Summer reading from Power to Persuade / the Women’s Policy Action Tank

Enjoy the summer break and catch up on your policy reading! Photo by Mason Dahl on Unsplash

2022 saw a lot of movement in the policy space, including a change in the Federal government and the largest number of independent candidates elected to office. There are many policy-related issues that are currently in flux, as indicated by royal commissions, law suits, the question of Indigenous Voice to Parliament, responses to climate change, continued management of COVID-19 and the economic reset that it caused, inflation, reforming the safety net, and fundamental questions about how government governs and is held accountable.

As always, Power to Persuade’s team of moderators have sourced a wide range of content on issues that are in the headlines as well as shining a light on issues that may not have the attention on them that they deserve. We have published research summaries, commentary, critiques, analyses and first-person accounts of the ways that policy can fail and the ways that it can succeed. For the first time, our moderation team includes not just individuals but also two research teams (The Life Course Centre and the Anti-Poverty Centre) and an organisation of volunteers who advocate from their lived experience (The Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union).

Across a year of change, the Power to Persuade and the Women’s Policy Action Tank have brought you over 100 blogs on a wide range of topics. The site recorded over 52,000 visitors who collectively read nearly 70,000 pages. Sixty-eight per cent of this readership was Australian, with an increasing international readership. As we give our moderators, whisperers and authors a break over the holiday period, we share with you a baker’s dozen (with a few extras thrown in) of our most popular blogs. We have organised them by theme.

Challenging welfare settings

The Power to Persuade has a long history of analysis focused on the welfare system, and our readers respond to these insightful pieces. This year our most-read piece was The social safety net as a complex system failure for women by Susan Maury, Sue Olney, Kay Cook, Elise Klein, and Shelley Bielefeld. This piece provides evidence for gendered differences across unemployment payments and mutual obligation requirements, child support, ParentsNext and the Cashless Debit Card; these examples indicate women are particularly at risk of poor outcomes when reliant on government financial assistance. On a related note, co-authors Alice Campbell, Janeen Baxter and Ella Kuskoff examine the direct relationship between experiences of violence and poverty for young women:  For women, the road to ‘unfreedom’ is paved with violence.

In a similar vein, Juanita Frost provided an extraordinary analysis of how small changes to reimbursement procedures can add up to a financial crisis in her popular piece Medicare, the education department and a real estate agent walk into a bar… Small changes equal big trouble on JobSeeker.

Members of the Centre for Health Research and Implementation at Monash University wrote an extraordinary analysis of how gendered employment pathways are a primary determinant of health for women: Women, work and the poverty trap: Time for a fair go to support health and wellbeing for Australian women,  by Joanne Enticott, Emily Callander, Rhonda Garad, and Helena Teede.

Jeremiah Brown contributed a critically important analysis of how complex forms create barriers to financial support, in The administrative burden of forms can stop people getting the services they need.

We also published a series of posts by some of Australia’s leading social policy scholars and advocates involved in a workshop on Rethinking Welfare and Conditionality in Australia, convened by the Social Security Research Policy and Practice Network in November 2022. The posts examine the impacts of recent policy and service delivery reforms on single parents and their children, unemployed people, and others subject to mutual obligations and conditionality.

Reimagining the social safety net

The blog also ran several pieces that were looking for positive change and hope. Many single mothers were calling on the new Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, to remember how difficult things were for his mother and to initiate change for helping single-parent households; this moving letter from Terese Edwards at the National Council for Single Mothers and their Children was a very popular read:  Dear Prime Minister: Single mothers are asking for some hope.  

What would happen if a more generous, less punitive approach was taken to welfare? Susan Maury, Elise Klein, Kay Cook and Kelly Bowey reported on their research into the positive impacts of temporary welfare changes in response to COVID-19: Evidence for welfare reform: Generosity may have unforeseen benefits for women and children.

Finally, Phoebe Nagorcka-Smith explored how the welfare system could make women and children safer from family violence, arguing that financial security is central to safety concerns: Reimaging welfare to mitigate violence against women.

 Hearing from the ‘experts’

Many of the year’s most popular pieces reflected the importance of centring lived experience in the policy debate. One piece that touched a nerve for many people was Life or death choices when walking the poverty line from Emma Morris for the Australian Unemployed Worker’s Union.

An important piece from Sharon Bessell argued for doing more to understand children’s experience of poverty in her popular piece Reducing poverty and improving wellbeing: Children’s role in transformational thinking.  

Joelie Mandzufas from Telethon Kids Institute wrote about bringing lived experience to the heart of public health research in Tackling wicked problems from the inside out.

Finally, a very popular piece by Gisell Newton lifted the lid on what is turning out to be a highly disruptive issue in many people’s personal and family lives: Donor-conceived adults are speaking out about their experiences, but will the government listen?

 Looking at governance

Finally, of many pieces that examined issues of governance, a few stood out. The first, from Andrew Morgan, examined how to embed Indigenous wisdom into our systems of governance: Can stewardship bring First Nations’ knowledges to the centre of being a public servant in Australia? The second, from Jessica Lane, celebrated the outcome of the federal election: Election 2022: The ‘persisterhood’ changes the game. Sandra Elhelw analysed the increased diversity of the new Parliament in Will the new government make Australian Multicultural history?

 See you in 2023!

We will be back in 2023 with new content, new experts, and fresh ideas for the policy space! A special thank you to our authors who share their expertise so generously and to our faithful readers.

The editors and team at Power to Persuade and the Women’s Policy Action Tank