Thank you to the Australian Institute of Family Studies for inviting me here today to speak to you on social capital and family policy. When Mary Murnane was first arranged to speak on this topic, little did any of us know about the major restructuring of the Commonwealth bureaucracy which was about to occur around this issue.

As you will all by now be aware, the creation of the portfolio of Family and Community Services brings together a wide range of social policy responsibilities from the old Departments of Social Security and Health and Family Services, the Attorney-General’s Department and the Treasury, around the theme of integrated support to families and partnerships between Government, the community and business.

This new portfolio provides us with the opportunity to build a department that provides high quality and integrated social policy advice, support and services; one that fosters economic and social engagement and aims to strengthen partnerships with the community, business and governments; and that responds flexibly to the needs of families and individuals.

An important part of this broadened role will, of course, be further developing a productive working relationship with the Australian Institute of Family Studies.

In establishing the new portfolio — FaCS as we like to call it — the Government has emphasised the role of families as the cornerstone of a well functioning and socially cohesive civil society.

Families provide mutual support and fulfilment; they nurture future generations and guide their development.

Without this support and guidance we would not be able to achieve the levels of social and economic engagement we currently expect from members of our society. Nor would we be able to provide the current level of care to the very young and older members of society or to those with disabilities.

Despite the importance of families, it is evident families are facing increasing pressures in the social and economic environment of the late 20^th century.

This has been reflected in changing trends in family structures. Trends over the past 30 years, for example, indicate that:

• men and women are marrying later and having fewer children — the fertility rate peaked in 1961 at 3.55, declining to 1.85 in 1994;

• more people are divorcing, re-partnering and entering new forms of relationships;
• more people are living alone with limited involvement with the community ;
• more women are in the labour force - in 1966 36% of all women were in the labour force; by 1996 this had risen to 54%; and

• more children are being born and raised within less traditional family structures - from 1977 to 1994 the proportion of children being born outside of de jure marriages increased from 10% to approximately 26%.

However, it is important to note that in 1997 while nearly 20% of children were in single parent families, approximately 74% of children were living with both their natural parents.

Transitions of young people to adulthood are also becoming more complex as they and their families struggle to deal with problems such as drugs, youth suicide and self-harm. Young people who are alienated from their families have even greater difficulties moving to productive independence.

These stresses take on even greater significance when you consider that our social and economic systems are largely built around the central role of stable families.

Yet we have tended to take the role of the family for granted.

The family has tended mainly to come to Government’s attention when problems occur, for example child abuse, youth homelessness, domestic violence, or when resources have to be found to reflect changing demographic or social realities.

This approach has not always worked in the best interest of families or family members. In meeting the challenges of today and of the future, it is becoming increasingly important to support the role of the family to help prevent crises or problems before they occur, and to work to strengthen families, including those most at risk, experiencing crises, so that the likelihood of problems occurring or re-occurring is reduced.

The Prime Minister took up this theme in his recent speech to ACOSS in which he emphasised the need to support and nurture families, to strengthen the family unit and empower them to succeed both economically and socially.

Yesterday the Minister for Family and Community Services, Senator the Hon. Jocelyn Newman, reinforced the importance of supporting families, not only for their own sake, but for the sake of our society.

Families are a part of a wider network of relationships, between individuals, businesses, communities and governments. These networks of trust, reciprocity and mutuality are sometimes described as social capital.

The value of families in building social capital or social cohesion should not be underestimated. Most writers on social capital agree that families are instrumental in building and maintaining well functioning civil societies.

An often noted indicator of social capital is the level of involvement in volunteer activities.

Research shows that participation in voluntary community work closely mirrors the life stages of families, for example:

• young people have reported they have little time to get involved in community activities;
• while families with young children tend to both give to and draw from community services; and
• those of active retirement age tend to give to the community more than they receive.

So what can governments do?

As the Prime Minister recently emphasised in his address to ACOSS, Government’s role must be seen in the context of partnership with the community, business, family and individuals themselves, which provide the ingredients for strengthening and maintaining a free, fair and united society.

Governments set the framework, reinforce values and act as a catalyst to the development of a society that nurtures and strengthens family relationships.

Governments are also responsible for developing policies that work towards building the capabilities of families and the communities they participate in.

They can provide information and financial support to enable appropriate forms of access and choice. A central feature of the Government’s tax package, of course, is to increase and rationalise financial support to families with children and to promote on-going economic and social engagement, by significantly reducing workforce disincentives and providing greater choice for parents to either stay at home to look after their children, or take up paid employment.

