Brotherhood of St Laurence seminars

That there will be larger numbers of older adults and fewer younger ones as the 21st century progresses is becoming a commonplace anxiety for policy makers. But what sort of life course do we want for mature adults and for ourselves as we age? This talk examines a number of alternative models for exploring what is happening to the adult life course, each of which has different implications for public policy.

This seminar examined how the income gains from economic growth between 2001 and 2009 were distributed among different population subgroups and whether growth was beneficial for the most disadvantaged groups in the community.

In this seminar Dr Duncan McVicar argues that active labour market programs (ALMP) are less effective in slack labour markets. He illustrates this point using an examination of a British ALMP - the New Deal for Young People - across 300 local labour markets over a nine-year period.

Michael Horn argues that the current welfare reforms embarked on by the Gillard government will fail to deliver sustainable, decent jobs for highly disadvantaged job seekers. Better integrated forms of assistance and more substantial reform are needed.

China is Australia’s biggest trading partner so it is important for Australians to understand China’s social policies. In this seminar Dr Li explains the five prerequisites for understanding China’s social policies and introduce four stages of the evolution of these policies since 1949. He will then introduce some specific policies in today’s China around health, old age, housing, education and relief, with a focus on social insurances which are the core of China’s social policies.

How do young political activists who are ‘digital natives’ use the web to engage politically with older and more powerful groups, who are typically ‘digital immigrants’ accustomed to traditional forms of political action? In this presentation Judith Bessant aims to describe and analyse the power relations and dynamics of this new public sphere.

Current welfare policies are firmly focused on shaping the behaviour of ‘jobless’ income-support recipients. This seminar focuses on the ways single mothers targeted by the welfare-to-work policy reforms introduced in 2006 understand and experience the disciplinary functions of employment service providers and Centrelink.

This seminar discusses the issues raised by a public inquiry that investigated the sharing of government and community facilities in Victoria, for example using school buildings after hours or using local council neighbourhood houses. The inquiry found that there is potential for increasing the sharing of facilities and the associated social inclusion benefits, but control from the top would be unwise.

This paper discusses the development of research networks and capacity within NGOs to conduct ‘in-house’ research. It concurs with a study conducted in 2010 that suggested that human-service NGOs now have more influencing power than previously, and that they are best positioned to produce research that should influence policy.

At a time of global financial instability, governments in the UK and around the world are facing higher rates of unemployment and major cuts in public spending, with welfare reform top of their agenda. With economic growth sluggish, a new work program aimed at changing the welfare to work landscape and an overhaul of the tax and benefits system, will the UK Government be able to achieve its aims of making work pay and reducing welfare spending? This seminar will consider some of the opportunities and challenges of the current policy framework.

The long-established focuses of housing policy development have largely been new housing production, accessibility and affordability issues. The need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and water use in Australian suburban cities suggests that this housing policy agenda is too narrow. In recent years the plethora of initiatives aimed at reducing domestic energy and water has been insufficiently underpinned by broader thinking about the production and reproduction of Australian housing, and to thinking about the way households live in their housing.

Class still matters in everyday life, both for those who miss out and, significantly, for those who rise above the stations of their parents and carry that baggage with them. With and after New Labour, it became popular to talk of exclusion, rather than exploitation, and class talk seemed to recede; but problems of inequality fester. In this presentation Peter Beilharz will open discussion of these language games and what they signify for those of us who remain concerned with problems of inequality and suffering. Against this background, Mark Mallman will then discuss his recent lauded MA work on the hidden injuries of upward class mobility.

Social work has long had a commitment to issues of social justice and human rights. Integrating rights-based ideas into practice and policy frameworks has nevertheless received less attention in recent years. It is not that human services and the professionals working within them do not appreciate or understand rights, indeed it could be argued that service delivery has become increasingly rights conscious. But the focus has tended to be on legalistic and often adversarial interpretations of rights. This seminar considers ways in which practice can meaningfully integrate rights-based ideas and engage with the subtleties of rights-based thinking.

This seminar explores the emergence of a ‘dual welfare state’, where different policy mechanisms are used to address similar problems faced by different social groups, arguing that this is the result of economic and political pressures reinforced by population ageing. It argues that attempts to target government support can have perverse effects that undermine both efficiency and equity, while failing to reduce fiscal pressure. Broadening our approach to include different policy instruments, and to include economy-wide effects not only fiscal impacts on government, can lead to better outcomes.

In order to understand the social politics of care provision and policies, this seminar examines how care needs are interpreted in Europe. It looks at this from two perspectives: first, from the claims for state support to emerge ‘from below’, that is, from movements and organisations of those with unpaid and paid caring responsibilities or needs for support; and second, from care policies ‘from above’ – from supranational organisations and national governments. It proposes that these perspectives represent two overlapping but competing frames for interpreting care needs: social justice (from below) and social investment (from above). The paper argues that while the social investment frame has provided spaces to raise issues associated with the social justice claims, it has, at the same time, led to policies that have undermined those claims. It concludes with a discussion of how care might find greater social value.