This paper is an initial step towards building an evidence base on Australian community attitudes to people with disability, on the impact of these attitudes on outcomes for people with disability and on effective policies for improving community attitudes towards them.

To what extent does receiving SAAP services facilitate positive changes in client self-reliance, and what forms does this improvement take for different groups of clients? This study provides a positive picture of the extent to which clients felt they had moved towards self-reliance after getting help from SAAP services. Nevertheless, many were still living in...

This short paper from the 2007 Australian Social Policy Conference looks at the extent of the spread of the notion of 'social capital', and investigates a number of the reasons given in the literature for its popularity. It concludes by suggesting that the question of why 'social capital' continues to prevail, despite its dubious epistemological...

This report commissioned by the Department of Family and Community Services analyses the current data on children in SAAP, both those who accompany their families and those who are unaccompanied, and discuss policy development and possible further research.

In August 2001 the Australian Catholic University announced that its new General Staff Enterprise Bargaining Agreement included a provision for one year's paid maternity leave - 12 weeks on full pay and a further 40 weeks on 60 per cent pay. Denise Thompson Michael Bittman and Peter Saunders assess how that decision helped shape the...