Australian Journal of Social Issues最新文献

While the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) has been operating in Australia for 10 years, numerous eligible people with disability have not accessed the scheme, many of whom are in prison. The South Australian Government, in partnership with the National Disability Insurance Agency, implemented a pilot programme to assist people in prison to access the NDIS as having NDIS supports on release may reduce the risk of returning to custody. This qualitative study, drawing on interviews with 20 stakeholders, explores the enablers and barriers of assisting people with disability in prison access the NDIS. Our findings show that while custodial settings provide opportunities to assist people with disability to have their eligibility for the NDIS assessed, prisons are difficult settings in which to undertake subsequent assessment and planning processes to determine the supports available on release. People with disability exiting prison also face significant challenges accessing suitable accommodation and support services, particularly when their needs are complex. Further work is required to ensure planning and assessment processes meet the needs of this group. The findings provide useful insights to both justice and other institutional settings and respond to many of the questions raised by recent public inquiries and reviews.

Therapeutic residential care (TRC) is a mode of delivering out-of-home care (OOHC) that can help meet the needs of some of Australia's most vulnerable young people and their families. TRC programmes aim to support young people to develop positive relationship experiences in a safe and stable environment. Given that TRC is a relatively new model of intervention, to date, the alignment between its aspirational aims and the existing and evolving policy environment in which it is located has not been analysed in any depth. This paper reports on a national policy analysis exploring how TRC is constructed in policy documents. One hundred and thirty-two relevant policy documents were analysed to identify the practices and the conditions that facilitate the development of relationships and connections. The aims of the policies underpinning TRC were consistent with the literature outlining promising trauma-informed approaches. Findings show how the policies support the development of beneficial relationships for children and young people; however, there were also several discrepancies and silences identified, including a limited conceptualisation of children's participation.

The purpose of this paper was to measure the prevalence of food insecurity (FI) in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic using the 8-item Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES). Employing the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, Rasch models alongside a discrete method were used to investigate the severity of FI and robustness of the 8-item FIES during 2020–2021. Our results indicate that during 2020–2021, 6.47% of Australians experienced moderate or severe FI and 2.93% experienced severe FI. Validation tests following United Nations guidelines show similar weighted and unweighted results and consistency with the discrete method. Infit and outfit metrics, alongside measures of reliability and residual correlations, were all within the expected range. We conclude that the FIES administered as part of Wave 20 of the HILDA survey was a suitable instrument for measuring the prevalence of FI at a representative population level. Although Australia has been measuring FI for 40 years, it has been characterised by measurement inconsistency, inadequacy and infrequency, resulting in insufficient data for policymaking. Reliable representative population estimates of the extent of FI in Australia provides critical intelligence for an effective policy response.

Out-of-home care is associated with a range of negative social outcomes for the young people who experience it. The most promising path to improved life chances for care-experienced young people is arguably through education, especially post-secondary education. Currently, no national data are collected on the post-secondary education participation of care-experienced young people. However, the evidence that exists suggests their participation rate is likely very low. Historically, one reason for post-secondary participation gaps has been the fact that care ended abruptly at 18 years, forcing care-experienced young people into independence much faster and earlier than the vast majority of their same-age peers. The recent extension to care to 21 years for most young people in care across all Australian jurisdictions has changed the out-of-home care landscape considerably. A central question is whether the extension of care will, in itself, result in increased post-secondary education access and success for care-experienced young people. We address this question through an examination of the current out-of-home care and education landscape, including state and territory legislation, Australian Government policy and current post-secondary settings and outcomes.

This article discusses variations in the experiences of Dutch identity and belonging to a music-making group in the Dutch migrant community in Melbourne, Australia. It answers the research question “Which variations of ‘Dutch identity’ are there for the participants and how does music-making relate to this?”. Feelings of identity and belonging are shaped by federal policies and micro-interactions. This article builds on the concepts related to migrant identity and ethnomusicology in the context of two distinct federal integration policies: the White Australia policy (which is characterised by an assimilation policy) and multiculturalism. The findings showed that community music has the potential to bridge generational, gender and class differences. Multiculturalism, enabling the participants to meet and sing in Dutch, empowered them to explore their dual identity as Dutch Australians, intersecting with disability, racial differences, age and education level. This study improves our understanding of the impact of diverse emigration and immigration resettlement policies that form part of the complexities of diverse generations and backgrounds of the Dutch-Australian diaspora.

