What Do You Do? Hope in Disability Policy Advocacy

As we approach the end of 2024, it seems an appropriate time to reflect on both the progress that has been made in disability equality, but also the things that we all do to protect ourselves and sustain our collective and individual advocacy efforts. In the Spring 2024 Edition of the Canberra Disability Review , Editor Rob Donnelly invited readers to do this, by responding to the question: What do you do that helps you to keep going, and maintain some measure of hope, when progress towards a fairer and more inclusive Australia is under heavy fire?

Advocacy for Inclusion’s Head of Policy, Craig Wallace, and the Disability Leadership Institute’s CEO and Founder, Christina Ryan, shared their perspectives.

Unseen Impact: How Unpaid Caregiving Shapes Health and Lives

Care-giving can be a rich and complex experience that is both rewarding and challenging. Enrico Pfeifer (@EnricoPfeifer1), a PhD Candidate at the University College London, knows this first-hand. Today, he explores his doctoral research on the impact that care-giving can have on people’s health, and how we can support care-givers to stay healthy.

Home Choice: An Interview with Hannah Orban, Co-Author of The Grattan Institute Report “Better, Safer, More Sustainable. How to reform NDIS housing and support.”

In the Spring 2024 Edition of the Canberra Disability Review, Editor Rob Donnelly sat down with Hannah Orban to discuss the Grattan Institute’s (@GrattanInst) recent report “Better, Safer, More Sustainable. How To Reform NDIS Housing and support”. Today’s blog piece shares key parts of their interview, highlighting key issues with the current NDIS housing system and opportunities for improvement. You can read the original interview here.

The Australian Government response to the Disability Royal Commission: Implementing strategies for improvement for people with disability within Australia’s health care system

Rae West details the Disability Royal Commission’s findings and recommendations on improving healthcare for people with disability, and the Australian Government’s response - as well as the disability community’s frustration at how few recommendations were accepted in full.

Policy and governancePower to Persuade3 September 2024Disability Royal Commission, Disability, healthcare

Shifting narratives about poverty in Australia

This is the final part of a 3-part series by Sharon Bessell and Cadhla O’Sullivan from the Children’s Policy Centre at ANU. Today’s post covers welfare policy narratives of individual blame and how they don’t reflect the reality of children’s lives.

Policy and governancePower to Persuade19 July 2024Children, Poverty, wellbeing, Policy Research

‘The Missing Middle’ in childhood poverty and wellbeing indicators

This is the second post in a 3-part series from the Children’s Policy Centre at ANU, focusing on childhood poverty and wellbeing indicators. Today Cadhla O’Sullivan, Megan Lang and Sharon Bessell highlight the gaps for children in the middle years, why this matters, and the importance of listening to children to understand their experiences of poverty.

Policy and governancePower to Persuade17 July 2024Measurement, Children, wellbeing

Reducing poverty and improving wellbeing for all children: Where do we stand?

This is the first post in a 3-part series by Sharon Bessell (@BessellSharon) and Cadhla O’Sullivan (@CadhlaOSull) from the Children’s Policy Centre at ANU. Today they identify some trends from their analysis of poverty and wellbeing.

Policy and governancePower to Persuade15 July 2024Children, wellbeing, Poverty

Revisiting the purple zone in regulatory public service

Navigating the politics of public administration continues to challenge public servants of all levels. In this piece, Isabelle Patterson, a student in the Masters of Regulation and Governance at the ANU, reflects on the duality of her experiences as a regulator and how her academic research supports her in navigating this.

Policy and governance, PoliticsPower to Persuade11 July 2024regulation, public service

Firsthand experience of migration, homelessness and disability reveals shortcomings in access to political participation: Student reflections on power and governance

Policy and governance, Lived experiencePower to Persuade9 July 2024politics and democracy, housing and homelessness, migration, mental health, Disability

Voting in Australia as a young, Queer person: Student reflections on power and governance

This week on the Power to Persuade blog, we will hear from students at RMIT University about their reflections on power and governance in Australia. First up is Em Dewhurst (They/Them). Em is a Bachelor of Social Work student at RMIT University, who has written a powerful reflection on voting in Australia as a young, Queer person. Em works as a Diversity and Inclusion Consultant at They/Say Consulting, a Facilitator for the Youth Disability Advocacy Service, and a Youth Engagement Support Officer for Hume City Council.

