Just how good are we? You know, net - net at really improving the position of people
in disadvantage over long time, you know a period of time.
The notion of inequality and what’s driving people’s perceptions about social and economic
mobility being an issue is inequality in a broad range of things.
And we need to sort of remain focused on the fact that it’s not just about a single measure
of income. What inequality is doing is it’s pulling
apart the rungs on the social ladder. Things are getting further apart.
And that makes it harder for people to climb that ladder.
You know, inequality that results from people being rewarded for their skills and their
talents, that’s the kind of inequality we want to live with.
Unfair inequality is driven by differences in the lottery of birth.
The complex production and reproduction of life chances and life outcomes over the life
course, then we’re looking at a set of interactions between family place and welfare resources.
And obviously, as Deb has already kind of begun to lay out, we’re talking about the
roles of work and learning through those interactions in influencing and mediating who gets what
and what your chances are. The global environment and the set of underlying
drivers and pressures that we’ve begun to enter which I’m going to canter through
now, I think actually present grave threats to the distribution of life chances and to
the prospects of social mobility. So we talk about a fit for purpose policy
and service response. And we think that it requires clarity, real
clarity about the problem to be addressed. We think it’s a multi-level problem requiring
a multi-level solution, and a multi-sectoral solution.
You’re 1.8 times as likely to need income support yourself as an adult if your parents
receive it. Now if that’s not a notion of intergeneration
disadvantage, a lack of social and economic mobility, I don’t know what is.
You’re about three times as likely to get unemployment benefits if your parents had
any form of social assistance when you were growing up.
We have to understand how place impacts. And we also have to understand how economic
and industrial structure, the shape of the labour market, does fundamentally influence
and interact with the infrastructure of government, health and social services, schooling, community
effort and so on. If you want to work in a knowledge economy
job, you’re most likely to be coming into central Melbourne to do it.
Something like 90% of the knowledge sector jobs in the Victorian economy I think are
being generated in the CBD or its immediate environs.
If you don’t have Year 12 qualifications, not only are you not going to get those jobs,
but you can’t afford to live anywhere near the centre of Melbourne.
And so there’s a kind of aggregate sorting effect which is rapidly undermining social
mobility and those objectives of fairness. How do you build capability?
And what are the conditions, the enabling conditions, the opportunities, the resources
and networks that build capability such that disadvantaged people of any age can make that
transition into - out of disadvantage. But it’s not just individual capability
that we need to pay attention to. We must pay attention to other actors in the
institutions in the domain. So, in this instance service provider capability
and community capability which will include employers.
Government has a role. It has particular expertise and particular
capacities. But so too do the community sector agencies,
the educational institutions, and the other community institutions and citizens themselves,
and so the design of these sorts of responses need to take account of that, and need to
be really intentional about how to leverage people’s roles and capacities.
It’s not about picking the right levers in isolation and making sure that different
ministers pull them, it’s about conceiving of the systems that reproduce these outcomes
across cohorts or across regions in slightly different ways.
And then somehow producing a combination of a joined up governance architecture.
You know, and the Victorian Government has huge capabilities and powers in terms of legislation,
regulation, investment, infrastructure, expertise, data, capability and the capacity to influence
cultural change in various ways. You know, so you’ve got to think - we’ve
got to think very hard about that, while also recognising that the determinance of social
mobility are actually largely distributed across systems that government doesn’t directly
control. We’ve got to find ways of setting a course
for government which can pursue these kinds of directions over four, eight, 16 years,
and make them less subject to the kind of swings of the political cycle.
And we’ve got to find ways of harnessing broader institutional alliance and support
to kind of build legitimacy for these goals and then demonstrate how institutions working
together can produce cumulative impact. And we want to create relationships in place
that can affect social change for a seamless transition between the short, medium and longer
term vision. And we think that in the design of programmatic
policy solutions for these sorts of issues that the designers and the co-designers need
to hold in place. What do we need to do in the short term?
What should we strive for in the medium and long term?
We think the community capacity building piece has been really overlooked.
And, you know, you saw the kind of thing of capabilities that I was talking about, that
actually needs resourcing. And that’s not really necessarily always
about money. It’s about thinking about how you join different
parts of civil society into the solution. Big data is a part of the story.
It certainly gives us a very nuanced way of understanding the key elements of the problem,
and also the impact of particular high level policy interventions.
But without accompanying sort of thick data about what’s working, and how and why in
real time, we’re going to miss the opportunity to develop efficacious models.
But largely, in a real sense, we’re drowning in data.
Right? Our problem in a way, is actually lack of
research capacity and infrastructure and systems and partnerships, that would let us harness
the data that we actually have. I think what we have to do is get better at
using our administrative data to work out what’s working for children and what’s not.
You’ve got economic and social policy coming
together and recognising that if we’re going to raise wellbeing, if we’re going to tackle
social mobility, we do it for equity purposes. We do it because it’s good for the economy.
We’re really in the same game. How we can have in government a unified focus
on it, and not just allow kind of a thousand flowers to bloom with small initiatives, but
how you get scale of impact. Which really means trying to create the best
platform for working in partnership in places that everybody understands.
That we share information, and that government - that moves its investment to where local
priorities are identified. Require an integrated approach between government,
the community sector, civil society and business to really affect changes to social mobility.
The need to focus a bit on young people and to ensure that they participate in processes
to build that social mobility is really crucial. I guess in driving any kind of reform we need
to do it in place. And to do it in place we have to bring communities
and the people in those communities with us.