Making Social Policy in Australia

An introduction

Wendy Weeks, John Wiseman, Tony Dalton, Mary Draper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000319439
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Social policy affects everyone and is everyone's business. Even if you do not receive welfare payments, directly or indirectly you benefit from government servides and funding. Yet how are policies and programs actually developed? Can social policy help us create a more just society?This book offers an introduction to the theory and practice of social policy making in Australia. Using detailed case studies, it covers: * the ideas and values which inform the social policy process* how different groups can influence policy making* how social policy making takes place in social and political organisations* the political nature of policy makingMaking Social Policy in Australia is the most up to date introduction to Australian social policy currently available, and is essential reading for students and practitioners in human and community service work and government.Tony Dalton, Mary Draper and John Wiseman lecture in Social Work and Social Sciences at Rmit, Melbourne; Wendy Weeks lectures in Social Work and Social Policy at the University of Melbourne and is author (in collaboration) of Women Working Together: Lessons from feminist women's services. Each of the authors has been involved in policy debate and development for many years.

PART I
Making social policy

1
Towards a framework for understanding and participating in social policy making

The task of this chapter is to establish a framework for understanding and participating in policy making processes. This requires exploring what social policy means and identifying some of the main elements of policy making practice. We will argue for reclaiming the ‘social’ in policy making theory and practice. The main elements of social policy making as proposed are contest over social issues; analysing or working out what is going on in the historical, social, organisational and inter-organisational context; contesting what will be done—a contest over social purposes and goals; understanding how policy making processes work; and then developing personal, professional and collective social practice.

A CONTEST OVER SOCIAL ISSUES

Social policy is about the social arrangements for everyday life. When a worker is stuck in a traffic jam on the way home from work, or when a parent cannot get paid work because there is no childcare available, she or he experiences policy in action. This worker and parent may discuss their way of life, perhaps wish they could change their lifestyle or explore moving to an area where the traffic flow is less, only to discover there are no jobs, the housing is more expensive, and childcare services are even fewer. Over a Christmas beer they discuss immigration with their neighbours from Thailand. The Thai family have been trying to sponsor the woman’s parents to immigrate to Australia, but the waiting list is very long. The Thai couple are wondering if it will ever work out: they, too, are experiencing a ‘policy problem’ in their everyday life.

To describe this another way, problems of everyday life are often seen as ‘personal problems’, yet it is these very everyday life issues which are the substance of social policy: the way a society is organised, who gets what benefits, and who is left to fend for themselves.

But when is a personal issue a social issue? And when is a social issue a social policy issue? The process of policy making begins when people come together to identify and name an issue of common concern, and to seek a collective or social solution to concerns in their everyday lives—or in the wider world in which they live. The concern may be about their housing, jobs or childcare, a wider issue in the environment, human or civil rights, or, as in the case of protests over war, about actions their government has taken which they don’t support. When a plan of action is developed, the people have a ‘policy proposal’. If this is adopted by a level of government it is likely to be called ‘policy’ or ‘public policy’. If it is widely recognised to be about quality of life, then it may be called ‘social policy’.

Organisations, too, have ‘policies’: about participation, wages or other rewards, social benefits and rules about how things are done. These may be called organisational policies. When large associations or trade unions adopt them and develop ‘policy positions’ on matters of widespread interest, such as unemployment, redundancy, maternity leave or child care, they become part of the policy making processes of the state. What are considered social issues and social policy issues is, therefore, a matter of debate and contest. Issues for public attention will be ‘discursively constructed’, that is, named and identified in discussion and practice. Each of the case studies in this book show how human experiences, needs or problems became, through collective action and drawing on people’s skilful practice and social goals, an issue of social policy.

Table 1.1 lists a number of definitions of social policy. These alert us to its complexity and the range of different approaches and traditions.

