Australian Journal of Social Issues最新文献

Social connection is a central element in mental health recovery and has been found to have a significant impact on the health and well-being of individuals. This study examines the experiences of social connectedness for people accessing National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) support for psychosocial disability. Interviews were conducted with eight NDIS participants. The study's findings suggest that people with psychosocial disabilities experience limited social connections and small social worlds. While NDIS support relationships were seen as important facilitators in increasing social engagement, these relationships may also limit opportunities for participants to extend their social connections beyond these professional support contacts. The impacts of participants' illnesses were identified as major barriers to establishing social connections and further research is needed to identify effective interventions that reduce social isolation in this population. This study highlights the role the NDIS can play in supporting social connection and inclusion for participants. Further consideration regarding the role of NDIS support relationships and NDIS-funded interventions in supporting the social connectedness of participants is needed.

This paper traces the temporal tactics of continually renewed coloniality—where some impasses are made to appear insurmountable while others demand swift solutions—in relation to housing and mining at Borroloola in Australia's Northern Territory. Distinct policy and regulatory regimes encourage analyses that set housing and mining apart. Yet together they signal the settler state's simultaneous remedial and extractive orientations to remote Aboriginal communities. Mining leeches into housing, and housing is a promise extracted from late liberal recognition, for community members forced to wait for promised amenities while fighting for long-term environmental protections. The analysis demonstrates the central significance of temporal control to settler colonialism: by selectively deferring action; by producing the appearance of actions that are not actually taken; and by intervening to expedite processes that serve the interests of extractive capital. We argue that the confection of intermittent urgency to intervene is a key feature of the deferrals enacted by Australian settler governance, as it rations remedial solutions and displaces harms into mortgaged futures.

The worldwide movement toward digitisation in public service delivery presents a range of opportunities and risks. The potential benefits include improved efficiency, more consistent service delivery decisions and enhanced responsiveness to citizens' demand. The potential risks range from challenges in data use and privacy, to uneven service accessibility and the costly ICT investment required for digitisation. Researchers have begun to assess this important movement and its impacts. There remains a lack of in-depth understanding of digitisation of public service delivery in developing countries. We aim to address that gap by examining a fully online welfare-to-work programme in a developing country, that is Indonesia's Pre-employment Card Program. Using data collected from semi-structured interviews with policymakers and service providers, we found evidence that digitalisation contributed to the programme's efficiency and effectiveness via, for example, automated registration processes and quick and revisable rollout. Its implementation however was not without challenges such as a digital divide among users and some technical problems. Indonesia's experiences with this fully digital programme suggest that a developing country, despite limited financial and administrative capacity, can embark on the digitalisation journey to improve their public service provision, even during the time of crisis.

HEALing Matters is an online professional development training program being implemented across the Victorian out-of-home care sector. HEALing Matters uses a trauma-informed philosophy to guide carers' understanding of the link between young people's healthy lifestyle behaviours and improved physical and psychosocial outcomes. This article reports the findings of a qualitative evaluation, which sought to understand whether participation in HEALing Matters fostered a sense of commitment, dedication and/or the introduction of new practices to create a healthy “home.” Semistructured interviews were conducted with 27 residential carers who completed the training and transcripts underwent thematic analysis. Four major themes evidencing healthy lifestyle behaviours were developed: (1) promotion of a healthy eating environment, (2) making physical activity a habit, (3) building connection through food and physical activity and (4) improved predictability and consistency. Implementation of HEALing Matters facilitated positive changes in health behaviours, supported carers to use food and activity to provide responsive caregiving and created a sense of safety and security through the introduction of household routines. The findings emphasise the importance of upskilling carers in preventative health practices and approaches to best support the health and well-being of young people in care.

In Australia, on any given day, about 45,000 children and youth aged 0–17 (about 1 per cent of Australian youth) are in the care of the state, often cared for through delegation-funded child welfare organisations. Many of these children are in out-of-home care of such organisations for brief periods of time, but a substantial number remain in care until their mandatory emancipation. About 3600 youth a year are obliged to leave care at 18 years of age, due to child protection orders ending before their 18th birthday. Many advocates in the field, including former youth in out-of-home care represented in the CREATE Foundation, believe that this is much too young to be out on their own. Founded in 2016, Home Stretch is a national advocacy campaign to extend the leaving care age for young people in out-of-home care from 18 to 21 years in all Australian jurisdictions. Prior to the Home Stretch movement, no Australian state, territory or federal government (with the partial exception of the ACT) had indicated any action, interest or desire to extending its services to children in state care past 18 years. Yet, extended care in varying forms has been found recommended in various government enquiries over the past several decades. Seven years after the Home Stretch launch, extended care is now offered in all eight Australian jurisdictions, and at last count, over 4200 young people are in extended care arrangements to 21 years across the country. This is a remarkable social policy about face by the Government in a relatively short space of time. This article describes the advocacy strategy employed.

