Australian social policy conference 2003.

• Author: Martin, Peter

The 8th Australian Social Policy Conference was held in July 2003 at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. (1) The three-day conference, sponsored and run by the National Social Policy Research Centre (SPRC) based at the University's campus, has become a key biennial event on the Australian social policy calendar, with 600 attendees and over 250 abstracts submitted. Inter-sectoral commitment and interest was evident from the list of sponsors, including the Commonwealth and New South Wales Departments of Family and Community Services, The Australian Bureau of Statistics, Mission Australia and The Smith Family.

The over-arching conference theme for 2003 was the concept of social inclusion, and this was reflected in discussion about the ways in which social structures and policies work to exclude certain cohorts and groups from full social and economic participation. Other speakers presented views on the most effective ways of fostering and maintaining inclusion for people whose ability to access life opportunities is limited because of factors such as discrimination, poverty, old age, youth, disability and geographic or social isolation.

EMERGENT THEMES

Social Capital Development

We found that a strong theme running through the conference was the concept of social capital development.

Numerous papers demonstrated that the ways that groups and individuals in Australia are excluded from "getting ahead" are diverse, multi-layered and often chronic. The geography of exclusion is both physical and human; the effects of the two often combine to create situations whereby disadvantaged people get locked into resource-poor environments from generation to generation.

Speakers explored strategies to foster inclusion, looking to find ways to strengthen individuals and communities to the point where they could create improvements in social outcomes themselves with ongoing benefits to their own community. Many of the solutions that were presented combined two strategies: building up the resources of a community through specific intensive help strategies around education, and providing access to resources that acted as a "circuit breaker" to the cycle of disadvantage. Successful interventions were often supported by strengthening or linking up a range of social services appropriate to the needs of the community. Case studies ranged from community renewal schemes in poor inner city neighbourhoods through to financial management education and banking services for isolated indigenous communities in Northern Queensland.

The most inspiring aspect of the social capital studies was that they were very diverse, but had common threads. For example, the common starting point for the disadvantage circuit breaker is finding some asset or decision-making component of which the whole community could take ownership. Also encouraging was how willingly national and state government agencies allied themselves or backed non-government organisations...