Our projects
Sustainable Care: connecting people and systems
Professor Gabrielle Meagher and Dr Matt Withers are international partners of the major research program ‘Sustainable care: connecting people and systems’, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom. The program is led by Professor Sue Yeandle and based at the University of Sheffield. The program’s overarching objective is to advance understanding of sources of economic and social sustainability in care, especially how wellbeing outcomes can be achieved for care users, their families and carers and paid care workers. Gabrielle is engaging with colleagues on questions related to marketisation in care systems, and creating sustainable jobs in paid care work. Matt is actively involved in organising the program’s early career researcher network and his research on the care constraints of transnationally separated migrant families contributes to the program’s ‘Care In and Out of Place’ work package.
East Asia's clean energy shift: enablers, obstacles, outcomes and lessons
Dr Sung-Young Kim is as a one of four Chief Investigators for this ARC Discovery Project along with A/Prof Elizabeth Thurbon (UNSW), A/Prof Hao Tan (UON) and Emeritus Prof John A. Mathews (FBE, MQU). This project aims to reveal the drivers of the transition to a low carbon economy, and the key enablers and obstacles to this transition. It will investigate how states in our region are seeking to overcome these obstacles, and the effectiveness of their efforts. The project will develop and analyse four new longitudinal case studies of clean energy industry creation in two of Australia's top Asian trading partners. Findings will advance scholarly and policy debates and strategies about the role of the state in high-tech industry creation and clean energy transitions, and benefit Australian exporters seeking new market openings.
Basic Income and Social Freedom
Professor Nicholas Smith’s project aims to assess a radical, currently much debated, proposal for social reform: provision of an Unconditional Basic Income. The project will challenge the conception of justice typically presupposed in debates around UBI, and will replace it with another one based on the idea of a ‘fabric’ of justice. The significance of the project lies in the insights to be gained from this new conceptualization.
Decent Care for Decent Work: Policy Implications for Australia’s Pacific Labour Scheme
Dr Matt Withers’s current research project, Decent Care for Decent Work, explores how migrant workers participating in Australia’s Pacific Labour Scheme (PLS) manage familial responsibilities and relationships during periods of separation. The PLS offers three-year temporary work visas to individual workers from a number of Pacific Island Countries (PICs), but does not allow for family accompaniment, entailing a transnational renegotiation of the work and care activities of migrant households. Using a combination of time-use surveys and in-depth interviews, the research aims to understand how care responsibilities change during migration – e.g. who takes on the care work previously performed by the migrant worker? – and how family relationships are managed from a distance. It hopes to shed light on the challenges, tensions and potential solutions arising from family separation in order to better understand the care needs of migrant households and PIC communities more broadly. Findings will inform ‘bottom-up’ social and development policy principles that support decent work and decent care outcomes for PICs, with the intention of extending the International Labour Organisation’s ‘decent work agenda’ by foregrounding the importance of recognising and redistributing unpaid care work.
Refugee employment with a local lens: Political opportunity structures and organisational dynamics in three local government areas in New South Wales
Dr Adele Garnier’s project is assessing how local government and settlement services providers are assisting refugee employment in three sites in New South Wales: the urban Councils of Ryde and Fairfield and the regional Council of Wagga Wagga. The project extends research Dr Garnier has already conducted in Canada and Belgium. Refugees face numerous barriers in the labour market, and while the role of individual factors such as gender and language skills have been well studied, the impact of local government and support services remains poorly understood. The project will deliver new qualitative insights into labour market inequalities, as well as opportunities and obstacles in addressing these inequalities through public policy at the local level.
The liberalization of professions in Europe, 2005-2020
Dr Francesco Stolfi, along with Dr Nicole Lindstrom (University of York) and Dr Catherine Moury (Universidade Nova, Lisbon), is leading this multi-country study. The research project aims at explaining the similarities and differences in the liberalization of professions across countries, occupations and industries. It is argued that the differential outcomes of liberalization are linked to the power differences and mobilization strategies of domestic actors operating under different opportunity structures. To test this argument, the project brings together experts from a variety of Member States of the European Union. In this way, the project will enable us to understand the politics behind service liberalization in Europe, and will provide fertile ground for dialogue with researchers asking similar questions in other settings. Given its broad scope and relevance, the project’s findings will be of interest to a large spectrum of scholars, from country experts to those interested in Europeanization, interest groups, compliance and the impact of partisanship on policy-making.
