Deborah Brennan

UNSW Sydney | UNSW · Social polic

The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence calls for the reorganization of personal relationships, communities, economies, and institutions around the principle of care. Arguing that carelessness is endemic to modern societies, the authors offer numerous practical ideas for action and policy to counter this lack of care. The Manifesto has...

This chapter explores the contrasting and sometimes conflicting rationales that have been used over the past century to support the provision of different types of early childhood education and care (ECEC). It illustrates the shifting and historically contingent ideals of motherhood embedded in policies, practices and subsidy arrangements. ECEC is...

This article examines the use of migration law and policy to address the labour needs of the care sector in two jurisdictions. New Zealand uses an Essential Skills visa to allow the direct entry of care workers on a temporary basis while Australia relies on a range of overseas born entrants including international students and working holiday maker...

The authors show that care migration is increasingly being promoted to meet predicted labor shortages in aged care and child care in Australia. Under current migration policy settings, it is virtually impossible for low-skilled workers to enter Australia in their own right. This chapter examines current debates about care migration in Australia, dr...

Migrants are important both as providers and users of paid care services in Australia, yet migration has rarely featured in Australian strategies to grow and sustain the paid care workforce. Correspondingly, Australia is rarely mentioned in the international scholarship on care and migration that has burgeoned since the 1990s. This article shows th...

Research on early childhood education and care (ECEC) policy focuses overwhelmingly on formal, centre-based provision and, to a lesser extent, on family day care (or childminding) provided in the homes of registered carers. Comparatively little research addresses the policy treatment of care provided in the child's home by nannies and au pairs. Thi...

The rise of the adult worker family norm across countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has created challenges for reconciling work and family life as the unpaid work of the female caregiver can no longer be assumed. The article compares childcare arrangements and maternity/parental leave programmes in Sweden, Austra...

Grandparents who have primary responsibility for raising their grandchildren are increasingly on research and social policy agendas in Australia and elsewhere. Little is known, however, about the diversity in circumstances and experiences among grandparents in these caring relationships, and assumptions about the homogeneity of grandparents are oft...

Examines the shift in Australia from a non-profit childcare sector to one that is heavily marketised. It considers the impact of this shift on the broader social purposes of childcare and the tensions between official claims of social investment versus the reality of system that is driven by private investment and profit. It looks at the nature of...

Introduction The care and education of young children has been subject to ‘a surge of policy attention’ since the 1990s (OECD, 2006). According to some policy experts, high quality education and care services are ‘the centrepiece of progressive institution-building in the early 21st century’ (Pearce and Paxton, 2005: xxi). Early childhood education...

At a time when neoliberal and conservative politics are again in the ascendency and social democracy is waning, Australian public policy re-engages with the values and goals of progressive public policy in Australia and the difficulties faced in re-affirming them. It brings together leading authors to explore economic, environmental, social, cultur...

This chapter examines the extent to which disadvantaged children are able to access high quality early childhood education and care in Australia. It describes current national initiatives include an aspiration to provide all children with high quality preschool, staffed by trained teachers, in the year before school entry, and efforts to improve qu...

Introduction Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is a high-profile political issue in Australia. In 2008, Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd promised ‘a world-class system of integrated early childhood learning and childcare’ designed to ‘boost national productivity, lift labour force participation, contribute to social inclusion and be the firs...

Providing early education and care (ECEC) which is both equitable and high quality is a challenge all governments are confronting. This comparative volume seeks both to broaden and to deepen our understanding of policies in operation in different countries. It asks how successfully policies in eight different countries ensure that all children, inc...

Grandparent kinship care is a growing policy concern in Australia. Availability of appropriate, timely, and up-to-date information on payments and allowances, support services, and children's needs, is an important factor in determining whether grandparent carers, and the children in their care, receive the support they need. While it is known that...

In recent decades, many OECD countries have adopted the notion of 'social investment' to reframe traditional approaches to social welfare. Social investment strategies and policies focus on employment rather than welfare and promote public expenditure on skills and education throughout the life course, starting with early childhood education and ca...

