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This paper examines the changes in the terms of citizen-state relations that are coded in Australia's current program of welfare reform. It argues that welfare reform entails a shift from welfare as a limited social right of citizenship to welfare as a form of support conditional upon completing specified obligations, and from the provision of support as a cash payment to support coupling cash with personal services. Together, these shifts have the scope transform the relation between citizen and state fundamentally. This is no less than a shift from social policy citizenship in which claimants are presumed to act on their own behalf to paternalistic support and care directed to reforming character and values as well as to meeting need. The paper argues that this shift violates the fundamental equality essential to social policy citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent developments in the environment surrounding the nonprofit human services sector in Australia have been viewed with some concern, especially given the role of the sector within the Australian welfare state. This paper reviews these developments, noting that some are less visible than others, and that the process of change is more widespread than often perceived. By explicitly employing a theoretical framework derived from organisational theory the paper argues that the contemporary experience of the sector, characterised as the existing institutional order of the field, is set to undergo substantial revision as it is incorporated within an emerging new institutional order of the market and the state as market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health policy was an integral component of the post-war welfare state, which represented a nationally based class compromise providing concessions in the form of income support and service provision outside the ambit of the market. In Australia, development of a universal health system was delayed until the introduction of Medibank, and subsequently Medicare. Since its inception, Medicare has been subjected to retrenchment pressures that have dominated welfare state developments since the mid 1970s. This paper traces developments in the Australian health system, revealing that the major trends, privatisation and the transfer of responsibility from the collective to the private sphere, represent a movement towards a more residual system that threatens the Medicare goal of equitable access to quality medical treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on various social themes dealt by the "Australian Journal of Social Issues." The journal's writers have not necessarily understood each paper as situated within a tradition of concerns about issues that are inescapably part of democratic social policy, concerns about professional authority, academic representation and the encouragement or inhibition of various kinds of individual and collective agency. One of the earliest themes identified in the journal was professional representation. That is, there is much comment on the process by which social phenomena become social issues and thus enter the domains of academic commentary and of the human services professions. In a variety of ways, the journal's writers have considered how social policy could or should be an expression of the values of Australians. A third theme called citizens and social capital, the relationship between state and civil society agencies, and how they interact to construct the agency of individuals and communities.

Church related agencies are major providers of community services in Australia (Lyons, 2001:34-35). While the history of church related welfare service provision is not well known in Australia it is asserted that many have a long tradition of outreach and service provision to marginalised groups regardless of the government social policy of the day (ACSWC, 2000; Mendes, 2003). This paper examines the current environment of human services restructuring and the impact of the shift to contractualism on one church related provider: Catholic social welfare provision in Australia. It explores the significance of the church's social teachings and history on concerns that service innovation, diversity and advocacy are currently under threat. Finally it calls for greater appreciation of the distinctive contribution of church related agencies and what they have to offer in service delivery and as contributors to the social policy discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]