Anglicare Australia rental affordability snapshot 2015

This report surveys private rental housing available across Australia; and tests its suitability – the cost and size – for different low income household types: couples, single parents and children, young people, pensioners, job seekers and people on the minimum wage. This time members of the Anglicare Australia network surveyed over 65,600 properties on a weekend in early April, and once again there were almost no dwellings that were affordable for people on the lowest incomes, such as Newstart and Youth Allowance, as the attached media release and report testify. The report itself also provides a breakdown of regional and metropolitan totals and a number of location based mini-reports, which are prepared by participating Anglicare network members. The survey also includes an analysis of the impact of housing unaffordability, the consequences of living with housing stress, and Anglicare Australia’s key recommendations to resolve the problem. In essence, we are calling for secure and affordable housing for people living on low incomes being made a priority. It requires a national plan that involves governments, industry and the community sector working together

Constrained by managerialism : caring as participation in the voluntary social services

The data in this study show that care is a connective process, underlying and motivating participation and as a force that compels involvement in the lives of others, care is at least a micro-participative process. Care or affinity not only persisted in the face of opposition, but it was also used by workers as a counter discourse and set of practices with which to resist the erosion of worker participation and open up less autonomized practices and ways of connecting with fellow staff, clients and the communities they served. The data suggest that while managerialism and taylorised practice models may remove or reduce opportunities for worker participation, care is a theme or storyline that gave workers other ways to understand their work and why they did it, as well as ways they were prepared to resist managerial priorities and directives, including the erosion of various kinds of direct and indirect participation. The degree of resistance possible, even in the highly technocratic worksite in Australia, shows that cracks and fissures exist within managerialism

Influences on children's voices in family support services: Practitioner perspectives

Australia's 2017 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse recommended to organizations that children should participate in decisions affecting their lives as a safety standard. While a substantial body of research about children's voices in statutory or out‐of‐home care now exists, there remains a paucity of research into children's voices in family support services delivered by nongovernment organizations. This is despite the primary service purpose being to benefit children. This lack of focus in family support was identified as a research priority by a nongovernment organization in Queensland, Australia, which lead to a collaborative research programme. This article reports on initial research from a survey study to describe the current state of play from practitioners into their perceptions and practices of children's participation in family support contexts. A voluntary and anonymous online, qualitative‐predominate survey was opened to 110 practitioners in family support services, of which 50% responded. The findings identified that children's voices were compromised by perceptions of children's capacity relating to age and vulnerability, the parental focus of the service coupled with perceptions of parent's needs and gatekeeping behaviours and service pressures that work against the conditions required for children's rights to voice

Experience Poverty: the Voices of Low-income Australians. Towards New Indicators of Disadvantage Project: Stage 1: Focus Group Outcomes

The research reported here forms the first stage of a project designed to develop new indicators of disadvantage for Australia in the new millennium. The research is funded by Australian Research Council Linkage project grant LP0560797 and is being conducted at the Social Policy Research Centre with the Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS), the Brotherhood of St Laurence, Mission Australia and Anglicare, Sydney as Industry Partners. The research is drawing on the concepts of deprivation and social exclusion to develop indicators that can form the basis of a new approach to the conceptualisation, identification and measurement of poverty. A supplementary goal is to pave the way for a large-scale nationally representative sample of the general population that will gather new information on aspects of deprivation and exclusion and allow the methods developed here to be applied more widely, in ways that can add to the research base and inform policy