How does federal state architecture affect the design of welfare? We explore the development of childcare and parental leave in Canada and Australia to address this question. Both countries are considered liberal welfare regimes, but their federal institutions operate in quite different ways, providing an opportunity for comparative analysis. We co...

The use of markets and market mechanisms to deliver care services is growing in both liberal and social democratic welfare states. This article examines debates and policies concerning the marketisation of eldercare and childcare in Sweden, England and Australia. It shows how market discourses and practices intersect with, reinforce or challenge tr...

This article is about the transnational movement of policy discourses on childcare. It considers whether the spread of neoliberal ideas with their emphasis on marketisation, on the one hand, and a social investment discourse on the other, are leading to convergence in childcare arrangements in Nordic countries (Finland and Sweden) and liberal Anglo...

The marketisation of early childhood education and care (ECEC) offers opportunities to test assumptions about the benefits of a market framework. In Australia, where marketisation included reshaping, extending, and increasing government subsidies, one major listed company (ABC Learning Limited) emerged to dominate child care. Child care prices incr...

Rianne Mahon holds the CIGI chair in comparative family and social policy at the Balsillie School of International Affairs at Wilfred Laurier University, Waterloo: rmahon@balsillieschool.ca

The absence of a national system of paid maternity or parental leave in Australia caused puzzlement, particularly because this country, regarded as a ‘social laboratory’ and known for its progressive social and industrial legislation, does not provide entitlement to working parents. Even if a minimalist scheme of paid leave is introduced in the nex...

Maternity leave: none. Paternity leave: none. Parental leave: 52 weeks per family with no payment; the mother may start to use this leave up to 6 weeks before the birth and 6 weeks can only be taken by mothers. Leave to care for sick children: 10 days per person per year at 100% of earnings + 2 days with no payment for each ‘permissible occasion’....

As a trickle of books on women and politics began to emerge in the 1970s, Australian labour historian and student of politics Baiba Irving predicted that academic work on these topics was likely to burgeon. But to what end? Irving was concerned that ‘Lady Political Scientists’ (an allusion to a critique of ‘Lady Novelists’ by George Eliot) would en...

Work/family reconciliation policies can be harnessed to diverse political agendas, ranging from feminist-inspired equality strategies to coercive, neo-liberal programs. In Australia, such policies have served a range of ends under different governments. This article focuses on developments since 1996 when the conservative coalition parties led by J...

The care and education of children below school age is an area of intense public debate and the subject of considerable policy innovation in Western democracies. Child care raises complex philosophical and policy issues ranging from broad questions about the relative responsibilities of state, market and family to technical aspects of policy design...

It is more than 50 years since the International Labour Organisation recommended paid maternity leave for working women, yet Australia still lacks such legislation. This paper provides a context for the current debate about paid maternity leave in Australia. We argue that a discernible shift in locating the responsibility for paid maternity leave f...

The public hearings conducted by the Senate Inquiry into Child Care Funding earlier this year provided a window onto the concerns of child care service providers and users. As both a participant and an observer at the Sydney hearings I listened to detailed reports of the crisis facing this sector. The reports came from a range of sources: parents,...

This book, now in a revised edition, is a political history of child care in Australia from the 1890s to the 1990s. Once provided by philanthropic groups and available only to those deemed underprivileged, child care has now become part of the mainstream political agenda. Deborah Brennan provides an in-depth analysis of policy developments in this...

The definition of systems abuse used in this report is "harm done to children in the context of policies or programs that are designed to provide care or protection". This definition was used to highlight abuse that occurs within the legal, education, child care, health and welfare systems (including residential and foster care). The aim of the rep...

The Parliament of New South Wales, specifically the Legislative Assembly, is sometimes referred to as Australia's "Mother Parliament", in recognition of its status as the country's oldest legislature. It is also known by the less gentle sobriquet, "the bear pit", due to the rough tactics, no-holds-barred style of debate and occasional outbreak of f...

Work/family reconciliation policies can be harnessed to diverse political agendas, ranging from feminist-inspired equality strategies to coercive, neo-liberal programs. In Australia, such policies have served a range of ends under different governments. This article focuses on developments since 1996 when the conservative coalition parties led by J...