• Ilan Katz

27 August 2008Labor’s social inclusion agenda is an exciting development, writes ILAN KATZ, but it will be a while before we know whether it will fulfil its promise.

THE election of the Rudd government has, inevitably, begun to change the lexicon of social policy. Every government has its own catch phrases and politically acceptable nomenclature, and this one is no exception. We seem to be moving from the era of Social Capital to the era of Social Inclusion. Already it has become de rigueur for any significant social policy conference to be themed around the concept of social inclusion, and I have no doubt that there will be a spate of special journal editions, edited books and the like.

Academics love this sort of transition because it opens up whole new areas of work - not only because new subjects of enquiry are encouraged, but also because new buzz words such as social inclusion need debate, refinement and discussion.

Social exclusion (as opposed to inclusion) has been studied in the European context since the early 1990s and is generally seen as a more productive construct than poverty. Firstly, it is multi-dimensional rather than relying on one threshold for its definition. Secondly, it includes analysis of the forces that exclude marginal groups such as ethnic minorities, mentally ill people and homeless people from mainstream society, rather than focusing exclusively on the characteristics of the excluded. Thirdly, it incorporates the dynamics and processes of inclusion and exclusion. It also has a number of different definitions and narratives. The most well-known analysis of these different connotations was provided by Ruth Levitas, who divided social exclusion into three discourses:

• the social inclusion discourse (SID);

• the redistribution discourse (RED); and

• the moral underclass discourse (MUD).

Thus it would seem that the Rudd government, by preferring the term social inclusion, has downplayed both the redistribution and the moral underclass discourses. It remains to be seen whether this will continue. In the UK the Blair government, which introduced the social exclusion discourse into the mainstream, did not take long to single out undesirable groups in the population (so-called dole bludgers, bogus asylum seekers, hoons etc) for official opprobrium.

Interestingly the term social inclusion, while a lot warmer and fuzzier than social exclusion, lacks the connotation of exclusionary forces. It therefore implies a much stronger policy focus on helping the excluded to participate in mainstream society, without examining what it is about that society that excluded them in the first place.

From a research point of view, the social inclusion agenda opens up a raft of opportunities to study aspects of social policy that were previously de-emphasised, particularly the effects of government policy on marginalised groups.

One of the fascinating aspects of academic social policy research and analysis is that many of the basic aspects of society and policy that we are addressing are very simple to understand on the surface, but are fiendishly difficult to operationalise and define accurately. Poverty, care, disability, child abuse, social capital and social inclusion are cases in point. Any intelligent member of the population will be able to easily grasp the essence of these terms, and yet none of them has been defined accurately or adequately. On the contrary, acrimonious debates and tensions amongst scholars have been engendered by disagreements over their definitions. Whilst these debates have engaged academics (and bureaucrats) over long periods of time, the groups of people who are subject to the actual policies don’t tend to care much about these arguments.

Social capital, for example, has spawned a veritable industry of definition, measurement, comment and analysis. The Australian Bureau of Statistics produced a guide to measuring social capital with a complicated diagram. I wonder where all of this will go now, given that social capital has been superseded in the political lexicon. In my view social inclusion/exclusion contains a much richer set of concepts than social capital. Although social capital has a very powerful, simple and common-sense narrative at its core - people function better in the context of networks of support and trust than as individuals - it has become an overburdened and tired expression with little meaning, and it is tainted by its vaguely right-wing connotations.

It would be a pity if the focus on social inclusion became mired by definitional issues. Social inclusion is intentionally an inclusive definition and hard to define accurately. There is another approach to the problem, which the government seems to be taking. That approach is based on the model set by the Social Exclusion Unit in the UK and followed by the Social Inclusion Board in South Australia. It is to identify a number of severe social policy problems that are known to require a multi-departmental approach and to set up processes to deal with these issues. Typically these problems include homelessness, substance abuse, mental illness, and young people not in education or employment.

This approach has the advantage of not having to address the definitional complexities of social inclusion. Instead it can narrow the focus on specific and hopefully achievable objectives rather than promoting social inclusion as a positive-sounding but fairly meaningless goal. On the other hand this approach is very programmatic and narrowly focused. It presumes that complex problems can be addressed relatively easily by short-term interventions. The UK experience with this approach has been mixed. Homelessness seems to have genuinely fallen, but other problems such as youth crime and drug abuse have been much less successfully addressed. This is a new and exciting phase in Australian social policy, but it will be a while before we know whether it will fulfil its promise. •

Ilan Katz is Director of the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. This article first appeared in the SPRC’s latest newsletter (PDF).

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