1,720,994 research outputs found
Do Australians want a private welfare state? Are they getting one anyway?
No full textLabor and Liberal federal governments have been privatising the Australian welfare state by promoting the entry of private businesses into human service provision. Private businesses now deliver a much higher proportion of health, aged, and child care services than Australians think is ideal. It is not hard to see why private businesses move into human service provision: taxpayer subsidised essential services make good business sense. But there are good reasons to suspect that privatisation makes bad social-policy sense, according to Gabrielle Meagher
Who cares? A demographic profile of care workers employed in the Australian community services industry
No full textIn nursing homes, child care centres, migrant welfare services, group homes for people with disabilities, and elsewhere around Australia, workers are employed to help other people meet their daily needs. These employees perform paid \u27care work\u27 in Australia’s community service industries. Gabrielle Meagher and Karen Healy present a profile of these care workers, using data from the Census of Population and Housing 1996 and 2001.
A second volume, Who Cares? Employment structure and incomes in the Australian care workforce is also available
Capturing marketisation in Australian social policy
No full textOpening chapter of the book, Markets, rights and power in Australian social policy, edited by Gabrielle Meagher and Susan Goodwin, and published by Sydney University Press.
Australia has never had a large public social service system like those of the Nordic countries, or even of the United Kingdom. Instead, most social services have been delivered by a range of organisations that has included, but not been dominated by, the public sector. However, the mixed economy of Australian welfare services has not been static. In recent decades, both the organisational mix and the modes of coordination have changed significantly. Successive governments have expanded publicly funded social provision without expanding the public sector, by directly subsidising private provision, by contracting private agencies to deliver services, and by subsidising consumer purchases from approved private providers using tax expenditures and voucher-like instruments. Policies have been rolled out at different rates and with different instruments across the range of areas of Australian social policy. Yet the direction of change overall is clear – market organisations and market logics are playing an increasing role. This chapter, by the editors Gabrielle Meagher and Susan Goodwin, marks out the analytical territory of the book, and the surveys the themes canvassed in Chapters 1-11.
Chapters in Markets, rights and power in Australian social policy:
Introduction: Capturing marketisation in Australian social policy
1) The politics of market encroachment: policymaker rationales and voter responses
2) The marketisation of human services and the expansion of the not-for-profit sector
3) The devil\u27s in the detail: the hidden costs of private retirement incomes policy
4) Social benefit bonds: financial markets inside the state
5) \u27Which bank?\u27 Competition and community service obligations in the retail banking sector
6) Community aged care providers in a competitive environment: past, present and future
7) Home security: marketisation and the changing face of housing assistance in Australia
8) Money and markets in Australia\u27s healthcare system
9) Marketisation of immigrant skills assessment in Australia
10) Markets in education: \u27School choice\u27 and family capital
11) Conditional income transfers and choice in social services: just more conditions and more markets
'Caution children crossing ahead': Child protection education with pre-service teachers using a strengths approach
Get PDFThis paper examines issues relating to child protection education for pre-service teachers and outline findings to date, from Phase one of the doctoral research of the author, into the use and potential of the Strengths Approach (McCashen, 2005) in this area of education. Although widely used in social work and therapeutic situations, the Strengths Approach is relatively unknown within the education sector. Review of the literature, however, would suggest there are interdisciplinary possibilities with the approach and that education students particularly may find it a useful tool in teaching child protection education. This paper examines the interplay of early research findings with the significant practical and moral demands of child protection education for pre-service teachers. Intrinsic to the research are the possible collaborations and partnerships between social work and education presented by the application of strengths approaches
Voters and the Senate
No full textOver half of all voters believe that government control of the Senate is a bad thing, report DAVID DENEMARK, SHAUN WILSON and GABRIELLE MEAGHER in this extract from Australian Social Attitudes 2: Citizenship, Work and Aspirations, a collection of essays based on the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2005 IN JULY 2005, a federal government won control of the Senate for the first time since 1981, after the Howard-led Coalition secured a higher than expected vote in the elections of October 2004. With this new majority in both parliamentary houses, the government can pass its legislative agenda without the need to consult with opposition parties - effectively eliminating what has become an important aspect of the Senate’s role. The Australian Survey of Social Social Attitudes 2005 asks respondents about their knowledge of who controls the Senate, and about their attitudes toward who controls it. The first thing to say is that most voters (79 per cent) know that the Coalition parties have a majority in the upper house, with few (1 per cent) saying Labor. But almost one in five citizens did not know (19 per cent responded “Can’t choose”). Overall, voters who did not know had lower levels of formal education and lower incomes, which suggests that voters affected by Senate decisions (such as changes to welfare provisions) may be unaware of this new legislative power.
The survey finds that, overall, 57 per cent of voters disapprove of the Senate majority (they say it’s “a bad thing”) with just 14 per cent saying it’s “a good thing.” Quite a few say “it’s too early to say” but very few think ‘it will make no difference’ anyway (just 8 per cent). It’s not surprising that Labor, Democrat and Green voters are strongly opposed to Howard’s majority (all above 80 per cent). What is more surprising is the low number of Coalition voters willing to say the majority is a good thing - 29 per cent for Liberal and 28 per cent of National identifiers respectively. More conservative voters have adopted a “wait and see” attitude, which may have some implications for strategic voters in the 2007 elections...
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What job, which house?: Simple solutions to complex problems in indigenous affairs
Get PDFIn a recent paper, former Keating government minister Gary Johns advocates a ‘no job, no house’ policy for remote Indigenous communities. Johns’ proposal is the latest in a line of offerings from conservative politicians and commentators on Aboriginal affairs. What arguments and evidence support such proposals? What do they say about the state of Indigenous politics in Australia? Will they work
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Caring for profit? The impact of for-profit providers on the quality of jobs in paid care
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