The normalisation of income management in Australia: analysis of the parliamentary debates of 2007 and 2009–10

Initially introduced as part of Australia's Northern Territory Intervention in 2007, Income Management (IM) explicitly targeted inhabitants of remote NT Indigenous communities. IM is a form of welfare conditionality that involves compulsorily ‘quarantining’ at least half of individuals' social security income. It has been heavily criticised for being racist, discriminatory, and a violation of individual rights. The introduction of New Income Management (NIM) in 2010 extended IM beyond Indigenous communities and introduced a new set of eligibility criteria that shifted the focus of IM from Indigenous people to working age recipients of social security income. This in depth study of the early parliamentary debates on the compulsory IM programs traces the patterns of political discourse that led to IM coming to be seen by many policy makers as a normal and legitimate technique within Australian social policy. Situating the IM programs within neoliberal concerns about welfare dependency and active citizenship, this article argues that the introduction of NIM heralded a shift from a conception of IM as part of a focused social experiment targeted at remote Indigenous communities to a potentially mainstream social policy option.     

Room to move? Professional discretion at the frontline of welfare‐to‐work

Outcomes of social policies have always been mediated by the discretionary agency of front‐line staff, processes which nevertheless have received insufficient attention in policy evaluation and in the social policy literature more broadly. This article takes the case example of the policy reforms associated with the Australian government's welfare‐to‐work agenda. Drawing on two discreet research projects undertaken at different points in the policy trajectory, the practices of social workers in Centrelink – the Commonwealth government's primary service delivery agency involved in welfare‐to‐work – is examined. Centrelink social workers have been and remain one of the core groups of specialist staff since the Department's inception in the late 1940s, working to improve the well being of people in receipt of income security. Their experiences of the recent past and their expectations of the future of their professional practice as welfare reform becomes more entrenched are canvassed. In summary, the discretionary capacity of the Centrelink social workers to moderate or shape the impact of policy on income security recipients is steadily eroding as this group of professionals is increasingly captured by the emerging practices of workfare.     

The Australian child support reforms: a critical evaluation

The Australian Child Support Scheme aims to ensure that children continue to be supported financially should their parents separate or never live together. Sweeping changes to the Australian Child Support Scheme were introduced between 2006 and 2008, featuring a dramatically different system for the calculation of child support and a more rigorous enforcement regime. The reforms were intended to respond to ongoing concerns about equity, and to changes in social expectations and practices in gender, work, and parenting. In this article we summarise key findings from a large cross‐sequential study of the child support reforms. Although the new formula initially led to lower child support payments, and an increase in the proportion of separated mothers experiencing income disadvantage, payments two years later had increased slightly. More broadly, the new scheme appears to have resulted in little change in separated parents' policy knowledge, parenting arrangements, perceptions of fairness, and child support compliance. Taken together, these findings suggest that Australia may not have made as much progress as it would have liked in this thorny area of social policy – especially in relation to compliance and perceptions of fairness.     

Compulsory Income Management in the Northern Territory – evaluating its impact

Australia has been experimenting with constraining the ways in which welfare recipients can spend their income support payments, limiting their ability to access cash and purchase some products. The policy objectives include to reduce spending on alcohol, gambling, pornography and tobacco in favour of meeting ‘basic’ family needs, especially for children, to limit the scope for financial harassment, encourage pro‐social behaviours, and build financial capabilities. In the logic of the programs these outcomes are expected to be manifest at the individual, family and community levels. The policy has primarily impacted on Indigenous Australians as a result of its geographic targeting, although a recent report has recommended a more stringent version of the program be introduced universally to all welfare recipients other than the aged. The largest of these experiments is ‘New Income Management’ in the Northern Territory, which has had more than 35,000 participants since its introduction in 2010. This article reports on the key findings of the major independent evaluation of New Income Management commissioned by the Australian Government.     

Mark Latham's Third Way: Income Support,Civic Renewal and Collectivism

The core aim of Mark Latham's Third Way‐style policy proposals is to promote the revivification of civil society as part of the renewed pursuit of the common good. I critically examine this core aim with reference to Mark Latham's proposed changes to income support. I claim that Latham's tendency to focus on disadvantaged communities as sites of normative dysfunction only reinforces the traditional conceptual division between deserving employed citizens and undeserving income recipients. It also neglects the real difficulties experienced by mainstream communities, such as the growing time deficit in working households. I conclude that Latham misses a real opportunity to re‐legitimise collective provision and revive the social sphere using a universal rather than a residual policy perspective that shows concern for the well‐being of all Australian citizens.     

