The vexed link between social capital and social mobility for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people

Overcoming the socio‐economic disparity between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non‐Indigenous Australians is a long‐standing social policy objective: one largely shared by Indigenous people. Achievement will require Indigenous individuals and households to be socially mobile, a process integrally involved with social capital, existing and requisite. The lack of research on Indigenous social mobility or its attendant social capital connections is addressed in this paper through an exploratory analysis of this interaction across three dimensions: distinctive patterns of Indigenous social capital; the transferability of Indigenous social capital; and traversing the social capital divide. The implications drawn, while tentative, indicate that for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people the intersection of the processes of social mobility and social capital is vexed, and contains hazards and costs not fully shared by socially mobile non‐Indigenous households. The Indigenous‐specific factors of a gendered professional class, the identity–social capital link, and Indigenous labour market circumstances all indicate that more research and a more nuanced understanding of Indigenous social mobility is necessary. Social policy recommendations include broadening the concept of cultural leave to include bonding social capital obligations, especially for women, and re‐evaluation of how to support Indigenous career trajectories and transferable skill sets.     

Explaining Social exclusion: Towards Social Inclusion for Indigenous Australians

Current policy often focuses on ‘Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage’ by simultaneously addressing multiple deficits that many Indigenous people experience relative to other Australians. International literature often frames such issues in terms of the contested concepts of social exclusion and social inclusion. This paper attempts to analyse what Indigenous social inclusion might look like in a plural society such as Australia. In addition to contextualising Australian policy in broader debates, this paper also briefly introduces several relevant theories of justice, diversity and Indigenous rights to provide a theoretical framework for conceptualising social inclusion. The article concludes with some reflections on some practical suggestions to move the debate forward. In principle, enhancing Indigenous social and political participation in policy design should both increase inclusion and reduce disadvantage by enhancing the effectiveness of programs that have a substantial Indigenous client base.     

Perceptions of Reconciliation and related Indigenous Issues among Young Residents of Shepparton

It has been argued that reconciliation between Indigenous and non‐Indigenous Australians requires non‐Indigenous Australians to change their attitudes. Some suggest that this process is occurring and that younger people hold more positive attitudes towards Indigenous Australians. This paper explored the perspectives of 86 young people from Shepparton, Victoria in relation to reconciliation and related Indigenous issues. The study found that young participants' views of reconciliation varied, and while some supported reconciliation, many opposed a national apology and indicated that they were not very informed about or interested in Aboriginal issues. Many distinguished between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Aboriginals based on behaviour. Their talk was embedded with notions of special privilege, ‘sameness’ and social hierarchy but excluded attention to cultural difference. Findings suggest that these young people have embraced discourses of sameness, individualism and ‘practical reconciliation’ and that they are reluctant to reflect on their position of White privilege.     

Good learning = A Good Life: Mathematics Transformation in Remote Indigenous Communities

The performance of Australian Indigenous¹ learners is a national concern. The federal government has recognised that health and education are keys to closing the gap between the achievement of Indigenous and non‐Indigenous people and has made health and education a national priority. Through its ‘Closing the Gap’ initiative, the Rudd government is allocating significant amounts of money to redress the poor health and education among Indigenous Australians. In this paper, we discuss an innovation in education that is being implemented in a cluster of remote communities in Western Australia.² The innovation draws on international research that has positively affected mathematics learning, particularly among students who are traditionally excluded from formal schooling. While the research is innovative, the mechanisms that may be the most effectual in bringing about strong mathematical learning for Indigenous Australians are unknown.     

Engaging Indigenous Communities: Towards a Policy Framework for Indigenous Community Justice Programmes

Community engagement has come to the fore as a policy and programme approach that seeks to connect citizens both with each other and with government in order to deliver improved social and economic opportunities and outcomes. This model has become a key aspect of the intervention approach within Indigenous communities and is seen to have particular application in addressing community justice issues. This article examines a suite of community justice initiatives being used in Indigenous communities in Australia with a view to ascertaining how the principles of community engagement are operationalized. The article draws on this information and argues that community engagement is only one aspect of a number of community‐oriented justice initiatives currently being applied. These initiatives range from concepts of community as a location, community as an interest group, and the leveraging of community capital so as to tap into and build better and stronger relationships. In so doing, the latter attempts to increase the social infrastructure, resources and capacity of communities. However, despite government attention in this area, there is a lack of a policy and programmatic framework to guide a coherent and apposite approach to issues of community in specific policy settings. The article contributes to the development of a framework that begins the process of differentiating and assessing justice administration interventions.     

