Families, Welfare And Social Policy

28 Pages 6946 Words

e Australia. There are some striking similarities in the issues and debates currently taking place in the English-speaking countries such as Britain, the United States and Australia, and these are reflected in several of the papers.
From America, we have a paper by Lawrence Mead, Professor of Politics at New York University, and a key influence on recent welfare reform debates in all three of these countries. Mead is author of two influential books - Beyond Entitlement and The New Politics of Poverty - which have helped shape both the Clinton and Blair governments' welfare reforms, and he will be visiting Australia in July 2000 when he will be a keynote speaker at the Australian Institute of Family Studies conference in Sydney.
Mead's paper is in turn criticised and evaluated by Frank Field, the British Labour Member of Parliament who has for years been a leading advocate of social security reform in the United Kingdom. Formerly the head of the Child Poverty Action Group, Field has been a leading figure in social policy debates in Britain since the 1970s, and in 1997 Tony Blair made him a junior minister in Britain's new Labour government, responsible for 'thinking the unthinkable' in the area of welfare reform. Perhaps fulfilling his brief too enthusiastically, he fell out of favour in 1998 and is now back on the back benches.
Alan Buckingham, a British sociologist from the University of Sussex, helps put both of these contributions in context for an Australian readership by comparing recent welfare reforms across all three countries.
From within Australia, Noel Pearson, head of the Cape York Land Council, also addresses the question of welfare reform, but he relates it specifically to the situation of Aboriginal communities here in Australia. His paper, which is an edited version of a speech delivered to the Brisbane Institute earlier this year, has generated widespread interest because of its claim that provision of welfare w...