Social Welfare: Availability and Delivery of Services and Benefits for Children

It is contended that social welfare legislation is principally concerned with the allocation of resources of income, wealth, position and power. Australian legislation providing welfare services and benefits for children is assessed from this perspective. It is argued that the present legislation providing income support payments for young people accords excessive weight to the promotion of economic interests of the community such as the work ethic and fails to address the social and human needs of that population. It is also contended that the structure of the child welfare services legislation is overly concerned to cater to conservative forces in society who favour social control measures designed to protect their values and interests and who resist efforts to provide a network of non-coercive preventive services. Both areas of the law are criticized on the basis that they place excessive reliance on the notion that the family unit is capable of carrying the major responsibility for income support and service provision.     

Models of Disability, Work and Welfare in Australia

In discourse around disability there has been a shift away from a ‘medical model’, which perceives disability as an individual problem to be ‘cured’ or contained, towards a ‘social model’. The latter focuses on the relationship between people with disabilities and their social environment, locating the required interventions within the realm of social policy and institutional practice. Drawing upon a small qualitative study conducted in Melbourne, this article argues that recent plans by the Australian government to introduce mutual obligation requirements for recipients of the Disability Support Pension (DSP) sit in tension with this shift from the medical to the social models of disability. Mutual obligation is based on the assumption that income support recipients need to be taught how to be more ‘self‐reliant’, to ‘participate’ in society more fully and to become ‘active’, rather than ‘passive’, citizens. This language appears to overlap with that used to articulate a social model, which places emphasis on participation in the community and attempts a shift away from reliance on the medical profession. However, examples from interviews conducted with current and former DSP recipients demonstrate that, in practice, mutual obligation is likely to reinforce a medical model of disability, frame DSP recipients as ‘conditional’ citizens and ignore the obligations of the state and society regarding access and inclusiveness for people with disabilities.     

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment policy and Welfare to Work: The Community Development Programme and the need for new narratives,new alliances and new institutions

The way Australian federal governments have approached Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment and welfare policy over the last two decades has been a paradigmatic example of what not to do in policymaking. In the absence of effective engagement or consultation, a series of decisions under Coalition and Australian Labor Party governments have had a range of negative consequences for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. These changes – centred around the closure of the Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) scheme and implementation of the Community Development Programme (CDP) – have resulted in increased unemployment, inadequate support for job creation, a dramatic over‐application of income penalties to social security recipients and reduced capacity in many community organisations. This article argues that these outcomes constitute policy failure, especially given that genuine engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people could have prevented many of these consequences. It then turns to an exploration of three ways in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are responding to such policy failure: through promotion of new narratives, new alliances, and new institutions. The study concludes that while we should avoid “specious hope”, there is room for optimism in a renewed push for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty.     

Australia's disabling income support system: tracing the history of the disability pension from 1908 to today

This article is based on a historical‐comparative policy and discourse analysis of the principles underpinning the Australian disability income support system. It determines that these principles rely on a conception of disability that sustains a system of coercion and paternalism that perpetuates disability; this is referred to as disablism. The article examines the construction of disability in Australian income support across four major historical epochs spanning the period 1908–2007. Contextualisation of the policy trajectory and discourses of the contemporary disability pension regime for the time period 2008–now is also provided. The system was found to have perpetuated disablism through the generation of disability categories on the basis of normalcy and ableness as a condition of citizenship. Two major themes were found to have interacted with the ideology of disablism. The first theme – Commonwealth authority – set the tone for legitimising the regulation of disabled citizens. The second theme – conservative sanctioned paternalism and coercion – reflected the tensions between the paternalistic concern for income support provision while attempting to prevent idleness and welfare dependency. This article argues that a non‐disabling provision based on social citizenship, rather than responsible or productive citizenship, counters the tendency for authoritarian and paternal approaches.     

Social capital and community building through an electronic network

This paper describes a social policy experiment that explores current and potential links between trends in Australian public policy. The central example is provided by the implementation of a wired community set up in a low‐income public housing estate by an entrepreneurial not‐for‐profit internet service provider, InfoXchange. ‘Reach for the Clouds’, the wired community being established at Atherton Gardens in Fitzroy, Melbourne, is attractive to policy‐makers and funding bodies, combining community‐building, public‐private partnerships, self‐help and place‐based management. However, although the project is promoted as an exercise in community‐building through technology, many of the key assumptions are untested. It seems self‐evident that low‐income people who are socially and economically excluded would benefit from greater ‘connectedness’ with one another. However, it is not clear that such exchanges, online or off‐line, will build ‘community’. The paper attempts to establish some distinctions between online communities of interest and place based communities, untangling the relationship between social connectedness and models of social capital.     

