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People with innate variations of sex characteristics (also known as intersex traits or disorders or differences of sex development) have any of a wide range of innate physical traits that differ from medical and social norms for female and male bodies. Responses to these physical differences create experiences and risks of stigmatisation, discrimination, violence, and harmful medical practices intended to promote social and familial integration and conformity with gender stereotypes. As is evident globally, the Australian policy response to the existence and needs of people with innate variations of sex characteristics has been largely incoherent, variously framing the population as having disordered sex development in need of "fixing", and a third sex/gender identity group in need of recognition, with only recent engagement by intersex community-controlled civil society organisations. This paper presents an overview of the context and goals of the intersex human rights movement in Australia. Australian intersex community organisations have sought to apply human rights norms and develop new infrastructure to address key health and human rights issues, and necessitating new ways of resolving policy incoherence. Together with human rights, mental health, and public health institutions, they have called for significant changes to medical models of care and reform to research and classification systems. Intersex community organising and resourcing have made a tangible difference. The Australian Capital Territory is the first jurisdiction in the country to move ahead with reforms to clinical practice, including a legislative prohibition of certain practices without personal informed consent, oversight of clinical decision-making, and investment in psychosocial support. A national community-controlled psychosocial support service has also commenced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social housing is today a highly residualised sector due to a combination of declining public investment and intensified targeting of stock to the neediest households. We argue that residualisation has opened up a distinct 'problem space' wherein policy making and debate are organised around a distinct set of questions and imperatives. Drawing on research into the management of social housing waitlists in Australia, we show how this problem space is characterised by a preoccupation with finding ever more fine-grained ways of targeting social housing to the neediest households in the context of growing scarcity of housing stock. Defining and operationalising 'neediness' becomes the focal point for policy making and struggles thereover, overshadowing questions of supply and broader debates about the role of social housing in addressing the housing crisis. The problem space of neediness is thus characterised by a tendency to reify social housing scarcity, transforming it into a natural and inevitable constraint that policy makers must simply manage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2020, the Australian Government proposed a new model of higher education funding that purported to incentivise study in national priority areas. However, despite shortages of social workers, the initial proposal doubled the student fee contribution for a social work degree. The Save Social Work Australia campaign was established by the Australian Council of Heads of Schools of Social Work to redress errant assumptions underpinning the funding of social work education and to lobby for social work to be funded at the same level as other allied health programs. A successful social media campaign resulted in the reclassification of social work prior to promulgation of the legislation as one of only two academic disciplines to achieve this outcome. This article demonstrates that social media can be an effective tool for social workers engaged in political lobbying. Social work academics successfully lobbied the Federal Government to improve the funding of social work education in Australia. Social media can be an effective tool for social workers engaged in political lobbying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID‐19 pandemic led to widespread social and economic policy experimentation as governments sought to protect household finances while locking down economies. Cash transfers emerged as one of the most popular policy measures, leading many to reflect on new possibilities for enacting universal basic income through temporary or emergency interventions. We take Australia's pandemic response, and particularly its Coronavirus Supplement, as an example of this broader experimentation. We analyse the Supplement through the lens of an emergency basic income, arguing the measure reflected existing institutional structures and norms, forms of national and international policy learning, and vulnerabilities in Australia's liberalized housing and labour markets. While temporary, we consider how its apparent success might suggest ongoing policy relevance, either as a form of capitalist "crisis management" or as an alternative pathway for implementing forms of basic income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the role of a local newspaper in shaping a community's collective memory of child sexual abuse by documenting changing representations of a former rural orphanage and its custodians where such horrific crimes took place. The paper conducts an across-time analysis of news coverage (1944–1954 and 2010–2020) to map these changing representations in their media, policy and social contexts. It extends scholarship around collective memory and temporal reflexivity as a provocation for journalists to acknowledge and engage with their news outlet's own mediated past (no matter how uncomfortable) when reporting on and interpreting events such as Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social policy represents a critical dimension of the governmental response to COVID-19. This article analyses the Australian response, which was radical in that it signalled an unprecedented policy turnaround towards welfare generosity and the almost total relaxation of conditionality. It was also surprising because it was introduced by a conservative, anti-welfarist government. The principal argument is that, though the generosity was temporary, it should be understood simultaneously by reference to institutional change and institutional tradition. The 'change' element was shaped by the urgency and scale of the crisis, which indicated an institutional 'critical juncture'. This provided a 'window of opportunity' for reform, which would otherwise be closed. 