Social Policy and the Challenges of Social Change, Proceedings of the National Social Policy Conference, Sydney, 5-7 July 1995, Volume 2

This year's conference was divided into broad social policy themes: Work and Welfare; Social and Economic Inequality; Family, the Life Course and the State; Community Services; Citizenship and the Mixed Economy of Welfare; and an Open Section which covered a variety of themes not included in the above categories. This volume of papers from the Conference includes the keynote address, the first of the plenary papers and thirteen contributed papers. There is no connecting theme to the contributed papers which are in alphabetical order by author within each volume

Two Papers on Citizenship and Basic Income

This Discussion Paper brings together two short papers reflecting on current proposals for reform in income support policy in the context of continuing high levels of unemployment and underemployment. In the first, Sheila Shaver reviews the conflicting arguments for Participation Income and Basic Income, both of which claim to represent extensions of the social citizenship of the welfare state required for a post-industrial society. The paper reviews the reforms introduced in the Working Nation White Paper, and suggests that these are part of a large scale historical shift in the character of the Australian welfare state. While social rights of citizenship such as income support were previously complementary to employment and capital accumulation, they are now becoming integrated into the processes of economic growth and development. The paper by Peter Saunders focuses on Basic Income (BI) and two key issues which must be addressed in all such proposals, conditionality and transition. Conditionality refers to the definition of those circumstances under which people are entitled to receive income support benefits. BI proposals have also given insufficient attention to the problems associated with the transition to such a scheme, and in particular to the political influence of estimates of winners and losers. Advocates of a Participation Income such as Atkinson and Cass accept some degree of conditionality as the price of BI at an adequate benefit level; this paper offers an alternative proposal for a low level but fully unconditional BI, which is considered a more promising approach to the problems of transition

Homelessness Wardship and Commonwealth-State Relations

The research presented in this Report is the result of a study commissioned by the Commonwealth Department of Social Security in which the Centre was asked to examine the changing balance and fit between Commonwealth and State programs in meeting the needs of homeless young people and in particular as they affect wards of state. The Report reviews changing policies and practices of State welfare departments in the use of orders for care, protection and control, and Commonwealth policies and services supporting young people in and leaving care. Case studies of services to young people in care in Queensland and South Australia examine these issues in more depth. The Report finds there is a longstanding trend to reduced use of legal orders for wardship across all States. The case studies suggest that this reduction reflects the conjunction of changing legal philosophies of care with fiscal constraints on the resources available to State welfare departments. New or extended Commonwealth measures designed to assist young people lacking parental support are particularly problematic in the case of wards under 16 years of age, for whom the Commonwealth considers the States responsible. In the result young people find themselves negotiating changing and sometimes contested boundaries between Commonwealth and State

Culture, multiculturalism and welfare state citizenship

Theoretical discussion of welfare state citizenship has focused too narrowly on bundles of rights and duties, with too little concern for the cultures of institutions, relationships and meanings that define them. It has been convenient, especially for comparative research, to reduce citizenship to measurable quantities and qualities of obligations and entitlements. The price of such convenience is to abstract these rights from the political culture and social action that make them meaningful for the citizenry concerned. Culture, in its broadest sense of the ‘design for living’ that a people may share, pervades the rights and expectations of citizenship. Given global migration, cultural differences are increasingly seen among peoples living side by side, within the borders of the same nation state or across territories bridged by supranational frameworks. Modern communications enable immigrants to maintain connections in their societies of origin as well as residence. As national boundaries grow more permeable, the increased mobility of capital, people and ideas raises significant questions about the coherence of the cultural foundations that underpin national social policy arrangements and the capacity of welfare state citizenship to mediate the local effects of global development. These questions are as relevant to developing as to advanced welfare states.Citizenship is itself a cultural identity in a world where identities are often multiple and less fixed than in the past. Drawing on the work of Turner, García Canclini, Kymlicki, Parekh and Sen, the paper addresses theories of citizenship and multiculturalism. Its premise is that citizen identity marks the intersection of public and private life in relation to the self and is socially constructed. The paper argues that culture forms a thread in the narratives of citizen identity that individuals construct for themselves in the course of daily life, which are correspondingly diverse. Linking public and private in the recognition of rights and responsibilities to self and other, these narratives reflect the nature of the networks and interactions by which citizens of different cultural background (amidst differences of status and class, gender and other important attributes) interact. The mutual recognition amongst citizens that welfare state citizenship entails is not guaranteed but contingent, the byproduct of the social and economic processes that order everyday social life in employment and commerce, cities and neighbourhoods, schools and religious groups.The paper concludes with discussion of what its argument implies for welfare states in countries of the north and south. It also points to the importance of institutions supporting the complex identities, loyalties and aspirations of diverse individuals