Australia’s response to preventing forced marriage should begin with listening to the needs of young women.

Gender, Lived experience, Policy and governancePower to Persuade5 July 2024women, Women's safety, violence against women

Beyond Screen Time Limits: Rethinking Digital Media Policies for Youth Mental Health

Dr. Rhiannon Parker discusses nuanced findings on digital media use and its impacts on youth education and wellbeing.

Policy and governancePower to Persuade2 July 2024social media, young people

Explaining the 2024 Net Overseas Migration surge

A recent surge in net overseas migration (NOM) has become a hot topic, with politicians and media commentators linking the surge with limited housing supply and other pressures. But what is the NOM? And do we really have unusually high volumes of migration? Alan Gamlen from the Australian National University explains. Y

Policy and governance, Politics, IssuesPower to Persuade19 June 2024migration policy, NOM, migration

Colombian transitional justice: the need for prioritizing local voices in peacebuilding.

The term ‘transitional justice’ encompasses a wide range of initiatives and mechanisms to address legacies left by human rights atrocities committed amidst situations of armed conflict or in transitions from autocratic to democratic rule. Mechanisms like the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, The International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda or the Former Yugoslavia (ICTR/ICTY) or Timor Leste’s Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor (CAVR in Portuguese) are among some of the most internationally known transitional justice processes. In this blog post Dr Louis Monroy-Santander explains the need to prioritise local voices in peacebuilding.

A deliberate choice to keep people in poverty

In the lead up to Federal Budget, we featured a series of posts about the challenges of living on Jobseeker. Last week’s budget confirmed there would be no increase to the payment, meaning it remains below the poverty line. In today’s post, Maiy Azize, Deputy Director of ANGLICARE AUSTRALIA, outlines the long history of research and inquiry demonstrating the need to raise the rate, and calls for a backlash over the ‘deliberate choice to keep three million people in poverty’.

Implications of the NDIS Amendment Bill 2024 for some of Australia’s most marginalised people

With the NDIS Amendments Bill 2024 open for submissions until the end of the week, today’s post, written by Muriel Cummins, critiques the potential impact of the Bill on some of the most marginalised NDIS recipients – people living in private supported boarding houses. Muriel raises concerns from her reading of the Bill and NDIS reform more generally, and the potential of these policy and legislative changes to further erode the rights of people living in these modern-day institutional settings.

Policy and governanceGuest User13 May 2024NDIS, social justice, housing and homelessness

We need a more humane budget - now more than ever

Antipoverty Centre, Lived experience, Policy and governancePower to Persuade10 May 2024JobSeeker, housing

Thinking differently about evidence: Collaborating with policy makers to create, share and apply knowledge for public health

Public health research generates a wealth of evidence but there are challenges when it comes to making that evidence available to audiences beyond the research sector. In today’s post, VicHealth (@VicHealth) Research Fellow Alexandra Chung (@Chung_Alexandra) of Monash University (@MonashNutrition) discusses a unique project that demonstrates the value of collaborative approaches to create and share knowledge with policymakers.

How international recognition of cultural practices could be a new way to protect refugees

Camps are dynamic, culturally significant spaces. New research from the University of Newcastle proposes the significance of these cultural practices may provide an alternative pathway to protection.

Transitioning out of youth involvement roles: an interview with a Youth Involvement Officer and Senior Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement Lead

Within mental health research and service delivery, involvement of experts by experience has become increasingly common. The involvement of experts by experience allows for the design and delivery of research that is of higher quality and more rigorous.

Transitioning out of youth-focussed lived experience groups is a matter that is not well understood and, for many reasons, complex. It can be difficult to transition from the role of being a young contributor to research into a professional in the Public and Patient Involvement space. Working in lived experience roles, either as ‘lived experience practitioners’, ‘peer support workers’, ‘PPI facilitators’ or ‘involvement officers’ can be complex and the relationships you hold in these spaces vary depending on your positioning within either the group or the organisation (Carr, 2019).

In this blog we explore the experience of Beckye, a former Youth Advisory Group (YAG) member for the University of Birmingham’s Institute for Mental Health as she begins the making this transition into an employee in a Youth Involvement Officer. The blog takes the form of responses to an with Beckye (Youth Involvement Officer) and Niyah (Senior Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement Lead). The interview offers early reflections that may be of use to organisations or individuals who may be supporting folk undertaking these transitions or in the process of negotiating the transition themselves.

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