'Tradition' was reflected in the nation's federalist conventions, which partially steered the response. The central implication for other countries is that, amid the uncertainty of a crisis, governments need to consider change within the bounds of their traditional institutions when introducing welfare reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction industry is the primary focus for social procurement policies in many countries. However, there has been little research into the drivers of social procurement policy adoption in this industry. To help address this gap in research, this paper reports the results of semi-structured interviews with fifteen social procurement professionals who are implementing social procurement into the Australian construction industry. Results reveal interesting historical parallels with the implementation of environmental sustainability initiatives. However, social procurement has yet to become normalized. There appears to be a high level of homogeneity in industry practice and while there is considerable scope for innovation, this is constrained by the prescriptive and 'top-down' nature of social procurement policies in Australia which make it difficult for organizations to respond 'bottom-up' to actual community needs. It is concluded that the considerable untapped potential of social procurement policies to create social value currently depends on the intrapreneurial efforts of a small number of emerging social procurement professionals who are individually challenging the many institutional norms and practices which undermine the implementation of these policies into the construction industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly unaffordable housing means that family homelessness represents an urgent issue for social policy and practice. Targeting families at risk of homelessness, Supportive Housing for Families (SHF) subsidizes leases and offers support aimed at sustaining tenancies and family unity. We explore how short-term funding cycles in an advanced welfare system impacts experiences with service delivery. Building on housing scholarship employing an ontological security lens, we interrogate the temporal dimensions of SHF, and how these are intertwined with understandings of home in spatial terms. The analyses are based on research conducted to examine a 12-month SHF pilot in Southeast Queensland, Australia. We analyse qualitative interviews conducted with families (n=17), statutory child protection officers (n=7), and SHF support workers (n=10) involved in this pilot. Findings indicate that fixed-term funding impacts every aspect of service delivery, resulting in the collective production of ontological insecurity, as families continue to long for a forever home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare conditionality, where income support payments are tied to prescribed activities or alternatively good behaviour, has intensified in recent years. The toughest form of conditional welfare is arguably compulsory income management (IM), which involves the quarantining of between 50 and 90 per cent of a participant's benefit payment for spending on food, rent, and other essential items in order to reduce substance abuse, and enhance socially responsible behaviour particularly around the care of children. This qualitative study examines the views of IM participants and community stakeholders in the BasicsCard sites of Greater Shepparton and Playford. Findings are presented regarding practical experiences of IM, including financial management; the socio-emotional impacts of IM; and whether IM has addressed key program objectives. It is concluded that the social harms of IM outweigh any perceived benefits and may particularly disadvantage already vulnerable groups such as women and Indigenous Australians. IMPLICATIONS Compulsory IM contains significant hidden harms, including social stigma and shame, and does not seem to be an effective means of addressing chronic social problems. A voluntary targeted IM scheme may have more utility, particularly if allied with a suite of complementary holistic support services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public health measures to address the COVID-19 pandemic have disrupted welfare regimes around the world. The Australian government suspended activation requirements for millions of social security clients and substantially increased payment levels. Both measures go against the dominant policy logic over the past several decades in Australian social policy. When these changes were made, many advocates and academics called for a permanent increase in the rate of payment and a relaxation of activations requirements. The Australian Government insisted the stimulus package was temporary and that there would be a gradual return to the pre-pandemic policy settings. In this article, we examine what was learned during this natural experiment of unconditional higher payments, which temporarily lifted millions of households out of poverty. We argue that a return to pre-pandemic policy settings should not go unchecked as there remains an opportunity to consider alternative approaches to the welfare-work nexus in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By using a life course approach, this article seeks to discuss and analyse the impact on a carer when their older loved one experiences cognitive changes such as dementia, and the specific implications for people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. In Western contexts such as Australia, dementia is often understood through a biomedical lens and deficit-based frameworks. These dominant understandings can maintain ageist attitudes that construct older people and those with dementia as a social policy burden. This is further amplified for people from non-dominant cultures. This paper examines the marketisation of aged care in Australia and phenomena of ambiguous loss in identifying a range of issues for carers, including the specific experiences and challenges for culturally and linguistically diverse people. Finally, it discusses implications for critical social work practice and argues for radical change at structural and organisational levels. It proposes that a reframing of dementia as a shared social experience along with strengths-based and relational practice are key to creating more meaningful counter narratives that foster a sense of agency and empowerment for carers and people with dementia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID‐19 pandemic saw governments around the