Autonomy and capacity building in active income support policies for Australian single parents
Michelle Brady
Department of Sociology, University of Alberta, Canada
Contact Email:   michelle.bradyualberta.ca

Over the last two decades a focus on capacity building has been central to social policy discourses concerning single parents in Australia. The Personal Adviser (PA) initiative, the Jobs, Education and Training (JET) program, and several new Job Network (JN) programs aim to promote single parents’ capabilities in areas such as employment skills, awareness of support services, abilities to make clear plans, identifying steps needed to fulfil plans and monitoring progress towards personal goals. These are the sorts of capabilities that income support recipients and their advocates would probably accept as valuable and important. In this paper I examine the administrative procedures through which policy makers and service providers have sought to develop these capabilities for single parents and the ways that these procedures have been experienced by single mothers receiving income support.

I argue that the administrative procedures through which the JET and PA programs operated were frequently as constraining for single parents as they were enabling. Although Centrelink claimed that PAs and JET advisers helped clients 'towards actively determining their future' and 'offer[ed]' support and encouragement with 'current and future plans', I argue, through an analysis of policy procedures and interviews with single mothers, that the JET and PA interview procedures were not orientated towards supporting and developing the autonomy of the individual. Instead these procedures were primarily orientated to uncovering and documenting details of clients’ existing characteristics and encouraging compliance with administrative requirements. I also report on interviews with JN providers in Perth concerning new programs they have developed for single parents. I argue that while some JN providers are devising innovative practices for capacity development, many of the elements of these new programs replicate the highly problematic administrative features of the old JET and PA programs.

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