Myra Hamilton

The ‘new social contract’ and the individualisation of risk in policy

Over the last three decades in Australia and Britain, there has been a transformation in the character of the post-Second World War welfare state away from shared responsibility for managing social risks through collective pooling mechanisms towards more individualised responsibility for managing lifecourse risks such as unemployment, parenthood and disability. In liberal welfare states like Australia and Britain, one result has been a range of activation or ‘workfare’ policies. While there has been much discussion about the reasons for these policies and the outcomes for citizens, there is very little exploration of the process by which risks have been individualised through government activation policies. The principle of individual responsibility is politically difficult to sell to citizens and yet how it has been packaged in policy terms has been neglected in the literature. This paper aims to explore the political rationale for the individualisation of risk in the process of contemporary welfare reform by examining government policy documents in Australia and Britain over the last 30 years – the period in which contemporary welfare reform and its emphasis on activation policies emerged. In both countries, I will argue that it is ideas about contractual reciprocity that have been mobilised to legitimise the principle that individuals should manage the risks associated with the lifecourse.

Conceptualisation of social and emotional wellbeing for children and young people, and policy implications

This report asks what is meant by social and emotional wellbeing for children and young people and identifies possible national indicators based on these constructs. Why is there so little nationally and internationally comparable data on the social and emotional wellbeing of children and young people? How can Australia begin to benchmark the wellbeing of its own children and young people without such basic information? With the support of the Fred P. Archer Trust, which is managed by the Trust Company, and in partnership with the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) and UNICEF Australia, ARACY commissioned two research papers to address what is meant by social and emotional wellbeing for children (those aged 0–12 years) and young people (those aged 13-25 years) and to identify possible key national measures / indicators based on these constructs. This work also considers the policy and practice implications of analysing and reporting on such data. The Social Policy Research Centre (UNSW) was selected to undertake this research and chose to combine the two parts of this project into this extensive research report. In mid-June AIHW and ARACY jointly hosted a workshop in Canberra. This workshop was one of a series of data development forums that AIHW has been conducting as part of its Headline Indicators for children’s health, development and wellbeing project. As a follow-up to the June workshop, ARACY hosted a 90 minute roundtable discussion on the issues concerning social and emotional wellbeing indicators for children and young people at the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) Conference in Melbourne, on 9th July. The workshop also provided an opportunity to reflect on progress made on developing our understanding of this complex topic since a roundtable held at the International Society for Child Indicators (ISCI) Conference in November 2009.

Capturing the centrality of age and life-course stage in the provision of unpaid care

The purpose of this article is to construct a new theoretical framework of care-giving that places age, and the life-course stage of carers, at the centre of conceptual understanding and analysis. Although care theory is heavily gendered, it pays far less attention to age differences among the diverse participants in care-giving. This article argues that the age and life-course stage of carers is central to differential pathways into care-giving, experiences of care-giving, and effects of care-giving in the present and future. To support this, the article draws on qualitative data from a study on the circumstances and experiences of Australian children and young people who provide care for family members with disability or chronic illness. Claiming that theories of care are incomplete if age differences, intersecting with gender and other socio-demographic differences, are not treated as central to the conceptualization, the article outlines a framework for an age-sensitive theory of care-giving.

Introduction: Young People and Social Policy in Europe

Young people in contemporary Europe face not only a heightened sense of risk (Beck, 1992; Furlong and Cartmel, 2007; Taylor-Gooby, 2004), but also the looming prospect of becoming ‘the first generation to do worse than their parents’. The challenges facing young people as they navigate transitions to adulthood are therefore unprecedented in European societies. Their experiences of risks, such as labour market insecurity and social exclusion across a range of domains, have become increasingly relevant in the media and in policy debates. Since 2008, the economic crisis has intensified the risks experienced by young people in Europe and created new forms of insecurity and exclusion. The austerity measures implemented in several European countries, such as labour market reforms aimed at promoting flexible labour markets (Jessoula et al., 2010; Madsen et al., 2013) and cuts in state support for students in higher education (Callender, 2012), have contributed to this insecurity. Recent studies have shown that young people are a group that is feeling the effects of the crisis and associated austerity measures most strongly (Busch et al., 2013; Dietrich, 2013; McKee, 2012; Theodoropoulou and Watt, 2011). There is therefore a compelling need for reflection upon the efficacy of social policies for young people in times of crisis and the assumptions that underpin them, and for identifying policies that can mitigate, and indeed reverse, the effects of these new risks.

Youth Transitions, Precarity and Inequality and the Future of Social Policy in Europe

The chapters in this book present research conducted during the current European economic crisis and offer a timely contribution to the analysis of the conditions facing young people in Europe. The emerging risks have to be understood, as we argued in Chapter 1, not only as an effect of the economic crisis but also as a consequence of longer-term patterns in youth transitions. Furthermore, as we pointed out in Chapter 1, a consensus is emerging on the detrimental combined effects of the economic crisis and of European austerity on youth transitions. For the most part, analyses of the effects of risk on young people’s lives in this new policy environment have been confined to youth studies, and social policy theory has important insights to offer to this debate. Drawing on new research by social policy scholars, this book shed light on the nature of inequality affecting young people and the relevance of welfare structures in mitigating contemporary risks. In particular, this book has offered both a major contribution to understanding risk and precarity facing young people in the crisis (in the contributions of Part I) and to analysing social policies and welfare mixes (in the contributions of Part II). Making sense of contemporary youth transitions requires efforts to describe both the evolution of individual experiences and an explanation of how these experiences are shaped by structural factors.

Constructing a Theory of Youth and Social Policy

This chapter develops a framework for understanding the experiences and policy needs of young people. At present, in spite of a greater focus on young people in social and public policy, there is no coherent conceptual approach to understanding youth and social policy. Contemporary analysis of the risks facing young people has been dominated by the sociology of youth, but the tools and concepts of welfare theory — central to how we can understand and address young people’s needs — have not been employed in any systematic way in this field. This chapter aims to fill this gap by discussing the interaction between the sociology of youth and social policy theory.

Recognising Unpaid Care in Private Pension Schemes

Parents and carers often have interrupted workforce histories, causing gaps in their pension contributions and hence significantly lower retirement incomes. In some countries, to ameliorate these inequalities, carer credits have been introduced to maintain public pension contributions during periods of workforce absence. But improvements to credits in public schemes have taken place alongside a shift to private pensions that widens inequalities for carers. Introducing carer credits to private pensions is one method of addressing these inequalities. A search for examples of credits to private schemes in OECD countries revealed that, at present, they are rare and limited. This article sets out the design features and principles that should underpin carer credits to private pensions.