Disability poverty and ageing in regional Australia: The impact of disability income reforms for indigenous Australians

Australian disability policy has undergone considerable reform since the early 2000s. While recent research and scholarship has largely focused on the new National Disability Insurance Scheme, there is a dearth of research that examines the impact of reform to the Disability Support Pension, and even less so the effects on Indigenous Australians living with disability. This is surprising as a higher proportion of Indigenous Australians live with disability than the non‐Indigenous population. This article pays particular attention to the experiences of Aboriginal Australians who have acquired a disability after extensive years of working (25–40 years), yet are still of workforce age (less than 65 years of age). Because of tightened eligibility criteria for the Disability Support Pension, people in this group are placed onto the lower paid Newstart Allowance (general unemployment benefit). The article illustrates the high levels of poverty that Aboriginal Australians with disabilities experience daily, and the ongoing costs they incur in managing Newstart conditionality to maintain continued access to the general unemployment benefit.     

Reimagining the Northern Territory Intervention: Institutional and cultural interventions into the Anglo‐Australian imaginary

This paper draws on the example of the Northern Territory Intervention to examine the role of Australia's broader socio‐cultural context in maintaining racist policies concerning Indigenous self‐governance. Central to this paper is the claim that legislative, constitutional, and other structural reforms are limited on their own to prevent institutional practices of violence and exclusion that are bound up with popular ways of imagining Indigenous and non‐Indigenous identities. In light of the potential limitations of top‐down reforms to prevent the perpetuation of discriminatory policymaking in relation to Australia's First Peoples, this paper explores the value of bottom‐up initiatives that constructively engage the imaginative, affective, and reflective capacities of individuals to facilitate a ‘critical re‐imagining’ (The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations, Oxford University Press, 2013) of Indigenous Australians as social and political actors. Developing and supporting such initiatives, on this view, is integral to the wider task of promoting and protecting Indigenous rights, interests, and entitlements.     

“Moving from transactional government to enablement” in Indigenous service delivery: The era of New Public Management,service innovation and urban Aboriginal community development

Over the last 40 years, Aboriginal Community Based Organisations have played a distinctive role in society in relation to urban Aboriginal peoples and their rights to self‐determination and community development in the Australian city of Newcastle. They have proven essential to advocacy, the maintenance of community development, and the creation of new Aboriginal social infrastructure (community organisations, facilities, services, and supporting infrastructure). Autonomy has been empowering for local Aboriginal people. Major reforms to the delivery of government social services, particularly government enablement of a new social service market based on New Public Management principles, threaten this success. This interpretive, qualitative case study illustrates the effects of social service market enablement. It draws on a case study of the effects of social service market enablement on urban Aboriginal Community Based Organisations in Newcastle, showing the antagonistic relationship between social service market enablement and Aboriginal community enablement and development. It ends with a discussion of how Aboriginal community development in this city could be re‐enabled in light of the Prime Minister's arguments in his 2017 Annual Parliamentary Closing the Gap speech providing particular value in the context of policy discussions about moving from transactional government to enablement in Indigenous affairs.     

Anti-Racism and Indigenous Australians

Indigenous Australians constitute approximately 2.4% of the Australian population and suffer from disadvantage across a range of social, economic, and health indicators compared to other Australians, including exposure to racism across all domains of contemporary Australian society. However, there has been relatively little research conducted on anti-racism in relation to Indigenous Australians. This article begins with an overview of theoretical issues pertinent to the empirical study and public policy of anti-racism. Empirical findings, from social psychology, on effective approaches to anti-racism at the cognitive, individual, interpersonal, and societal level as well as for the targets of racism are detailed with a particular focus on Indigenous Australians. Recommendations for improving and expanding institutional and legal policies to implement these approaches in relation to education and child-rearing, public service, law enforcement and media, as well as monitoring racism and promoting anti-racism in civil society, are then presented. To conclude, strategies for engendering political will to combat racism in the current neoliberal capitalist climate are explored.     

Social inclusion under Labor in South Australia

Social inclusion policies were championed by the former Rann Labor government in South Australia from 2002 to 2011. In 2011 the Social Inclusion Unit was dissolved by the South Australian government. It is argued that the relatively narrow focus of the former SIU on ‘problem’ communities limited its capacity to provide more than residual solutions. The diminishing political returns on social inclusion also encouraged the South Australian government to abandon this initiative. In 2014 this government has had to grapple with the end of car making in Australia and a declining manufacturing labour force, traditionally a ‘mainstream’ constituency of the Labor Party. The return to ‘mainstreaming’ social policy in South Australia might offer limited space for realignment of social policy with the concept of social citizenship. It might also represent a move away from the functionalist morality of social inclusion. Social inclusion as practiced in South Australia has limited capacity to address generalised social disadvantage. The latter is likely to concern a re‐elected Labor minority government grappling with significant job losses and a declining local economy.     

