Social Inclusion
What the ‘Social Inclusion Agenda’ means for the Integration of the Labour Market and Social Policy
Investigators
| Associate Professor Dr John Howe | Director, Centre for Employment and Labour Relations Law, Melbourne Law School |
| Associate Professor Miranda Stewart | Director, The Tax Group, Melbourne Law School |
| Professor Ian McDonald | Department of Economics, Faculty of Economics and Commerce |
| Daniel Perkins | Social Policy Branch, Department of Human Services, Victoria |
| Dr Rosanna Scutella | Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, Faculty of Economics and Commerce |
| Professor Paul Smyth | Professorial Fellow in Social Policy, Department of Political Science, Faculty of Arts; General Manager, Research & Policy Centre, Brotherhood of St Laurence |
Summary
The election of the Rudd Labor Government in November 2007 heralded a new era in labour market and social policy. The Labor Party promised to employ the concept of ‘social inclusion’ as an approach for addressing social disadvantage and alleviating poverty in Australia and has outlined an ‘Australian Social Inclusion Agenda’. This project will undertake a critical examination of the Rudd Government’s ‘Social Inclusion Agenda’ by examining its normative underpinnings, and investigating the interaction between labour market regulation and social policy regimes within the rubric of social inclusion and from a social justice perspective. The focus will be principally on the interaction between labour law, employment assistance and welfare policy, but the project will also consider the operation and impact of other areas of legal and social policy, including taxation. The research will lay the groundwork for a larger project to undertake empirical research to assess whether these fields of legal and social policy interact effectively to ensure secure incomes and employment for families experiencing disadvantage. The project will make a major contribution to policy debates about welfare to work, about the ethical issues involved, and about alternative policy frameworks.
Work to date
To date, the Social Inclusion Project team have been working to develop an introductory working paper that considers what ‘social inclusion’ means in the context of the Australian Social Inclusion Agenda.
The kinds of questions that have been asked as the paper has been developed are:
- what was the social policy background immediately prior to the development of the Agenda;
- what might ‘social inclusion’ and ‘social exclusion’ mean; and
- what, if anything, can we elicit from the Agenda and work to date as to what the current government means what it talks about ‘social inclusion’?
The paper will be released in draft format in June 2009 and in final format as a Social Justice Initiative Working Paper in July 2009.
Social Inclusion Research Forum 25-26 June 2009
The Social Inclusion Project team is also hosting a Social Inclusion Research Forum on Thurs 25 – Fri 26 June 2009. For more information about the Forum, please click here