world suddenly accumulate substantially higher levels of public debt. We consider the level of debt entered into by Australia's federal, state and territory governments and compare this against three metrics for debt sustainability. Using these measures, we find that current and future public debt levels sit within what is regarded as sustainable by scholarly and practitioner opinion. However, we note that recent increases in interest rates will challenge this. We conclude by outlining a range of economic, social and policy challenges arising from the new high public debt environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary reflects on an important article by Fisher and colleagues who draw on four Australian policy case studies to examine how universal and targeted approaches or a combination can be deployed to improve health equity. They conclude that universal approaches are central to action to increase health equity, but that targeting can improve equity of access in some situations including in the context of proportionate universalism. However, we argue that although target services may provide benefits for some populations, they are often stigmatizing and fail to reach may people they aim to support. Instead of accepting the dominant discourse about the key role for targeted approaches, we argue that those committed to reduce social and health inequities should consider the potential of Equity Sensitive Universalism (ESU). This approach focuses on achieving proportionate outcomes with equally provided resources rather than proportionate inputs and provides a 'cohesion dividend,' increasing social solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article employs narrative policy analysis to examine how community playgroups are constructed in the ECEC policy framework, in order to understand what might exclude families, and how more families can be included in community playgroups. Playgroups are a widespread and important component of early childhood education and care (ECEC) provision in Australia, where parents and carers meet weekly with their babies, toddlers and preschool children. They are sites of social support for parents, together with play‐based learning and socialisation activities for the children. Through the lens of intersectionality theory, four narratives are constructed through analysis of interviews with policy elite informants. The classic narrative draws on the enduring model of community playgroups from the 1970s, and the vulnerability narrative centres the supported playgroup model. The belonging narrative and the intercultural narrative indicate possibilities for future policy approaches to community playgroups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Housing services in Australia have a foundation of a system developed by English Invaders and, as a result, have limited governing documentation and recommended practice, particularly in Queensland, to operate in a culturally sensitive manner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander traditional owners. This article focuses on a social housing service and the analysis of legislation and social policy, policies and procedures, staff approaches and client perceptions to examine indirect discrimination towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians involved with housing services. Reflective analysis featuring a critical theory lens indicated a disconnect between legislation and social policy with experiences of clients and organisational approaches resulting in shame, feelings of unworthiness and disengagement from these services. Although Queensland housing legislation provides some governing principles protecting the cultural rights of consumers, organisational practice may not always meet this expectation due to ambiguity from industry leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare conditionality, whereby eligibility for income support payments is linked to prescribed forms of behaviour or values, is intended to encourage responsible behaviour in marginalised populations. However in practice, it may have consequences that worsen rather than improve their life chances. One of the most invasive forms of conditional welfare is income management (IM), involving the quarantining of up to 90 per cent of income that cannot be spent on excluded items in order to reduce substance abuse and gambling and enhance financial management and parenting capacity. This qualitative study examines the views of IM participants and community stakeholders in the regional community of Ceduna, Australia. Its findings are presented – pertaining to practical experiences of IM, the impact of IM on participant wellbeing, and community divisions around IM – and the study discusses whether or not it has advanced key program objectives. It is concluded that the negative effects of IM exceed any perceived benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Case management is promoted as a trademark of community service practice with young people funded by neoliberal social policy. In spite of this, case management practice and case managers have largely escaped the attention of youth scholars. In this paper, we examine the funding parameters of two youth case management services in Australia to reveal the governing effects on young people, case managers and NGOs. We develop an analytical framework that exposes the compounding effect of interacting governable spaces that facilitates a critical analysis of case management revealing the problems of governance within this seemingly generic practice method. Shifting focus from the young person as the object of governance to include the case manager and case management as separate but interacting governable spaces, provides new insights into the problematisations underpinning case management practice with young people. We argue compounding governable spaces provides insight into the infantilisation of young people that is amplified and reinforced within and between case managers, and case management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Researchers and policymakers are increasingly concerned that personalisation schemes in social and health care might be worsening social and health inequities. This has been found internationally, where better outcomes from such schemes have been found amongst those who have higher education and more household income.Method: This study looks at one of the world's largest personalisation schemes, the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme. Using publicly available data we examine the allocation and utilisation of NDIS