MUTUAL OBLIGATION AND THE WELFARE RESPONSIBILITIES OF GOVERNMENT

Significant forces mean that governments are reassessing their responsibilities for welfare. The welfare changes introduced by the Howard Government have a strong role for mutual obligation. After reviewing the meaning of welfare, the historic welfare responsibilities of government and the impact of social and economic change, three key objectives for a current Australian Government are proposed. These are to protect the vulnerable, to develop capacity to function effectively in a more difficult environment and to promote social cohesion. The paper examines whether the current application of mutual obligation assists their achievement, concluding that all are compromised. Protection is compromised by the reduction in levels of income support payments, often to very marginalised and vulnerable individuals. Capacity building is undermined by the limited activities and choices available and social cohesion is affected by the divisions created by mutual obligation and the lack of attention to institution building.     

Comparing income poverty gap and deprivation on social acceptance: A mediation model with interpersonal communication and social support

In many developed countries or regions, wide income disparities increase the difficulty in reducing poverty. In their day‐to‐day lives, poor people often feel less accepted by the society. The failures in communicating with social groups and receiving social support lead to negative consequences on individual well‐being and higher level of social exclusion. Based on the debate upon alternative approaches to conceptualizing and operationalizing poverty, this study attempts to verify a mediation model with data from a household survey (N = 1,202) in Hong Kong. The results of structural equation modelling reveal that deprivation is a more powerful indicator than income poverty for specifying the negative relations of poverty with interpersonal communication, social support, and social acceptance; the negative impact of deprivation on social acceptance can be reduced by two significant mediators of interpersonal communication and social support. The results are discussed in terms of directions for future research and policy and welfare intervention.     

Compulsory intergenerational family solidarity shaping choices between work and care: Perceptions of informal female carers and local policymakers in Estonia

Estonians are obliged by law to provide maintenance for family members who are unable to cope by themselves. As a result, 80% of fragile older people receive informal care. Whether this is because the carers themselves feel solidarity and choose informal caring or because they lack alternatives is the question. We applied the cultural approach for explaining the construction of compulsory family solidarity in care provision to older people through the perceptions of informal carers and policy actors. Our interest is in how filial norms framed by individual responsibilities of care provision required by law can influence (i) informal carers’ perceptions concerning their choices between work and care and (ii) impact policy actors’ perceptions concerning eldercare service provision. Analysing the empirical data produced during focus groups with female carers and interviews with policy actors, we demonstrate the triple‐fold pressure to informal caregiving as an expression of compulsory family solidarity. Key Practitioner Message: ? The article demonstrates how the national Family Law Act constitutes a compulsory requirement of family solidarity in society; ? The compulsory family solidarity norm influences local‐level policymaking and inhibits the development of formal care services for older people; ? Informal carers’ choices between work and care are shaped by their personal filial norms, familialistic policymaking, and pressure exerted by older people.     

The influence of faith‐based organisations on Australian social policy

This historical overview explores the crucial and changing relationships between faith‐based organisations and governments, not only in the implementation of social services but also in the formation of social policy. Historically Australian governments have left large areas of social provision to the non‐government sector. For example, income support for the unemployed was not taken up by governments until World War II and income support for sole parents remained largely a responsibility for non‐government organisations (NGOs) until the 1970s. Prior to governments taking responsibility for income support, most of these NGOs were religious organisations surviving on donations, philanthropic support and limited government funding. It is argued that the dominant, semi‐public role of religious organisations in service delivery and social policy formation is an important but largely overlooked aspect of the Australian historical experience.     