Gender-targeted recruitment in policing has elicited varied public responses. This study explores public sentiment toward policing gender targets using a symbolic interactionist and social identity approach. A sentiment analysis was conducted on 5447 comments extracted from a Facebook recruitment campaign targeting women. The study revealed a nearly equal distribution of positive and negative language in the comments, with high levels of trust and fear, and notable expressions of anger and sadness. Positive sentiments utilised terms like “equality” and “merit” indicating support for gender targets as a means to promote gender equality and career opportunities for women. Conversely, negative sentiments centred on discrimination. Findings underscore how individuals construct meaning around gender and interpret gender-target initiatives in policing through the sentiments expressed in online interactions. This research contributes to a nuanced understanding of public discourse surrounding gender targets, highlighting the importance of tailored recruitment and educational campaigns to promote inclusivity and effective gender-targeted initiatives.

Effective marginal tax rates are of interest to policymakers due to the concern that high rates lead to disincentives to work, particularly for secondary earners in couple families and single parents who pay personal income tax and lose government welfare payments as their private income increases. Hypothetical models of the tax and welfare system demonstrate the possibility of high effective marginal tax rates particularly for secondary earners in lower income families where personal income tax intersects with the loss of means-tested welfare payment. This paper estimates effective marginal tax rates across the whole working-age population, rather than for hypothetical families, using a microsimulation model based on a nationally representative sample of Australians. These distributional estimates suggest that high and very high effective marginal tax rates are relatively rare and that most persons of a working-age face rates that are relatively modest. The paper extends previous work on distributional effective marginal tax rates to include the impact of formal childcare and the higher education loan program.

Australians are embracing new forms of digital finance products and services, which includes purchasing cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). There has been an increase in investment scams associated with cryptocurrencies. In this article, we sought to understand from cryptocurrency and NFT investors, who is vulnerable and what vulnerabilities exist. We surveyed 745 Australians aged 18 and over who have purchased cryptocurrencies or NFTs. We used sociological perspectives of consumer vulnerability that focus on internal and external factors to analyse our findings. We found that both socioeconomic advantaged and disadvantaged Australians are vulnerable. The vulnerabilities include concerns over security, unsolicited advice, limited options for learning, and insufficient financial and IT literacy. The findings suggest that online financial education is needed from trusted independent sources to help combat scams and to keep Australians and their crypto assets safe. We recommend that more opportunities to educate individuals about alternative forms of financial products are offered in compulsory, vocational and higher education settings.

Digital mental health technologies and services are here. More are coming. Such technologies and services present both risks and opportunities. At their best, they may enhance the most humane, communal and caring parts of our social systems and communities. At their worst, they may reinforce reductionist approaches to distress and crisis, increase surveillance and control, as well as extracting data and wealth from people seeking care. In this paper, we argue that lived experience-led governance and collaborative development of these technologies and services will enhance the best opportunities and mitigate against the biggest risks. This paper provides a commentary emerging from work by authors with lived experience, and those without, that explored accountability in digital mental health technologies and services. The commentary offers guidance to anyone interested in supporting lived experience-led, and collaborative governance of, digital mental health technologies. This guidance, drawing on interdisciplinary and lived experience-led research and grey literature, assists readers in understanding why collaboration should take place, when, where and with whom, on what issues this could start, and how collaborators should approach this.

Mental ill-health is a serious and growing problem among university students in Australia. Within this cohort, international students are particularly vulnerable. International students in Australia have fewer social rights than domestic students and are at elevated risk of social isolation, exploitation in employment, precarious housing, financial insecurity, and racism and discrimination. When mental health challenges arise, international students are also less likely than their domestic counterparts to access support services. Against the backdrop of this escalating problem, this article presents a critical analysis of Australian universities' policy approaches to international student mental health. We ask: (a) How many universities have such policies publicly available, and (b) how do these policies understand and seek to address the problem of international student distress? Drawing on a documentary analysis of publicly available university mental health strategies, we find that—in the comparatively rare cases where such documents exist—international students' mental ill-health is generally framed in these documents as an individual concern, placing the onus on individual students to develop “resilience” and/or seek out help. Leveraging theoretical insights concerning the collective production of (mental) health and illness, we caution that this individualisation of student distress naturalises and depoliticises the logics of financial exploitation and neglect that contribute to many international students' mental health problems to begin with.