be retained by government. It is sceptical of claims that social policy debates in Australia lead to the conclusion that welfare state development here has been satisfactory. Social democratic objectives (derived from intellectual contributions in the 1940s and 1950s as well as from the comparative political economy of the 1980s and 1990s) emphasize more decommodified provision of services than can be readily admitted in Australia. If the demand for social welfare and social policy continues to increase to the extent suggested by past and present circumstances, serious implications emerge for both public and private providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to its specific historical context and unique sociopolitical milieu, Australia has developed a relatively distinctive Southeast Asian settlement assistance model. This article explores the adequacy of the pattern of service delivery that has evolved in Melbourne in response to the settlement needs of the Southeast Asian community. The research finds that the Australian Indochinese aid initiative is high on principle and rhetoric and low on practical solutions. Despite compassionate public pronouncements, assistance institutions increasingly operate in a harsh social, economic, and political context wherein there are few forced migrant-specific provisions. A devolution policy has also engendered an inefficient patchwork service set-up rather than a benevolent resettlement arrangement. Without a more genuine official orientation and a more appropriate overall approach, many Australian Southeast Asians are destined to continue a protracted struggle against disadvantage and neglect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The shift to community care for people with disabilities in Australia has given rise to some recognition and acknowledgment, in both academie research and policy development, of the importance of their carers. However, information about government policy and services for carers is fragmented and limited. Our knowledge about the prevalence of caregiving and the socio-demographic characteristics of carers and their service needs, is inadequate. Studies in relation to carer use of and satisfaction with services tend to be small scale and focussed on a specific service or carer group. Carer views on broader mainstream service provision have received little attention. This paper identifies gaps in our knowledge as well as the practical and conceptual difficulties in documenting the range of services available and the relevant social policy. These difficulties are likely to reflect barriers to broad and effective policy and service development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author focuses on the issue concerning social exclusion in Australian's government social policy. She articulates the advantages and disadvantages of adopting social exclusion in contemporary research and policy debates related to housing, disability and place-based initiatives, as well as welfare reform. She also discusses the relevance housing system to social exclusion and inclusion.