Housing and Accommodation of Irish Travellers: From Assimilationism to Multiculturalism and Back Again

This article charts the changing conceptualization of Travellers in relevant Irish central government policy statements since the 1960s, together with the accommodation policy initiatives devised on this basis. It interprets developments in this regard as a movement from assimilationism to integrationism to (weak) multiculturalism. The article also reveals a significant “policy implementation deficit”, which is manifested in two ways. Firstly, accommodation output has generally failed to meet central government targets and has consistently failed to reduce the numbers of Travellers living in unofficial encampments. Secondly, the type of accommodation provided has often been at variance with central government recommendations. Thus, an assimilationist policy statement has effected multicultural policy outcomes, while a multiculturalist policy statement has effected assimilationist policy outcomes. These patterns of accommodation output are related to various implementation variables—some long‐standing, others new—which have impeded the implementation of national policy by actors on the ground.     

(Im)mobility: regional population structures in Aboriginal Australia

The socio‐cultural factors underlying contemporary Aboriginal settlement and mobility patterns are invisible to the categorisations that underpin both demographic modelling and policy that relies on that modelling. Taking the Yolngu people of north east Arnhem Land as a case study, this paper elaborates an anchored network model consisting of three tiers—an ontologically prior ancestral geography, with its associated contemporary settlements, to which kin‐based networks are anchored by nodal individuals. While the content of each tier may vary across the continent, this model can potentially be applied wherever Aboriginal Australians continue to live in kin‐based social universes. It is argued that constructing a ‘recognition space’ between conventional demographic categories and Aboriginal categorisations of their socio‐spatial universes would lead to more informed policy‐making on the part of government. Such policies would take account of the aspirations of Aboriginal people rather than imposing upon them the state's aspirations for them.     

Healthcare decommodification in decentralization context: Reviewing the ideational constructions of “classless hospital policy” initiatives in Kulon Progo Regency,Indonesia

This article illustrates the emergence of radical local welfare initiatives as a political response to the imperfect national program in decentralization context in Indonesia. In order to gain further understanding of the topic, it is worth reviewing Kulon Progo Regency's experience which recently embarked on removing class stratification at any in‐patient room in all local government‐owned hospitals through “classless hospital policy” initiatives. Using exploratory case study method, this article aims to review the ideational constructions of healthcare decommodification that is displayed on this initiative. It is concluded that the classless hospital policy reflects how social citizenship was organized through the mechanism of idea contestation which originated in the past community's behavior, combined with the vested interest of political regime for then subduing market logics under state power. This circumstance ultimately has provided the groundwork for encouraging innovative welfare outcome.     

Nexus between drinking patterns,gender and life satisfaction: Some evidence from Indigenous Australians

Excessive alcohol consumption results in a broad range of health problems and other social issues, such as violence, social disorder and family breakdown. As such, alcohol consumption is considered as a critical social policy issue in Australia. In this study, we have used ordered logit models to estimate the probability of an Indigenous person consuming alcohol and to assess the impact of alcohol consumption on self-perceived life satisfaction. A heteroscedasticity-corrected ordered logit model is used to identify the gender difference in such effects. For this purpose, we use the latest National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey (NATSISS) 2014/2015 data collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The estimation results reveal that age, gender, employment status, income and the experience of unfair treatments significantly affect Indigenous people's (level of) alcohol consumption. The results also reveal that any level of alcohol consumption is linked with reduced overall life satisfaction, which is another reason why prevention of alcohol misuse should be a priority. A significant gender differences in the medium-risk-level alcohol consumption were also observed. These findings could be used as an alcohol prevention message in developing and implementing alcohol prevention strategies and policies.     

Rurality and Social Inclusion: A Case of Preschool Education

This paper begins by reviewing several of the ways in which social inclusion has been conceptualized in the literature. The paper then explores these approaches in the context of the provision of preschool education in rural Scotland. Preschool education is viewed by government as a powerful weapon in the fight against social exclusion, but higher per capita costs in rural areas as well as the availability and cost of transport are major problems, raising questions in turn about inclusive models of provision. Moreover, many parents are sceptical about their ability to access preschool education for their children while also continuing their own engagement in the labour market (a central pillar of social inclusion policy). Issues of choice, quality and governance arise and these are discussed in depth. The paper concludes with some reflections on the concept of social inclusion in the light of this case study.     

