Mm Walter

How White is Social Work in Australia

Abstract How White is social work in Australia? This paper analyses this question, focusing on social work practice and education. In asking the question, the aim is to open space for debate about how the social work profession in Australia should progress practice with Indigenous people and issues. The paper combines Bourdieus concept of the habitus with “Whiteness” theory to argue that the profession is socially, economically, culturally, and geographically separated from Indigenous people and that the consequences for how social workers engage with their Indigenous clients have yet to be fully explored. Decentring Whiteness requires recognition of epistemological and ontological assumptions so deeply embedded that they are invisible to those who carry them. This invisibility permits White privilege to exist unacknowledged and unchallenged within societal formations. In shifting the focus away from the “Other” to the “non Other”, an examination of Whiteness asks social workers to examine their own racial location and the role of White privilege in their lives. It requires us to go beyond intellectual commitments to antiracism and antioppression, and to make racial issues personal as well as political.

Working their way out of poverty? Sole motherhood, work, welfare and material well-being

Over the last 20 years, Australian social policy has increasingly focused on raising the labour market participation level of sole parents. The extension of mutual obligation to sole parents under welfare reform further concentrates this policy direction. Yet while increased workforce activity may reduce ‘welfare dependency’, the efficacy of employment to raise the level of material well-being in sole parent families is less clear. Recent research casts doubt on the assumed link between material well-being and paid work for sole mother households. This article uses data from the 1996/97 Negotiating the Lifecourse Project and three measures of material well-being to examine the relative importance of employment and partnered status to material well-being among sole and married mother households. The results indicate that increased market work may not lead to significantly higher rates of material well-being for sole mother families.

Burying Indigeneity: The Spatial Construction of Reality and Aboriginal Australia

In this article we argue that spatial distance and historic socio-ethnic boundaries play a critical role in determining the relative priority given to groups that are marginally placed. These priorities are materialized through law. We utilize theories that understand ‘reality’ as something socially constructed: our impressions of the structure of everyday life are mediated in large part by our primary social group interactions. We profile the spatial distribution and relative segregation of Indigenous Australians, from urban to remote regional contexts. Our data highlights how even a predominantly urban Indigenous population remains out of the sight and mind of social and political actors due to its small numerical size and perceived social difference. We move to explain public policy formulation in terms of orientations that are influenced by the spatiality of social affiliations. We suggest that the spatially-bounded patterning of black and white lives supports the continued burial of Indigenous life. The socio-spatial construction of Indigenous life for white and other Australians has enabled both aggressive and neglectful policy instruments in which Aboriginal life appears as something that is politically, legally and spatially marginal.

Teaching race to teach Indigeneity

Australia is a relatively new nation state built on colonisation and settler migration. These origins situate Australia’s First Peoples and Indigenous/settler and nation-state relationships as central aspects of contemporary Australian society. It would seem logical to conclude that Australian sociology curricula would include a substantial range of units and courses with Indigenous themes and content. Yet, this is not the case. Indigenous sociology is largely absent from the sociology curriculum within tertiary education. In this article we argue that the lack of the Indigenous is not an oversight but can be linked to a normalisation of a more general disengagement of the discipline with the key social force of race. Apart from consistent description of Indigenous disadvantage, Indigenous and race issues are presumed to sit outside the realm of mainstream Australian sociology. We use Whiteness and Critical Race theories to explain how this curriculum absence can be seen as a particular Australian praxis of Whiteness and colour-blind racism. Our own experiences as Aboriginal sociologists in mainstream sociology departments provide the empirical base to show how Whiteness, and its privileging practices, pervades the Australian sociology curricula. Our argument extends to addressing the pedagogic challenges faced by lecturers presenting Indigenous content to a largely Euro-Australian student body.

