Every so often Australia gets a chance to remake the policy foundations that shape the life of its citizens. Today a new policy framework is under construction: social inclusion. It ought to be the basis for a new integration of economic with social prosperity.
The Federal Government is still forming its approach to social inclusion. Sometimes it seems minimalist. The 2020 Summit papers, for example, add social inclusion to the usual fare on strengthening communities and families.
This might indicate an agenda little more than the place-based neighbourhood scale initiatives we have been familiar with for over a decade from State Governments. While these have value, they will not shift the structure of disadvantage unless they are integrated with economic policies and a renewal of mainstream social services.
That social inclusion could represent just such a radical overhaul of our social and economic policy was the message delivered by Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard at the Australian Council Of Social Service conference last Thursday. Here we see a wide-ranging social inclusion agenda. The vision is to reverse the inequality which has coexisted with prosperity. It includes the spatial dimension of disadvantage but extends to include a number of key areas across the life cycle, including the early years and school to work.
For the first time in decades, equality is said to be a friend of efficiency. Moreover, social inclusion is not to be an activity of some marginal departments focused on 'the excluded', but rather a whole of government exercise driven by a cabinet committee co-chaired by the Prime Minister and his Deputy.
Member countries of the European Union including the United Kingdom have had a social inclusion framework for nearly a decade. Drawing on that experience, Kate Green, the Director of the UK's Child Poverty Action Group, encouraged a recent Brotherhood of St Laurence seminar to think big and make the most of this reform opportunity. Challenge the government from the outset, she said, to benchmark our social policy performance against the world's best practice and settle for nothing less.
How should we proceed? First the big difference about social inclusion down under is the way that it is being embedded in economic policy from the beginning. Unlike the EU, where social inclusion has come to be treated as something of a residual of good economic policy, Australia's National Reform Agenda has recognised from its beginning in 2006 that excessive social disadvantage is not