Since the late 1990s, Australia's employment services have enforced mutual obligation compliance as part of a transition to a disciplinary regime of conditional welfare. In recent years, the digitisation of employment services has extended the disciplinary approach to self-activation. Notably, self-activation extends mutual obligation requirements so that online reporting is a condition of benefit eligibility, or a digital obligation, enforced by threats to financial security in the form of automated payment suspensions. Guided by recent developments in the conceptualisation of digital welfare to work programs, case study analysis is used to explore the ways the technologies of self-activation have changed the location of power in mutual obligation compliance decisions. This shift represents a move from street-level decision making to Robo-compliance. The article discusses the significance of this shift in the digital administration of disciplinary social policy in employment services. It highlights the need for further empirical research to explore this shift and how it affects individuals whose social security payments depend on interactions with these technologies.

Within recent public policy and administration scholarship, there has been a growing focus on the concept of “administrative burden” to describe the learning, compliance and psychological costs incurred by citizens when trying to access services and exercise social and political rights. Specifically, in the context of activation and welfare-to-work programmes, scholars have highlighted the effects of administrative burdens on claimants' autonomy, dignity and well-being. We bring critical social policy scholarship on administrative harm into conversation with Adam and Balfour's concept of “administrative evil” to highlight the underlying dynamics of masking, moral inversion and dehumanisation that facilitate street-level workers to adopt dispositions of enforcement of administrative burdens. To illustrate the applicability of Adam and Balfour's work to understanding how experiences of administrative burden can be intensified by the practices and dispositions of street-level workers, we draw on examples of from an ethnographic study of the delivery of welfare-to-work in Australia.

#BlackLivesMatter activism is a contemporaneous manifestation of a centuries-old resistance against anti-Black racism. This paper analyses diverse perceptions about the #BlackLivesMatter movement's purpose, significance and potential utility in the Australian context. Our analysis of the #BlackLivesMatter highlights how the movement harnessed the power of social media to deploy counternarratives to white supremacy on a global scale through sharing stories of anti-Black discrimination and making visible the hidden and subtle conditions, practices and attitudes that embolden racial violence. Focussing on Black non-Indigenous people's understandings of the #BlackLivesMatter movement in Australia, findings reveal that the movement improved racial discourse, raised awareness about the experiences of Black people in Australia and challenged the ‘superdiversity- multicultural- melting pot’ narrative that often obscures the insidious ways in which white supremacy produces and sustains anti-Black, colour-blind everyday racisms. Scepticism about the movement was also raised about the very real risk of the movement being “co-opted” by whiteness in an attempt to capitalise on its popularity.

Mentorship and sponsorships play a significant role in faculty experiences, career trajectories, well-being and academic success in higher education. In this study, 23 racially and culturally minoritised (RACM) academics were interviewed about their experiences working in Australian universities, and all spoke about the key importance of their mentoring experiences. Mentorship was understood as both enabling and constricting, with unspoken rules of conduct and an embedded hierarchical relationship that could perpetuate the exclusion of both marginalised scholars and scholarship. In this paper, the theory of practice architectures, part of a wider ‘practice turn’ within education and the social sciences, was used to conceptualise the qualitative analysis of how mentoring arrangements are experienced by RACM academics in Australian universities. Here, we view academic mentoring as a social architectural practice whose power is articulated in discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements and enacted through language (sayings), actions (doings) and relationships (relatings). This study offers insight not only into the structural and experiential landscape of mentoring for RACM academics but also provides an opportunity to envision pathways for its transformation.

This paper explores the animating ethos of digital unemployment services. Unlike human-to-human services, where the intention of policy is normally mediated by professionals, digital services are fully designed in the policy imagination. As a result, it is a pressing issue to understand the ethos that animates their development. To address this, we report on design thinking focus groups undertaken to support the development of a disruptive digital unemployment service that sought the views and responses of three different groups—senior policymakers, caseworkers and unemployed people in four European countries. Without prompting, each conversation variously problematised the imputed motivations of unemployed people, suggesting a form of paternalistic motivation that should only risked in-person. From this, we suggest that the design of digital unemployment services may well be dominated by the axiomatic, uncritical mobilisation of motivation theory. Going further, we offer a brief genealogy of the form of motivation theory that surfaced in the study, highlighting its interesting, shared history in seminal studies on unemployment. As a result, we conclude, that rather than altering welfare, digitisation may reanimate, essentialise and make durable activation in new ways that deepen longstanding processes of “double activation”—activating public employment services as well as the unemployed.