| Social inclusion is the social policy guideline introduced by the then Labor Premier Mike Rann from Prime Minister Tony Blair in the United Kingdom,and implemented in South Australia(SA)from 2002 to 2011.From 2007 to 2013,the Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and his successor,Julia Gillard,adopted social inclusion as their national social policy guideline.In 2013,however,when the party leader of the Liberals,Tony Abbott replaced Gillard as the new Prime Minister and formed government,social inclusion was immediately abolished,its institutions disbanded,and documents and websites swept into archives.This thesis studies the rise and fall of social inclusion as a policy guideline enforced in Australia from 2002 to 2013.In a word,this thesis explores reasons for its adoption and abolition in South Australia and in the federal government,and offers a brief evaluation of social inclusion as a policy guideline in Australia.This thesis firstly presents reasons for the SA Labor government and the federal Labor government to adopt social inclusion,and analyses the context and content of Social Inclusion Initiative and the Social Inclusion Agenda,two social inclusion guidelines published and implemented by the Labor governments in South Australia and federally.This thesis finds that these two social inclusion guidelines are much the same in.their core approaches,whichare ’theory of change’ and ’joined-up government’.However,social inclusion policy programs in South Australia were generally praised for having reached their set goals,while in the federal government,social inclusion was never able to win the same credit,and was finally abolished for lacking satisfactory outcomes.This thesis identifies two reasons for the fall of social inclusion in Australia.Firstly,impact of the 2008 global financial crisis on Australia did not only cause tightening of government spending on promises of solving social issues made when it was newly elected,but also changed economic and social situation dramatically.Social inclusion was applied in a different setting and dealing with changed social situation after the global financial crisis.Therefore,execution of existent social inclusion policy programs was disrupted,and were not as effective as had expected.Secondly,the Australian version of social inclusion is ’weak’ in some aspects.Its core approach,’joined-up government’,was not effectively implement.Meanwhile,It focused too much on single goals such as employment and education to help the disadvantaged,but did little to diminish,but rather to say to create,gaps between the disadvantaged and the mainstream society.This thesis concludes that social inclusion was chosen by the SA Labor Party to tackle economic and societal issues,and its implementation helped relieve social issues in South Australia then.However,because of both its inherent features and changing economic and societal situation in Australia,it was not effectively enforced in the federal government and was finally abolished.Theory and policy practice of social inclusion contributed to Australia’s social policy development in that it provides a new perspective to look at and help the disadvantaged in Australia. |
