Holiday reading: Celebrating 10 years of Power to Persuade
As we close out 2021, we celebrate 10 years of sharing the latest thinking and analysis on Australian policy! This year the site hosted nearly 100 blogs, written by academics, policy specialists, and people with lived experience. We had nearly 65,000 visits representing 82,000 page views.
Happy birthday to us… happy birthday to us… Our gift to you: Our most-read blogs of 2021! Photo by Prachi Palwe on Unsplash
Our readership has expanded over the years; only 66% of our readership is in Australia, with the balance from all over the world. The site and its contributors are active participants in a global conversation about how to create better policy.
Here we share the most-read blogs from the year – both our general policy blogs (Power to Persuade) and those that apply a gendered lens (Women’s Policy Action Tank). We also throw in a few gems you may have missed.
Power to Persuade – most read
The most-read blog for 2021, with well over 1,000 reads, was a reflection by self-advocate Joey King, entitled “I am dirt poor”: reflections on poverty, homelessness and welfare. The power of personal experience shines through this deeply affective piece of how Australia’s welfare system fails so many people, and especially older women.
The blog has run several pieces on the challenges of having a disability in Australia; reflecting more insights from lived experience, an anonymous author shared Government homelessness inquiries in Australia have ignored disabled peoples.
Sharynne Hamilton and Sarah Maslen shared a critical piece on how child protection could shed some of its structural injustices in their analysis entitled Radically rethinking child protection work with the four pillars of institutional justice capital.
Rounding out the top 4, Briony Lipton had us all wondering why some office norms followed us home in Appearance at work: The future of workplace dress codes.
Women’s Policy Action Tank – most read
The most-read analysis from the Action Tank, perhaps reflecting a year of having young children at home, is a second insightful piece by Briony Lipton which takes a new look at a beloved Australian icon in What can ABC’s ‘Bluey’ tell us about Australian family dynamics and work life balance?
Another piece current with our pandemic times came in a close second; Louise Chappell, Robyn Norton, Janani Shanthosh, Mark Woodward and Zoe Wainer provided The gender-based data gap in Australian medical research is a problem for everybody.
We learned in 2020 that the government can reduce poverty in Australia if it chooses to, and in 2021 we saw those temporary supportive measures rolled back; Sharon Bessell provided research-based insight into children’s experience of poverty in her piece entitled Poverty and its effects on school-aged children: Understanding the consequences of policy choices.
Leonora Risse hit a nerve with her analysis of some workplace culture, including (we learned) Parliament House in her piece entitled When work becomes a masculinity contest.
In case you missed it
There are always blogs that we feel deserve a greater readership. At the top of this list is a piece from Penny Skye Taylor and Daphne Habibis entitled Do you know what you don’t know? Aboriginal people on the problem of ignorance, which turns the focus onto White settlers and how we could better bridge the gap with Australia’s First Nations peoples.
In another powerful piece from a self advocate, How can government do better at listening to people with disability? My experience of homelessness services and inquiries in Australia suggests there’s a long way to go – full of personal insight but also practical solutions to entrenched barriers created by ill-informed policy.
Basic income has been increasingly raised as a tool that could help rectify Australia’s welfare woes; Beth Goldblatt wrote about how it could also support gender equality in her piece entitled Basic income, gender and human rights: Reinforcing inequalities or transformative action?
Finally, in a piece from the UK by Holly Barrow, the author warns us about the dystopian intersection of neoliberalism and pandemic responses in her piece, Welcome to the age of epidemiological liberalism.
See you next year!
The directors, moderators and policy whisperers are taking a well-earned break over the holiday season, but we will be back in February with our fresh takes on the policy landscape, including some new faces joining the stable that keeps Power to Persuade going!
Posted by @SusanMaury