The Liberalization of pharmacies in Cyprus and Greece, 2001-2020
Dr Francesco Stolfi, along with Dr Gregoris Ioannou (University of Glasgow) and Dr Stella Ladi (Queen Mary University), have started a project that studies the conflict over the liberalization of pharmacies in Cyprus and Greece by applying to it the conceptual tools developed by the public policy literature on interest groups. The power of interest groups derives from their control of technical and political resources that they can use to gain access to policymakers and policy influence. In turn, the distribution of these resources across interest groups is at least partly defined by the institutional context of policymaking. Francesco’s previous work on Greece focused on the power differences across interest groups operating within a single institutional context of policymaking. Building on that work, the present project compares the liberalization of a single profession, pharmacists, across two countries. This will allow assessment of how institutional differences affect the power of professional actors and thus their influence on reform outcomes.
Professional liberalization and regime alternation in Thailand, 2005-2020
Dr Francesco Stolfi and Dr Boonwara Sumano (Thailand Development Research Institute) have started a new project. Between 2001 and 2014 Thailand experienced several dramatic government transitions. In 2001 the government of Thaksin Shinawatra was the first ever to be elected based on a broad electoral mandate; Thaksin was re-elected in 2005, only to be deposed and banned from politics in a military coup in 2006; following a year of military dictatorship, parties that in effect represented Thaksin won the 2007 and 2011 elections, until a new coup in 2014 restored the traditional power of the military, the monarchy and the Bangkok elites. The Thaksin government came well short of democratic norms in a number of areas, including the respect of human rights (Ferrara 2015). However, it and its successors in 2007 and 2011 did represent an epochal change from the uninterrupted run of military dictatorships and military- and monarchy-dominated governments of modern Thailand. What difference did it make for Thai citizens? In other words, did the changes in the macro political context, from limited to electoral democracy and back, affect policy-making? Francesco and Boonwara address this question by assessing whether and how changes in the macro context in which policy choices are made, namely the alternation between democratically-elected and military governments, has affected the ability of actors from professions such as engineers, lawyers and medical doctors and of the users of their services to access policy makers and influence the rules governing their professions. This research contributes to the study of the politics of regulation and to the literature on market-oriented reforms, liberalization and privatization, in developing countries.
The Centre for Research into Global Power, Inequality and Conflict
Dr Noah Basil is the Convenor of this initiative which was flagged as sitting within the Markets, Policy and Inequality group. Research into Global Power, Inequality and Conflict (RGPIC) is a Macquarie University Faculty of Arts Research group primarily focused on studying the myriad challenges resulting from the historical and contemporary structural and symbolic inequalities that continue to define the contemporary world. The group’s work focuses on understanding the ways that four decades of the hegemony of neoliberalism in both north and south have redefined, reshaped and often hardened unequal relations of power, exacerbated material inequalities, racial, ethnic, sexual and religious identities and prolonged or produced conflicts inherited from the colonial era. At the core of the group’s aims is an emancipatory project to create new concepts, narratives and relations that decentre the western, capitalist, patriarchal system.
Economic Elites in Australia: Who Occupies the Top Income and Wealth Positions?
Dr Hangyoung Lee’s project explores how Australia had maintained lower levels of income and wealth inequality over long decades because of egalitarian culture and strong redistributive policies, however, recent decades have shown a quite different trend. An increasingly growing share of income and wealth has been going to the top one percent, which has contributed to rising economic inequality in Australia. This project aims to explain this new trend of economic inequality by studying social stratification and mobility of Australian economic elites. Using two Australian household-level survey datasets (Survey of Income and Housing, Household Income and Labour Dynamic Survey), this project aims to achieve three goals. First, the project identifies the top one percent income earners and wealth owners, investigates their economic, social and demographic profiles and assesses the relative contribution of these profiles to the top one percent membership. Second, the project examines the extent to which and how top economic status is transmitted intergenerationally. It investigates whether and the extent to which those who receive a large inheritance have been dominant in the top positions over the past decades. Lastly, the project studies how macro-economic conditions impact mobility into the top one percent. Specifically, it explores whether financialization and real-estate boom of the Australian economy over the past decades has encouraged financiers and real-estate owners more than entrepreneurs to occupy top positions. By achieving these three goals, this project will shed light on recent changes in the top of income and wealth distributions and show how these changes have contributed to increasingly growing economic inequality in Australia.