School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableTime for Good Care and Job Quality: Managing Stress among Older Workers in the Aged Care Sector(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2023-03-04)Improved job quality will make longer working lives in the aged care sector more sustainable. We interviewed 20 older aged care workers to identify which job characteristics are significant for health and to identify policy remedies. Workers take pleasure and pride in responding autonomously to a care recipient's situation, developing understanding, maintaining morale and performing intimate bodily care with dignity. However, a shortage of staff time requires workers to take a task-oriented approach. This causes worker stress and diminishes their desire and capacity to delay retirement. In the Australian context, regulating minimum staffing is the most suitable policy response.
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ItemWhose responsibility? Reexamining Victorian justice system responses to the children and families of parents in prison(WILEY, 2022-06)Abstract Research into the children and families affected by parental imprisonment has demonstrated a range of well‐being concerns and proposed a comprehensive array of policy and practice responses, but little practical change has been achieved. With a focus on the Victorian justice system, we provide an overview of the literature and the current service provision, investigating why the policy inertia has persisted. Using feminist theory on the ethics and practices of care, we reexamine the findings of two significant Australian studies into the child and family‐centeredness of professionals within the police, courts, prisons and child protection agencies. We demonstrate that, at best, care is fragile and rendered from the margins of roles that are designed to be care‐less in relation to this cohort. At worst, justice system personnel and procedures can be resolutely uncaring. We suggest that reluctance among policymakers to displace attention from “core business” may explain the absence of policies to care for children and families of imprisoned parents, and highlight two further strategies: leadership to protect and extend the fragile care practice within the justice system; and new mandates to care for children and families of imprisoned parents extending from family‐oriented human services outside the justice system.
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ItemCommonwealth place-based policies for addressing geographically concentrated disadvantage: A typology and critical analysis(WILEY, 2022-03)Abstract A suite of ‘place‐based’ Commonwealth policy frameworks to address geographically concentrated socio‐economic disadvantage foreground local knowledge and devolve some decisions to multi‐government and local agent governance bodies. We analyse these policies with reference to Dewey's theory of democratic experimentalism, focussing on how publics are constituted in place and enrolled in processes of deliberation and problematisation, and on how policy success is framed. We categorise ‘place‐based’ policies into three groups. Statutory collaboration policies enable coordinated intergovernmental investment in regional economic regeneration and enact broad publics through a concern with economic growth. Collective impact policies commission for social service integration and figure the users and providers of social services as their publics. Indigenous partnership policies are concerned with ‘self‐reliance’, economic participation, and empowerment among Indigenous people. We find that only the policies in the latter type clearly provide their publics with epistemic or decision‐making power. Further research on the implementation of collective impact policies would be necessary to determine their participatory scope, and statutory collaboration policies provide little opportunity for input from their publics. Our aim is to highlight the democratic significance of who is included in place‐based deliberations and what is deemed to be valuable.