Suburban affairs: political communities across Sydney

Recent literatures explore aspects of political organisation at the local level. These include studies of social capital where such issues as the effects of diversity, the relevance of political opportunity structures and government facilitation all figure. A complementary literature explores new patterns of citizen engagement. Finally there are a number of earlier studies of local community organisations in Australia. This paper reports the preliminary findings of a survey of community organisation in six diverse state electorates in Sydney. Our methodology involved a three month time frame that utilised local newspapers, newsletters and websites of local organisations, local council information and websites, and interviews with prominent political actors, including candidates in state election. The three month period purposefully covered the following events: NSW state election March 24, Harmony Day March 21, Youth Week April 14-22, and Anzac Day April 25, that may have led to one-off examples of community organising. Contrary to expectations the study found broadly similar numbers of organisations were active in these communities. However, the types of organisations, the populations they represented and their strategies of advocacy and mobilisation differed. Issues to be explored in future work are also foreshadowed

Pragmatist and neo-classical policy paradigms in public services: which is the better template for program design?

Principal-agent theory alerts principals to their problematic relationship with agents. The former are encouraged to take deliberate action to counter asymmetries in knowledge, moral hazard etc. To avoid this, principals should determine outcomes and contracts and incentives should be designed to achieve them. This approach has influenced the form of purchaser-provider arrangements, including the Job Network. This article reviews impacts, which include incentives for gaming and increased transaction costs. Another survey highlighted the extent to which innovation in the disability employment sector had depended on collaboration, which competition would end. The article then sketches an alternative pragmatic or experimental approach, which assumes that the centre can never establish outcomes that are other than provisional and corrigible. Program design needs to be built around this fundamental fact. Learning not ‘carrots and sticks’ is the appropriate form of relationship. The article explores the feasibility of this approach in a Job Network context

Between universalism and targeting: Exploring policy pathways for an Australian Basic Income

Despite growing interest in proposals for a universal basic income, little advance has been made in implementation. Here we explore policy options for an Australian Basic Income. Our analysis responds to concerns that Basic Income is both too expensive and too radical a departure from existing welfare state structures to be a feasible policy option. Drawing on policy and Basic Income scholarship we identify changes to Australia’s current means-tested benefits structures that move substantially towards Basic Income while remaining consistent with historic policy norms, which we call ‘affluence testing’. Using microsimulation we explore fiscal and distributional trade-offs associated with the implementation of an affluence-tested Basic Income. Our results suggest Basic Income has the potential to significantly reduce inequality and poverty while also requiring taxes to rise substantially. Placing these trade-offs in international context we find the policy would reduce inequality to levels similar to Nordic welfare states while increasing overall taxation to approximately the OECD average