Consistencies and Inconsistencies: Mental Health, Compulsory Treatment and Community Capacity Building in England, Wales and Australia

In relation to mental health, it is clear that medicalized underpinnings,the provision of a clinically orientated evidence base for practiceand the need to contain ‘risk’ continue to be prioritized,particularly when compulsory intervention is considered. Thisis despite the increasing influence of a citizenship and socialjustice agenda which is being promoted by psychiatrists involvedin the development of ‘postpsychiatry’, as wellas by service users/survivors. These drivers are not mutuallyexclusive, but in the context of compulsory treatment, thereare clear tensions. In this article, the policy surroundingmental health and compulsory intervention in Australia and inEngland and Wales is explored. In the context of this discussion,three ways in which current government policy can be interpretedare examined and links made between these interpretations anddifferent ways of viewing the relationship between mental healthand community capacity building. With regard to social workpractice, it is argued that a response to mental ill healthwhich concentrates on an individualized ‘diagnose andtreat’ approach, which particularly comes to the foreat times of compulsory intervention, has limited capacity tofacilitate community engagement, foster social inclusion andgenerate reciprocal dynamics between positive mental healthand community capacity building.     

Partnership and participation: contradictions and tensions in the social policy space

Partnerships and participation seem to be the order of the day. Yet, for many community organisations, this way of ordering the social policy space is contradictory, creating practice tensions that increase the complexity of local service systems. Such changes impact community organisations in a politics that needs to be made visible if they are to be able to act in the interests of their members and service users. We therefore outline the social policy space currently constituted by four major discourses: neo‐liberalism, managerialism, new paternalism and network governance as they intersect and interact chaotically, reshaping participation and partnerships between government, community service organisations and local communities. We then examine how policy as a technology or set of mechanisms is discursively creating contradictions and practice tensions within which community organisations engage for social justice.     

Blind‐sided by Basics: three perspectives on income management in an Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory

Income management was introduced into the Northern Territory in 2007. Despite much rhetoric around evidence based policy making and constant reviewing of income management, there has been little grounded research about Aboriginal responses at the community level to this new institution. In this article I report on the operations of income management from a longer term perspective, working with Kuninjku people and retail outlets in the Maningrida region in Arnhem Land. My argument is that from a local perspective income management is just one of a suite of new measures that have been introduced to alter the norms and values of people to correlate more closely with Australian mainstream norms. This view is based on participant observation rather than direct questioning. Income management is a low priority issue for the Kuninjku people in the current policy maelstrom that seeks to shift policy from ‘self determination’ back to a form of assimilation now heavily influenced by a neoliberal ideological agenda. Local responses vary from indifferent acceptance to resistance. I ponder the crucial policy question, how can we allow substantial financial resources to be squandered in unhelpful income management when they could be deployed productively to enhance wellbeing for Indigenous Australians?     

Social Worker Assessed Vulnerable Income Management

Despite the small size of the sub program, Social Worker Assessed Vulnerable Welfare Payment Recipients Income Management is often cited as a preferred approach to this type of initiative, being tightly targeted at a group of people with identified high needs, and demonstrated poor outcomes. Although the program was considered in the two recent major evaluations of income management, specific findings relating to it have tended to be overshadowed by the more general finding of an absence of positive outcomes, and indeed potentially negative effects, from compulsory income management. While the size of the sub program has made evaluation difficult, the two major evaluations of income management have nevertheless made specific findings which suggest that the program has had some positive outcomes for a highly marginal participant group. These findings, along with aspects of the operation of the program, including the role played by social workers, and a proposal to abolish the program, are discussed.     

Changing paradigms in measuring national well‐being: How does Korea rank “beyond GDP”?

Academics, politicians, and citizens around the world are calling for multidimensional measures of national well‐being to be included in public policy‐making. Under the motto “The Future of Well‐Being,” the 6th OECD World Forum recently pushed forward this debate in Incheon, Korea. Comparing multidimensional well‐being measures across countries, Korea ranks well in income and health, but shows deficiencies in social support, perceived freedom over life choices, air quality, and work‐life balance. Multidimensional measures of well‐being are increasingly being adopted by policy‐makers around the world to improve people's lives.     

风险社会与国家治理现代化

我国目前正处于重大的社会转型期即风险社会之中。中国进入风险社会有四个主要标志：政府作为社会治理或公共治理的中心,其公信力在不断下降;中国出现了公共机构有组织的不负责任现象;＂理论的不在状态＂和＂现实的不在场＂;主体意识或个体意识的崛起。中国进入风险社会表现为四个基本的、深层次的社会结构性紧张：利益结构的紧张、制度结构的紧张、文化结构的紧张、价值结构的紧张。风险社会只是一个表象,根本原因是四大深层次的社会结构性矛盾没有解决。中国学术创新的关键就是要研究社会的结构性矛盾或结构性紧张,找出其形成的规律,从根本上消除阻碍社会主义发展和国家治理现代化的深层次根源。