Table 1.1 Definitions of social policy

David Gil (1970, p.413)	Social policies are the elements of a society’s system of social policy, a system of interrelated yet not necessarily logically consistent principles and courses of action which shape the quality of life or the level of well-being of members of society, and determine the nature of all intrasocial relationships among individual social units and society as a whole, by governing—(a) the development of resources and services, (b) the allocation of statuses, (c) the distribution of rights, rewards and constraints, (d) the extent to which the distribution of rights is linked to the allocation of status.
Richard Titmuss (1974, p.23)	Policy can be taken to refer to the principles that govern action toward given ends.
Elizabeth Wilson (1977, p.9)	Social policy is simply one aspect of the capitalist state, an acceptable face of capitalism, and social welfare policies amount to no less than the State organisation of domestic life.
Vic George and Paul Wilding (1985, p.18)	Social policy is … the result of the constant attempts of various groups in society to improve or redefine their situation vis-a-vis that of other groups … The first stage of conflict decides whether legislative change will take place, while the second decides the actual form and shape of legislation.
Gillian Pascall (1986, p.19)	A feminist approach should mean more than putting women into the picture. It means criticising and renewing conceptual apparatus, and understanding social policy as part of wider social processes. Feminist analysis—which has largely focussed on women’s position in relation to men and capital—is an obvious resource.
Economic Planning Advisory Council (1987, p. 1)	The Social Wage is that part of government spending which provides benefits, either in cash or kind, to individuals or families … government spending on education, health, social security and welfare, and housing and community amenities.
Adam Graycar and Adam Jamrozik (1989, pp.92–3)	Social policy is ‘a philosophical concept as a set of general principles—as a series of desirable states as a product a series of conclusions or recommendations concerned with selective or general social improvement as a process—a social political process of implementation as a framework for action.’
Mark Considine (1994, p.4)	Policy is the continuing work done by groups of policy actors who use available public institutions to articulate and express the things they value.

Social policy involves both products or outcomes—particular ‘policies’—as well as processes of critical reflection, action and contest between people. Social policy is concerned with social goals, purposes and values: it is never value free, in spite of claims to the contrary. For example, since the women’s movement made public a number of social issues previously understood as personal—such as childcare, rape and violence in families—it has become widely accepted that social policy is about personal, family and community life, as well as wider social arrangements.

Social policy making involves debate and contest—about ideas and practices—about what will be defined as social policy, and how it comes to be made, based on varying analyses of the social context and different assumptions about power and social relations. There will be contest over understanding social problems or issues: for example, whether the main problem in being unemployed is having no money, or whether people need meaningful activity, or whether both are true. How change occurs will be debated, as will different visions and goals about what society could and should look like. For example, Nancy Fraser (1989, p.164) describes three moments in the politics around needs which are also useful in understanding the stages of turning personal or social needs into social policy. The first phase is ‘the struggle to establish or deny the political status of a given need’. An example of this is the long campaign undertaken by the Council for Single Mothers and their Children to establish the need for income support for sole-support mothers. The second stage is about contest over the ‘interpretation of the need’, that is, how it will be named and what solutions are desirable. The third moment is ‘the struggle over the satisfaction of the need, the struggle to secure or withhold provision’.

So far, then, we can say that social policy is a contest about personal experiences which become collectively defined as social issues, about what social directions will be taken, and whose interests will be served.

What is the difference between social and economic policy?

When structural/functionalist social theory dominated discourse, social welfare policy was seen to be separate from the economy and the family. This construction of the issue was consistent with a liberal welfare state in which ‘the family’ and ‘the market’ were the main mechanisms for well-being. Contemporary analyses recognise that public legislation and policies about social life are interdependent and influence personal and family life, community experience and labour, urban planning, transport and recreation, as well as the distribution of wealth and other resources.

Welfare economics is a branch of the study of economics which draws more on economic than on social policy traditions but which identifies an approach of those economists concerned with social welfare. With the pressure in the 1980s to address the dominance of economics in policy making and to deliver social services in a cost-efficient manner, many policy personnel have explored this tradition.

Some welfare economists emphasise the government role in redistribution, based on philosophical principles about equality and social justice. A contribution of this tradition is its emphasis on the economic base as intercepted with social policy, and on the production, as well as the consumption and allocation of goods, as significant. A contribution has been made by those welfare economists who, following feminist theorists, have broadened conceptions of the economy to include the study of the household economy and time use. The uncritical acceptance of the dominance of the market and, as with some traditions of social welfare policy, seeing ‘welfare’ as a sub social category for attention, is a limitation of welfare economics. This approach is primarily concerned with the economic basis of social policy and, while therefore very important, does not necessarily generate a focus on the full range of social questions, issues and effects. In a climate where economic values and indicators dominate policy debate, we emphasise that every economic and political decision has social implications. The political economy tradition, referred to later, enshrines this assumption.

