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Children's poverty has long been a central concern for policy makers and policy researchers. The body of extant research conducted and the range of programmatic interventions undertaken by successive governments in this and other countries is extraordinary. Nevertheless, children remain in poverty. Clearly there are many reasons for this, not least of which is the maintenance and intensification of market capitalism with its attendant blatant inequalities. Even so, the moral, political, social and economic imperatives for developing workable responses to children's poverty remain. This paper argues that we, in Australia, should adopt an approach increasingly taken in the UK. Drawing on, among other things, the new sociology of childhood, this approach begins not with the expertise of adult researchers and policy makers, but with that of children. In doing so, the case is made for why children's perceptions and experiences of poverty are key concerns for policy. The paper outlines in theoretical terms why children's voices matter. Invoking the new sociology of childhood and the sociology of identity, a conceptual framework for understanding why policy scholars and makers should carefully attend to the voices of their subjects is sketched - in this case, the subjects are children. Finally, some methodological implications of this for undertaking policy research informed by this approach are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International empirical evidence, including that from Australia, suggests that neoliberal reform has not changed public attitudes towards the social rights of citizenship as much as one might predict. But do these international findings hold true for New Zealand, whose institutions were more rapidly transformed by neoliberal reform than similar countries? Drawing upon public opinion data regarding economic protectionism and the welfare state over the past two decades, this paper argues that while some significant changes have emerged there is no overwhelming evidence of a paradigmatic shift in public attitudes towards social citizenship rights as a result of New Zealand's neoliberal reform. Indeed, New Zealand's experience appears as ambiguous and ambivalent as that of Australia, albeit different policy and historical settings have produced some differences in public attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concern over the reliability of conventional poverty studies has focused attention on the need to demonstrate that those identified as poor are actually experiencing hardship. This paper takes a step in this direction by examining poverty using a living standards approach derived from the literature on deprivation and social exclusion. Deprivation - defined as an enforced lack of socially perceived necessities - has emerged as a way of identifying who is missing out on what the community regards as the necessities (or essentials) of life. Social exclusion - which exists when individuals do not participate in key activities in society - has opened up new areas of inquiry relating to a lack of connectedness between individuals, the communities in which they live, and key economic and social processes. The findings indicate that many Australians face deprivation and exclusion in numerous aspects of their lives, and that those defined as poor in income terms are different from those who are deprived or excluded. The low overlap between the three indicators implies that they all have a role to play in documenting the extent of social disadvantage and helping to identify the factors that contribute to its various manifestations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "wage-earners' welfare state" model has gained wide acceptance as a framework explaining the evolution of Australian and New Zealand social protection. Despite its important contribution to Australasian and comparative policy analysis, however, the model does not adequately highlight the importance of the labour market to social protection. This is because it treats the industrial relations system as largely static. This paper considers debates within both the industrial relations and social policy literatures and analyses the interplay between state welfare and protective labour mechanisms in Australia and New Zealand. Focusing on the period since the early 1980s, the principal argument is that updating and understanding the comparative evolution of the two regimes requires a dynamic and historically nuanced explanation of the nexus between social policy and industrial relations. Viewing social protection in this way reveals more subtle characteristics of contemporary neo-liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia recently enacted welfare-to-work reforms for sole parents, the partially disabled and the long-term unemployed. At the same time, it enacted labour law reforms which dismantled labour law award protections in favour of 'individual bargaining'. This paper argues that the combined effect of these reforms not only brings about closer integration between social security and labour law, but also increases the 'disciplinary' controls over the lives of welfare clients, while also degrading the conditions of the most vulnerable welfare clients, whether they are in work (on reduced employment conditions) or on welfare (on less generous benefits). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of the New Zealand Poverty Measurement Project's analysis of the effects of the 1990s social reforms in New Zealand on the incidence and severity of poverty, and assesses the impact of the social and economic policies introduced by the Iabour-led coalition governments since 1999: New Zealand superannuation, income-related rents on state houses, active labour market policies for an employment-rich economy, the Primary Health Care Strategy and the planned income support policy to reduce child poverty. Superannuation is assessed as both adequate and sustainable, rents for state houses are found to he affordable, and CDP growth and employment have increased incrementally as unemployment and benefit numbers have decreased. The Primary Health Care Strategy is an innovative initiative that will increase affordable access to general practitioners, but it and the proposed child assistance initiatives arc too new to be adequately assessed. Of the challenges that remain, policy priorities should centre on housing alternatives, including home ownership for low-income households not in state houses; income support for poor households, particularly those with children; and multi-sector development of education and training aimed at lifting economic and social capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]