The Good Life: what about the children?

This paper is a reflective historical survey of how Australia, despite its affluence, has not delivered ‘the good life’ to poor Australians, both indigenous and non‐indigenous. It argues that, contrary to our national mythology, this country was founded on institutionalised social inequality and on the exclusion of Indigenous people from land rights, property and equal citizenship. As one of the world's twenty richest countries, we perform poorly across a wide range of social and health indicators because we suffer from entrenched, systemic and growing inequality. If we are to survive the challenges that face us from climate change and the global financial crisis, we need to shape policies that mitigate income and social inequality and that promote inclusion and better social cohesion.     

Social inclusion,exclusion, and well‐being in Australia: meaning and measurement

This paper begins by examining the social inclusion agenda that formed the centrepiece of the social policy agenda of the Australian Government between 2007 and 2013. It discusses several features of the agenda, including its objectives (as articulated by the government) and some of the administrative and bureaucratic mechanisms that were put in place to assist with its development and implementation. Although no formal assessment of the impact of the agenda is attempted, some of the ways in which such an agenda could make a difference are identified. The paper then summarises the social inclusion indicator framework developed by the Australian Social Inclusion Unit with assistance and advice from the Australian Social Inclusion Board, and compares its structure and content with the frameworks developed by two of Australia's leading social research institutes. Finally, data from two national surveys of poverty and social exclusion are used to examine recent changes in social exclusion and the association between the severity of exclusion and levels of subjective well‐being. These latter results show clearly that subjective well‐being is consistently lower among those who experience the greatest degree of social exclusion, suggesting that exclusion as identified and measured reflects external constraints rather than internal preferences.     

Towards better preparation and support for health and social care practitioners conducting specialised assessments in remote Indigenous contexts

Remote health professionals encounter many challenges associated with delivering care in poorly serviced remote locations and working across cultures. Despite an identified need for the assessment practices of health and social care professionals to accommodate cultural differences, and for staff training in the area, deficits in preparing the remote workforce for assessment remain. This paper combines the results of two qualitative studies to consider current and improved approaches to preparing and supporting staff for conducting assessments in remote and Indigenous settings. Study A focused on aged care assessment practices within the remote Aboriginal context of Central Australia, and Study B focused on the practice for assessing cognition among Aboriginal Australians in the Northern Territory. Our secondary analysis of these combined data sets provides valuable information to improve planning of approaches to preparing staff for assessments in these contexts. We report themes relating to three categories: the assessment workforce, current approaches to preparing assessment staff, and cross‐cultural knowledge/skill. We discuss which areas require more detailed attention to prepare staff for this work – such as critical reflection and cultural safety – as well as how this may best be achieved – such as through the inclusion of cultural supervisors in practitioners' supervision models, and in follow‐up components to workshop models.     

Indigenous Australians and Impaired Decision‐Making Capacity

This article explores issues associated with impaired decision‐making capacity for Indigenous Australians. There is very little published on the subject of impaired decision‐making capacity in Australia, particularly in relation to Indigenous people. To gain some insight into this subject, this article looks at some indicators of impaired decision‐making capacity for Indigenous Australians such as rates of intellectual disability and mental illness. The Australian state‐based Guardianship and Administration system—the legislative framework designed to provide for decision‐making for people with impaired capacity—is briefly described before looking at the cultural relevance of this Western system and its constructs for Indigenous Australians. Future investigation should be directed at exploring existing and alternative strategies to support Indigenous Australians with impaired capacity and their carers.     

Labour Force Participation,Social Inclusion and the Fair Work Act: Current and Carbon‐Constrained Contexts

The notion that employment is a precondition for personal wellbeing and social inclusion is almost sacrosanct in Australian culture. Yet, the working and living conditions of Australia's low paid workers tells a different story. While labour market participation is a cornerstone of the Federal Government's Social Inclusion Agenda, it is recognized that low pay and poor job quality often derail this key objective. Indeed, the difficulty of ‘making work pay’ at the bottom end of the labour market is a social inclusion challenge that has yet to receive the policy or public attention that it warrants. This article considers what the Fair Work Act means for the social inclusion of disadvantaged workers, in the context of wider‐ranging strategies to address low pay. It concludes with some considerations of the challenges that a carbon‐constrained economy is likely to present for labour force participation as a remedy for social exclusion.