The Jobs, Education and Training program, or JET, provides assistance to certain income-support recipients, mainly parents, who choose to undertake training or re-enter the workforce. Through a program of personal goal setting, access to training, child care and job search assistance, JET offers income support customers increased independence and delivers savings on social security outlays. It is another example of an initiative that aims to enhance the choices and options available to families by reflecting changing family responsibilities and life courses.

The structures of government are also important, of course. As I have already noted, the Government’s recent administrative changes had families as one of its centrepieces. With the bringing together of responsibility for family and community policy, programs and services into the Department of Family and Community Services, the opportunity has been provided to focus far more systematically on strengthening families and family relationships.

This integration will enable us to adopt a more holistic approach to policy development and service delivery and to provide more effective assistance to families.

In the past, governments have supported families in varied circumstances through a number of programs, with responsibilities distributed across the bureaucracy, including:

• Relationship education and counselling;
• Income support payments for families with children;
• Intervention programs for families in crisis situations;
• Child care;
• Counselling and mediation for adolescents and families threatened by family break-down; and
• Support for people with disabilities.

These programs will now be coordinated under the one department and supported by the proposed establishment of the Family Assistance Office to specialise in delivering

coordinated financial assistance to families through the tax or social security systems. The FAO will enable families to deal with just one agency and enable the primary carer to choose how they wish to receive their assistance.

This provides the opportunity to address the varying needs of individuals and families through their life stages, such as adolescence, marriage, having children and entering or re-entering the workforce, in a more coordinated and structured way.

It also provides the opportunity for becoming more responsive to the requirements of families by:

• recognising the changing and increasingly diverse needs and roles of families throughout the various life stages; and

• focusing on enhancing the capacity of low income families to maximise opportunities which may lead to improvements in family life.

A particular partnership we will be enthusiastically building in our new Department, is that between ourselves and the Australian Institute of Family Studies. There are strong synergies between our key family policy issues and the Institute’s research agenda, including:

• developing a clearer understanding of the life stages of Australian families and their complex inter-relationships with the changing social fabric of our society; and
• more specific analysis of family relationships, such as those between parents and young children, including best practice in strengthening such relationships to reduce the chances of them breaking down.

Both in Australia and internationally, the focus is increasingly shifting toward establishing arrangements which facilitate and encourage families to maximise control of their own social and economic futures.

But some families will continue to need additional support and assistance in times of stress.

As the Prime Minister also noted recently, the modern safety net differs from the traditional model in its recognition that governments cannot do it alone.

The modern safety net embraces the belief in the potential of the family unit and identifies the need for prevention as much as cure.

This safety net involves the provision of both social and economic assistance, and includes a range of strategies to help families deal with crisis, including:

• community organisations which support families in dispute through mediation and counselling;
• child abuse prevention and parent support;
• income support to relieve financial burdens in times of need; and
• support for young people and their families where there is a risk of youth homelessness.

These services offer support at critical points, and attempt to minimise the emotional, social and economic costs that invariably result from families in crisis.

The Prime Minister also noted that in providing such support and assistance emphasis needs to be placed on re-engaging people in work and the community.

Inter-generational unemployment is a major concern internationally, as families are cut off from employment and networks that assist in the job searching process. As a result of this, emphasis has been placed on education and training or re-training, with a focus on life long learning.

The recently introduced youth allowance is an example of a Government initiative, which offers incentives for young people to remain in education or training until they have the skills necessary to enter the workforce.

The mutual obligation arrangements, including the Work for the Dole Scheme, is another example. The objective of this scheme, of course, is that young unemployed Australians are assisted in maintaining self-esteem, confidence and good working habits which will encourage re-engagement with the workforce and society, while giving something back to the community.

But we need to expand our knowledge of how best to structure, target and tailor assistance to provide the opportunities and incentives for economic and social participation. Over the last 2 days the Department of Family and Community Services, in conjunction with the Australian National University, has conducted a major conference addressing development of a research agenda which focuses on attitudes and behaviour, and the implications of these for design of more effective social policy.

A major theme of the conference has been the importance of collecting longitudinal data for the analysis of social policy which gives us a better understanding of how individuals and families respond to opportunities and choices over the life course. Papers from the conference will be made available through the Department in due course.

The development of community capability is another key ingredient of strengthening and supporting families, and another area in which FaCS has a range of government responsibilities.

