Living conditions of women who experience violence from their partners: Norway and Australia comparisons

This article briefly explores the comparative ways in which the Australian and Norwegian welfare system supports women and children escaping violence, when they are seeking to become established independently. The two welfare systems are compared with regard to family structure, women and the labour market, women and income, support for crisis accommodation and housing, and child care. It demonstrates that Norway provides a more woman‐friendly welfare state.     

Living Healthy and Living Long: Valuing the Nonpecuniary Loss from Disability and Death

This analysis uses three valuation approaches—risk–risk tradeoff, paired risk–dollar comparison, and utility function estimation—to estimate the nonpecuniary cost associated with disability in late life. In addition, we obtain an estimate of the value of life using a paired risk–dollar comparison. The data were obtained from interviews with 548 persons using an iterative computerized questionnaire. Respondents reported a median value of life of $12 million. They were willing-to-pay .7–1.4 million to avoid disability in late life or approximately $47–$95 thousand for each year of disability over age 62. The results were robust to the valuation technique employed.     

Living on the margins: older homeless adults in Toronto

A handful of scholars have acknowledged that, along side the traditional homeless, there are now older people who become homeless for the first time in old age. Few researchers, however, have systematically compared the recent older homeless with the chronic or traditional homeless. In the research presented here, we compare recent older homeless with long-term older homeless adults in Toronto according to their health and wealth, their housing history, and their use of health and social services. Findings indicate that people who become homeless for the first time at older ages have needs that are different from the lifetime elderly homeless and require different approaches to intervention.     

Culture wars in South Australia: the sex education debates

School sexuality education has been a component of Australia's successful and internationally recognized HIV/AIDS strategy since the 1980s and has been well accepted in the community. However South Australia is experiencing a re‐emergence of opposition to school sexuality education orchestrated by groups associated with the United States‐based Christian Right. In this paper I will outline sex education policy developments in Australia and the United States as a framework for discussing the controversy generated around the Sexual Health and Relationships Education (SHARE) program in South Australia in 2003. In doing so I give attention to the similarities between the strategies deployed by the opponents of SHARE and those used to install abstinence‐only‐until‐marriage sex education as national policy in the United States. I will argue that, rather than a phenomenon indigenous to South Australia, these debates are part of an international movement to progress the political goals of the Christian Right.     

澳大利亚和英国的中国学比较

不管是在总体趋势还是在相关部门所面临的困难方面 ,澳大利亚与英国的中国学研究都有许多相似之处。然而 ,由于澳大利亚得益于其地理和政治地位的优势 ,因此它在中国学 ,特别是对现代中国的研究方面更领先一步。共同点两个国家的中国学研究呈现出一些共同的特点 :同美国相比 ,两个国家的相关研究都处于一种边缘状态 ;两国政府都给予了实际的但并不充足的支持 ;两个国家都与中国建立了越来越多的联系 ,但在如何应对不断增多的母语是汉语的学生和学者方面都存在问题。首先 ,与中国学在美国所处的中心地位相比较 ,澳大利亚和英国的中国学都显示…     

Unmarried Mothers in Australia: A Review

An increase in both illegitimate births and in the number of single women retaining their offspring has become evident in all Commonwealth industrialized English-speaking countries. It is shown that women who bear ex-nuptial children are getting younger, and that about 40 per cent are keeping their children. All States show a gradual increase in ex-nuptial births, with those in Western Australia and Queensland rising to over 10 per cent of annual live births for the areas. Further research is needed on single women in Australia who keep their children.     

Income management in Australia: A critical examination of the evidence

The introduction of income management – sometimes called welfare quarantining – for subgroups of Australian income security recipients within the Northern Territory, and subsequently a number of other trial sites, has provoked considerable contention. The present study critically examined the arguments and evidence presented in favour of income management with particular reference to the guidelines, methodology and findings of official evaluations conducted by the Commonwealth Government. We identified five key issues that do not seem to be adequately addressed by official evaluations: choice and control, the quality of decision making, consultation with local community members, structural disadvantage and economic cost. We used these concepts to develop a proposed alternative model for assessing the impact of income management on local communities.     

Not-so-distant cousins: Family benefits in the United Kingdom and Australia

Abstract   Recent trends in tax transfers have seen an increasing interdependence of tax and welfare systems in determining access to and the quantum of benefits, particularly in relation to in-work benefits, such as family support. Both the United Kingdom and Australia have adopted family support mechanisms that appear to operate in a similar way, but closer examination of the detail reflects the differences in underlying policy in the two jurisdictions. This article examines, first, the institutional and policy basis for the design of the family tax transfer system in each jurisdiction and, second, the issues raised by the interdependence of tax and social security concepts in the design of in-work benefits.     

Living on the edge: welfare and the urban poor in 1930s Beijing

This article examines poverty and welfare provision in early twentieth-century Beijing as dialogue and transaction between the city government and the urban poor. Earlier studies of the Chinese urban have tended to emphasize the material aspects of urban development, and the efforts of planners and city governments to modernize China’s cities, rather than the human experience of the city. This article draws on the extensive archives of the Beijing Municipal Government Social Affairs Bureau to extend our understanding of the experience of poverty and the agency of the poor. The archive confirms that Beijing’s growing and increasingly formalized welfare institutions were designed to discipline the poor as they alleviated poverty. However, the correspondence between applicants for welfare and the Social Affairs Bureau also reveals that the poor often approached these institutions instrumentally and assertively. Recourse to the welfare institute became a livelihood tactic, a claim on the authorities in pursuit of which certain sub-groups within the poor mobilized intangible assets, from social networks to understanding of the intended terms of the system, to sway the terms of their engagement with the authorities in their own favour.     

The Single-Parent Family in Australia: An Overview

Studies of single-parent families in Australia are reviewed and statistical trends related to this type of family pattern are discussed. It is quite evident that family sociology has paid little attention to this growing population in Australia. The categories reviewed include single parents, unmarried mothers, widows, deserted wives and the families of prisoners.