What is the difference between public policy and social policy?

Some authors use the term ‘public policy’ more broadly than ‘social policy’ and describe current areas of government policy operation. For example, Jennett and Stewart (1990) include defence, conservation, trade, international relations, immigration, economic and social policy. In their categorisation, ‘social policy’ refers only to people who are presently disadvantaged. Others focus on some common elements and processes at a high level of abstraction. For example, according to Davis et al. (1993, p. 15), ‘Public policy is the interaction of values, interests and resources, guided through institutions and mediated by politics.’ Hogwood and Gunn (1991, p.24) claim that ‘for a policy to be regarded as a “public policy” it must to some degree have been generated or at least processed within the framework of government procedures, influences and organisations’. Their definition emphasises the role of government.

As we understand it, the scope of social policy includes all areas of personal and social life which contribute to the well-being of citizens or its absence. As defence, urban policy, transport, economic policy all have personal and social implications, the distinction tends to be arbitrary and related to disciplinary and occupational foci. The value we give to the ‘social’, rather than only the ‘economic’ or the ‘administrative’, leads us to reclaim the term ‘social policy’ and define it broadly

What is the difference between legislation, policy and programs?

The term ‘social policy’ is often used loosely to include laws, regulations and written policy guidelines. Legislation is the most explicit and formalised policy. It is accompanied by written policy, such as the social security manual, regulations which fill out the detail of how the legislation is to operate, or industrial awards, which spell out the intent of the law in more detail. Programs refer to policy implementation or service delivery. So, for example, social policy relevant to persons who are unemployed is broadly described in law, written with details about rates of payment and eligibility rules in the policy documents, and put into practice in programs such as Jobsearch and Newstart.

ANALYSIS: WORKING OUT WHAT IS GOING ON

Research is the catch-all term for trying to understand ‘what is going on’. It takes many forms and occurs under many different labels, as Chapter 7 discusses more fully. The uses and abuses of knowledge are contested terrain, and powerful interests ‘gate-keep’ information, as they do the knowledge- and theory-building institutions. White males are over-represented in the powerful levels of the knowledge-producing industry, as they are among the decision makers. Some social groups have substantially more resources than others to spend on developing or suppressing knowledge. It is no accident that it has been so difficult to fund large-scale research into wealth in this country.

This means that the use of research in policy making will be a matter for social and political contest, negotiation and compromise. Research topics, questions asked and processes employed will be determined by social goals and values, interests and experiences.

Postmodern critiques of grand social narratives and ‘universalising’ theories have challenged the possibility of obtaining an accurate, long-lasting analysis of social truths. It is, however, our view that there are some useful approaches to understanding the ‘social’ which can be counted upon. These are proposed here as guidelines for understanding and participating in social policy.

Taking an historical view of social issues

We argue that an historical analysis of both the social context and the way people respond to issues gives the best understanding. Let us take the issue of unemployment. In 1993 there were 1 million Australians looking for paid employment and unable to get a job. Just 30 years before, in the 1960s, this would have been unthinkable. Governments were under threat of losing an election if the official unemployment rate edged toward 2 per cent and yet by the mid-’90s it was fluctuating between 10 and 12 per cent. What has happened? What can account for such a dramatic shift, and such a change in what Australians will tolerate?

Any answer to these questions should include an analysis of the earlier policies of ‘full employment’ and the ‘family wage’, noting that these referred to paid work for white males and assumed the economic dependence of women, as wives and mothers, and their children. The answer must follow the struggles to regulate labour, the impact of a shift from an agricultural, resource-based economy to a service economy, and the associated casualisation of labour. It could also examine what has occurred for indigenous Australians, for newer immigrants, and in relation to the gendered division of labour, which has proven such an entrenched part of the social fabric.

So analysis, as groundwork for participation in social policy development, rests on understanding the historical and social contexts in which issues are formulated and debated and directions are chosen, and locating oneself within those processes. Chapter 2 explores this in more detail.

From personal to political

Another starting point is that analysis and practice or action must mov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Tables and figure
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Making Social Policy
• Part II Case Studies
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index