Australian Journal of Social Issues最新文献

Indigenous employment has been the subject of numerous policies in Australia, with governments aiming to increase the workforce participation rate amongst Indigenous people in recent years. Indigenous-owned businesses, formally defined as businesses that are at least 50% Indigenous-owned, have been demonstrated in previous research to maintain substantially higher levels of proportional Indigenous employment than non-Indigenous businesses. This suggests that Indigenous-owned businesses maintain work environments that are more supportive of and conducive to Indigenous employment, meriting the influence of Indigenous-owned businesses' workplace practices in future Indigenous employment policy design. Using administrative data from two Indigenous business registries (Black Business Finder and Supply Nation), this paper provides an updated empirical analysis of the Indigenous business sector. This paper demonstrates that Indigenous-owned businesses of all sizes, industries, locations and profit statuses consistently average proportional Indigenous employment rates higher than the Indigenous proportional population. Of all the people employed in Supply Nation-listed businesses, over 35% are Indigenous. The potential impact of the Indigenous Procurement Policy is illustrated by differentials in the size of businesses and their capacity to employ Indigenous staff. This paper provides analysis of the Indigenous business sector that can inform future policy direction for both Indigenous employment and Indigenous business policies.

The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) represents a social reform of a magnitude unseen in Australia. The Scheme's significant scope for impact warrants that proper performance evaluation is undertaken, that stakeholder interactions are collaborative and that the scheme is outcome driven. This article reviews a selection of grey literature to gain insights into the persistence of challenges facing the Scheme, as well as how the policy discourse has developed between 2011 and 2020. Our review finds that key issues related to the Scheme's effectiveness and sustainability have been persistent and repeatedly documented by stakeholders. Furthermore, we find that, had the grey literature been heeded, the current and predictable challenges facing the NDIS could have been mitigated at least to some extent. Our contribution here is to renew scholarly vigour toward the Scheme by canvassing its challenges as identified by commentators, policymakers and the industry itself and to focus attention on the capacity for this literature to predict and describe potential and extant problems as well as providing mitigations. By extension, we provide a catalogue of these challenges while showcasing the value of grey literature as one source of triangulating evidence in informing policy evaluation.

The social housing sector provides housing to some of society's most vulnerable people, disproportionately housing people with disabilities and chronic health conditions, the aged and people unable to work. These groups are often more susceptible to health impacts from poor temperature conditions within their home. In this paper, we examine temperature conditions in Australian social housing, explore tenant experiences and reflect on possible remediation responses. Using a novel contact-free delivery protocol for data collection, temperature was measured in 36 social housing dwellings over a 3-month springtime period. Semistructured interviews were conducted with occupants to better understand their experience of (adverse) indoor temperature conditions. On average, participants spent 35 per cent of time across the study period in temperatures outside the WHO guidelines (18–24°C). Most participants perceived their homes to be cold or very cold during periods of cold weather, and many considered energy unaffordable. Building conditions, such as poor sealing around windows and doors, lack of insulation and inadequacy of space heating appliances, were of greatest concern to participants. Participants' preferences for remediation work suggest that considerable benefit could be gained from making homes more energy efficient through draft sealing and insulation.

This paper examines household earnings arrangements and parenthood. Previous research has shown that parenthood is associated with a motherhood wage penalty with women withdrawing from the labour market or reducing their work hours. But few studies have examined within-couple relative earnings and breadwinning arrangements across the transition to parenthood. We identify three types of households—“female-breadwinner households” (where women earn more than 60 per cent of the couple's annual labour income); “male-breadwinner households” (where women earn less than 40 per cent of the joint income); and “equal-earner households” (where women earn 40 per cent to 60 per cent of the joint income). Using longitudinal data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey and fixed effects models, we find a substantial decrease in the percentage of couples in equal-earner households in the year prior to and after parenthood that is largely replaced by an increase in the percentage in male-breadwinner households. We observe little return to pre-parenthood earnings arrangements for equal-earner and male-breadwinner households. For female-breadwinner households, we observe a gradual return to pre-parenthood arrangements. These results provide evidence that parenthood is a major milestone contributing to gender inequality and highlight the importance of policies for reducing the impact of parenthood on women's earnings.

The COVID-19 crisis has brought into sharp relief the precarious employment situation of young people, precipitating a raft of academic and public claims of an unprecedented crisis that has disrupted young lives. Our study contributes to research on youth labour and transitions with new longitudinal empirical analysis. Our analysis challenges the “newness” of the precarity highlighted by COVID-19, focussing on employment. It draws on longitudinal mixed methods data from a research project tracking the transition to adulthood of young Australians. We make use of the concept of liminality to analyse the labour patterns for this group of young adults for the past 5 years. While we acknowledge the impact of COVID-19 on young people's lives, our analysis reveals a precarisation of labour conditions for a significant proportion of participants that precedes the pandemic crisis. We conclude that the tendency in some youth research and in public discourse, to depict contemporary events as heralding “new” crises for young people, obscures the deeper structural arrangements that continually position the young to take the brunt of social and economic policies.

In this study, we investigated people's perceptions about the causes (i.e. attributions) of underachievement among students experiencing socioeconomic disadvantage and their support for public assistance to those students. Results of an online survey conducted with Australian adults (N = 1999) revealed that people preferred societal attributions to individual attributions for underachievement among those students. The respondents' attributions, particularly societal attributions, significantly predicted their support for public assistance to students and schools in need. There were statistically significant differences between people with conservative and progressive political views in their attributions and support for public assistance. However, after taking people's attributions into account, their political views add little to the prediction of their support for public assistance. These findings have implications for the promotion of equity-oriented educational policies.

The Medical Treatment Planning and Decisions Act 2016 (Vic) is a step toward law reform to implement supported decision making and the rights of people with disabilities enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The Act includes provisions to enable a person, who might otherwise be assessed as being without decision making capacity, to make an advance care directive with support. This case study explores the implementation of the Act through the experiences of a person with intellectual disability, their medical practitioner and supporter in making an advance care directive. The findings identify shortcomings of the Act that effectively exclude people with severe intellectual disabilities from supported decision making. They illustrate the need for greater institutional support for supported decision making and educational strategies for medical practitioners if the potential of the Act is to be realised for people with intellectual disabilities. Finally, the findings indicate the relevance of the La Trobe Support for Decision Making Practice Framework as a guide to decision support in this context.