Communities have an important role in fostering and nurturing healthy families, and community organisations are often best placed to deliver appropriate and effective services.

They have the capacity to understand and respond quickly and effectively to changing regional or local circumstances.

Communities and community groups also have a key role to play in assisting government develop and evaluate policies and programs to ensure the needs of individuals, families and communities are met most effectively.

In this respect, the Prime Minister’s Youth Homelessness Taskforce, chaired by Captain David Eldridge of the Salvation Army, and involving representatives from other community groups and Commonwealth and State bureaucrats, has demonstrated the considerable value to be gained by government working in close co-operation with community-based agencies in the design and implementation of services. It was convened to provide advice to government on helping young people and their families where there is a risk of family breakdown and inappropriate early home leaving. It advised on building on existing resources in local and regional communities and providing counselling, support and referral so that young people at risk remained engaged with their families and their communities and continued with their education, training or employment.

In a similar vein, the disability advocacy review recently identified the need to listen to and involve families and carers in developing solutions and options to their particular problems.

This review demonstrated the need to place greater emphasis on adopting a family approach in the provision of support or assistance, rather than attempting to intervene only at an individual level, as has often been the case in the past.

Just as communities are vital in helping to strengthen families, so too is the business sector.

The Prime Minister has emphasised that the business sector has a strong stake in ensuring that communities remain dynamic and prosperous, and FaCS has responsibilities for helping to foster the relationship between the business and community sectors with a view to them working more effectively together.

The business sector depends on families and communities for its employees and its markets. Often it is the communities in which businesses reside that will be instrumental in defining their success.

At the broadest level, the business or work environment also has a role in directly supporting families through promoting family-friendly employment practices.

It was interesting to note, for example, that the United Kindgom’s recent Green Paper on Supporting Families, identified this need for family-friendly employee practices, and as a result encouraged firms to improve employee rights, especially in relation to working hours, flexible working arrangements, parental leave and dealing with family crises.

The Government’s initiative on Business Against Domestic Violence provides an innovative example of the role business can play in strengthening our families and communities. This program has been established to encourage the involvement of corporate Australia in the enterprise to help young people and families prevent domestic violence within the Australian community. Businesses can support their communities through this initiative by leading a change in attitude, by developing policies linking the workplace to domestic violence services or by donating funds to benevolent projects.

One area in which partnerships with business have been developed is in looking at new ways to assist men to improve relationship skills. At the National Forum on Men and Family Relationships, convened by the Government in Canberra earlier this year, we heard how important the workplace is as a means to reach men.

Quality child care is also a key requirement of many working families and is an essential element of the Government’s strategy to foster the well-being of our families. Business can contribute to the commitment to provide quality child care and offer a range of choices to both parents and children, either directly through workplace based child care, or indirectly through employee benefits.

To provide further impetus in this area the Commonwealth Government has committed $13.4 million over four years to progress the Prime Minister’s Business and Community Partnerships initiative. These funds will be used for the development of strategies which raise national awareness of the value of partnerships between the business and community sectors.

The Minister has recently approved a strategy to implement the recommendations of five working groups which were set up following the Prime Minister’s round table discussions in March.

Initiatives under the strategy include:

• plans to develop best practice partnerships;
• an information and brokerage service to bring potential business and community partners together; and
• the collection of base-line data.

In addition, information is being disseminated via a newsletter, an Internet site and a series of international speakers symposia.

Clearly, the direction for future efforts in strengthening families and social capital are now well laid down. We still have much to learn, however, about how best to help strengthen the various partnerships between families, governments, communities and businesses, and we are setting about doing this.

That is why FaCS is working, in partnership with the wider research community in Australia and overseas, to develop an integrated research and evaluation approach which will assist us to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between policy settings or interventions and ultimate outcomes or results.

Clearly, the Australian Institute of Family Studies has an important role to play in contributing to such a research agenda.

There is a need to look forward to best practice approaches, including in particular with an emphasis on prevention and early intervention, to research the development of cross-sectoral partnerships and to provide longitudinal analysis of data.

I am sure we would all agree on the importance of maintaining a close working relationship between the Department and AIFS to ensure our policy development is based on relevant research findings and that, in turn, the Institute’s research is attuned to the Government’s policy agenda. By placing greater emphasis on appropriately focused research and community involvement in the development and delivery of services we will have greater assurance that Government programs and approaches are best meeting the needs of Australian families.

I look forward to the many challenges the new Department will undoubtedly provide and I welcome the opportunity of working with many of you in the future.