The job network and underemployment

The paper notes how long-term unemployment has been replaced with long-term underemployment and examines the role of the Job Network in this new environment. The paper discusses how the structure of unemployment has changed, how the Job Network has evolved and comments on its performance. It is noted that the Job Network has become more and more driven by tightly specified processes and services supported by an ever tighter compliance regime. This business model has much in common with franchising and this analogy is used to interpret the observed outcomes and the concerns expressed by providers and other interested parties. The paper concludes that there are some inherent problems with the franchising model and suggests that less prescriptive arrangements may be preferable

The restructuring of WA human services and its implications for the not-for-profit sector

Western Australia provides an interesting case study of the outsourcing of human services to the not-for-profit (NfP) sector. This article presents and discusses some of the key themes that emerged from a recently completed research project examining one large NfP in Western Australia. Key themes included the recruitment and retention of staff linked to pay and changing funding arrangements, and the sector becoming increasingly corporatised in outlook and goal orientaiton. Despite evidence that the shifting policy and funding environment within the NfP sector has had some negative consequences, the research findings highlight a degree of agency within which organisations can resist or counterbalance these changes. Efforts to avoid this trend, however, are reliant upon a number of factors; for example, a strong commitment to vision and mission supported by skilled leadership and adequate resourcing. Significantly, these factors are unlikely to be readily available, particularly for smaller NfPs. This discrepancy in organisational capacity is set to become more conspicuous with the potential introduction of ‘Big Society’ policies derived from the United Kingdom, and funding cuts proposed by the Coalition government

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

The costs of disability and the incidence of poverty

Although both disability and poverty have been subjected to extensive research, relatively few Australian studies have examined the relationship between these two important social issues. However, recent changes to the Disability Support Pension mean that there is an urgent need to estimate the costs of disability so that the impact of the changes on poverty can be assessed and inserted into the policy debate. This paper reviews evidence linking the presence of disability to the risk of poverty and the actual hardship using data from the 1998-99 Household Expenditure Survey (HES), and shows that where there is someone in the household with a disability, poverty rates are higher and hardship is more prevalent. It then uses the HES data to estimate the costs of disability using a method recently developed in the UK that relies upon information on household living standards. The estimates are robust and reliable, indicating that the costs of disability represent a substantial percentage of disposable income, and thus that poverty rates are much higher where there is a disability present. Estimates based on the impact of the severity of the restriction associated with the disability are also derived and make a similarly large difference to conventional poverty estimates. Overall, the estimates imply that there is an urgent need to review the adequacy of income support arrangements for those with a disability across all household types: single and married; young and old; one- and two-parent; with and without children. The size of the impact of disability on the risk of poverty and actual hardship suggests that action is required to ensure that people with a disability no longer have to confront a greatly increased risk of poverty in addition to many other challenges