funds according to social gradient.Results: We find that the rate at which people with disability 'spend' or effectively use their disability care funds follows a social gradient. That is, those in areas of higher socioeconomic disadvantage are not spending as much of their allocated budgets on care services across the year compared to people in areas of higher socioeconomic advantage. This represents a clear issue of equity in the use of public money to people with disability in Australia.Conclusion: We argue that this points to the need to provide targeted supports for the use of disability care funds in areas of higher socioeconomic disadvantage. Without effective supports for fund use, the NDIS and other personalisation schemes may be positioned to worsen existing social inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the ageing experiences of older Chinese immigrants in Australia. The life course perspective provides a framework to investigate the main aspects relating to a sense of home and to analyse how family, relational, and societal factors influence older Chinese immigrants' construction of a sense of home in a transnational context. This paper is based on qualitative data from 30 in‐depth interviews with older Chinese immigrants living on the Gold Coast, Australia. This study reveals that family relationships, independence, and social interactions contribute to constructing a sense of home among older Chinese immigrants. Findings elucidate the interrelations between personal adaptive actions and mindsets, Chinese organisations, and social policies in the life experiences of older Chinese immigrants in Australia. This study suggests that policymakers need to be more sensitive to the significance of culture; it also highlights the need to further support existing cultural services that contribute to developing a sense of home for older Chinese immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial Intelligence has the potential to be an important part of education governance. It is already being built into everything from business intelligence platforms to real-time online testing. In this paper, we aim to understand how AI becomes, and forms, a legitimate part of authority in contemporary education governance in what we call the automated education governance assemblage, that incorporates technology companies and AI-supported products used in education. We focus on EduTech Australia – an education technology trade show in Sydney – as a way to look at: (i) how the different aspects of automated governance are connected at EduTech, including the relations between different participants, companies and products; and (ii) how the automated governance assemblage works to legitimise and constitute EduTech as a policy space and site of new authorities in education governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Disability Support Pension (DSP) is the major Australian government financial benefit program for people of working age with medical conditions and disabilities that restrict work capacity. Between 2012 and 2018 a series of policy reforms sought to restrict the growth in DSP payments and encourage more people with some work capacity to seek employment. We characterise changes in three markers of access to disability financial support over the reform period (1) DSP recipient rates (2) DSP grant (approval) rates and (3) the rate of unemployment benefit receipt in people with impaired work capacity. Results demonstrate a significant reduction in DSP receipt and grant rates, and significant increase in the rate of unemployment benefit receipt in working-age Australians with work disabling medical conditions and disability. These changes were not distributed uniformly. People whose primary medical condition was a musculoskeletal or circulatory system disorder demonstrated greater declines in DSP receipt and grant rates, while there was a more rapid increase in unemployment benefit receipt among people with primary mental health conditions. Some trend changes occur in periods during which new disability assessment and pension eligibility policies were introduced, though our ability to attribute changes to specific policy changes is limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this viewpoint article is to consider the #BlackLivesMatter movement within the Aboriginal Australian struggle for equality, sovereignty and human rights. Indigenous sovereignty has been threatened throughout Australia's history of colonization. We provide a viewpoint and recommendations for social policy education and practice. Design/methodology/approach: We provide commentary and interpretation based upon the lived experience of Black, Indigenous and Other People of Color (BIPOC) co-authors, co-authors who are Allies, extant literature and practice wisdom as social policy educators. Findings: Universities are sources of knowledge production, transmission and consumption within society. We provide critical recommendations for what social policy education within universities can address human rights and the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Originality/value: Culturally responsive inclusion for BIPOC has only just begun in Australia and globally within the context of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. This paper adds critical conversation and recommendations for what social policy programs might do better to achieve universities' teaching and learning missions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the Australian state of New South Wales considers the adoption of a policy of personalised budgets in child protection, questions arise regarding how such a policy could take shape and how it would impact service delivery to promote safety and well-being amongst vulnerable children. This article presents findings from a mixed-method, realist evaluation of a pilot programme that adopted some of the features of personalised budgets, namely, personalisation, brokerage and keyworkers. Drawing on literature on personalised budgets in disability and aged care, the article highlights the features, potential benefits and challenges of personalised budgets in child protection. It concludes by arguing for a better understanding of how personalised budgets could benefit vulnerable children. This might involve: defining the roles of brokers and keyworkers, developing ways to increase service user engagement, clarifying implications for the wider service sector and planning for the provision of required supports and services for children and families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]