Market Forces and Indigenous Resistance Paradigms

The pervasive force in the relationship between the nation-state and Australian Indigenous peoples during the 1990s and 2000s was, and is, neoliberalism. Free market ideals became the dominant political philosophy and Indigenous people were coerced into a political ‘experimental’ cutting of a neoliberal template into the fabric of Indigenous life. The pairing of market ideology with concerted efforts to de-power Indigenous groups and people align, at least thematically, the Indigenous experience of neoliberalism with that of a social movement. This article details the entwined story of explicit Indigenous resistance and activism and the how and what of the infiltration of market forces into Aboriginal territory. Empirically, it demonstrates the neoliberal infrastructure and ideological rationale for the explicit undermining of Indigenous rights and presence within Australian society and the Indigenous parameters of resistance that emerged to confront and defy the re-confining and redefining pressures of neoliberalism: an Indigenous resistance paradigm. Theoretically, these facets are analysed through the frame of the ‘domain of Aboriginality’ to articulate the broader contours of the reach of neoliberalism into Indigenous lives and the resistance to the developing hegemony.

The implications of child support for housing after relationship dissolution

Abstract In this article we investigate the associations between the payment and receipt of child support and housing circumstances of both resident and non-resident parents. We do so by analysing data from Wave 4 of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey. The final analytic sample comprised 1,043 separated parents (637 resident parents, 406 non-resident parents). Our findings indicate that for resident parents the receipt of child support payments above

Doing Indigenous Family

75 per week was significantly associated with better housing circumstances. By contrast, the payment of child support was not significantly related to housing outcomes for non-resident parents. Overall, our results suggest that resident parents in receipt of child support, particularly above the median amount, live with their children in better housing circumstances than resident parents receiving little or no child support. While this finding makes intuitive sense – money matters – the way in which child support appears to be differentially related to the housing circumstances of resident and non-resident parents warrants further investigation.

Beyond the margins/beyond marginality

Even the limited Australian literature concludes that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples do not “do” family within normalised Euro-Australian parameters. There are subtle but important culturally informed differences in family structures, arrangements, practices and values. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families are more likely to be sole parent households, though they also often include another significant adult. Parents also hold specific views on what the most important values for their children to learn at home are. This chapter uses data from LSIC Waves 1–6 to map how factors of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander family life manifest in the lives of the children of the LSIC households.

Education for Family Life in Australia

This special issue marks a moment in the history of Australian sociology: the first time that this journal has devoted an entire issue to Indigenous issues. It was, and is, the aim of the guest editors to bring sociology, as a discipline, from the margins and into the forefront of debate and scholarship around Indigenous social issues and to encourage sociologists to contribute to reducing the marginality of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia.1 As we write this editorial in June 2006, Aboriginal issues are again frontpage news: the tragedy of young lives traumatized by chronic sexual abuse, high levels of violence against women, communities held hostage to gang warfare, petrol sniffing and alcohol abuse are all there (again) in all their lurid detail. Uncomfortable but crucial questions are also being asked of state and federal governments, the nation and Indigenous people. At this moment then, Aboriginal Australia has infiltrated the Indigenous-free zone that is inhabited by most Australians and, dare we say it, by most sociologists. But already the shock of the exposure to the reality of life for many Aboriginal people is giving way to restricted, simplistic discourses about Indigenous culture, or law and order, accompanied by political demands for the end of self-determination and a return to ‘a new paternalism’. The exclusive focus of media and political attention on remote Indigenous communities disregards the endemic poverty, ill-health and restricted life chances that are also the lived experience of the nearly three-quarters of our Indigenous population who live in regional and urban Australia.

Introducing the longitudinal study of Indigenous children

Family life education is neither a formal discipline nor a formally recognized vocation in Australia. Rather, it comprises a loose amalgam of programs, services, and policies - with little reliable evaluation data to guide its activities. Education for family life in Australia has a complex disjointed story, characterized by a marked decline in couple relationship education, on the one hand, and an expansion of parenting education on the other. Our central argument is that supporting and enriching couple relationships is critical to successful parenting. Yet Australian policy - possibly reflecting broader cultural and attitudinal barriers—appears to neglect this important nexus.