This study explores the institutional systems through which post-separation financial abuse is perpetrated. While existing measures seek to quantify the harms experienced by women post-separation, this study draws on financial, welfare and legal service casefiles to identify where such harms occur. Drawing on 76 de-identified Victorian service casefiles, the findings show that government, commercial and private financial systems are implicated in the perpetration of financial abuse. The findings reveal that within government systems, victim-survivors' child support and income support payments were manipulated. Banks were the primary commercial site of perpetration, where debts were accrued and assets were affected. Perpetrators were able to levy debts directly against victim-survivors through corporate and government systems, or to manipulate local, state and federal government systems to indirectly inflict financial harms that overlapped across public and private institutions. Our analysis reinforces the importance of the Australian government's focus on systems-perpetrated violence, as well as the need for continued efforts towards the goals of the National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children.

This paper applies Bacchi's 'What's the Problem Represented to be?' (WPR) approach to critically examine the educational leader policy in Australian early childhood education and care (ECEC). The sector has experienced a persistent shortage of qualified staff, largely due to its traditionally low social and professional status. This shortage is framed in policy discourse as a key barrier to achieving the government's vision of high-quality education. In response, the 2012 introduction of the educational leader role was positioned as a solution, tasked with leading pedagogy and mentoring peers to lift quality. However, utilising the WPR approach to policy analysis reveals a deeper contradiction rooted in capitalism: while dependent on socio-reproductive labour such as care work, the system simultaneously devalues those who perform it. The policy's proposed solution reinforces dominant discourses of care and productivity. It operates as a form of governmentality, using educational leadership as a cost-efficient mechanism to tackle workforce 'deficiencies' without addressing structural inequalities.

This article maps the ways that intimate partner financial abuse presents, and the range of public and private entities involved in its perpetration. It reports on an analysis of submissions by individuals to the Australian parliamentary inquiry into the Financial Services Regulatory Framework in Relation to Financial Abuse. Our analysis documents the web of systems through which financial abuse can be perpetrated in ways that are largely unchecked, and with significant perpetrator autonomy. Private systems of financial wealth, such as banking institutions, private businesses, superannuation, and trust accounts enable perpetrators to extract financial benefits and inflict financial harms. Victim-survivors must deal with the consequences of intimate partner financial abuse, including diminished resources and agency afforded to them through public systems, such as child support, Centrelink, the Australian Taxation Office, and the family courts. The paper suggests avenues for further research to identify specific cross-system sites where intersectoral intervention may be possible.

In this paper, we provide a review of extant qualitative research that reports on women’s experience of economic abuse during intimate relationships and following separation. To advance understanding of the processes of economic abuse that play out over the course of an intimate relationship, we draw on Zelizer’s social meaning of money and Risman’s causal mechanisms of gender to provide a conceptual basis and typology to begin to untangle gender, finance, and violence in intimate-partner relationships. This qualitative meta-ethnography draws on 19 studies that centre the lived experiences of women survivors of economic abuse. Following a multi-faceted literature searching strategy across leading academic databases, studies were coded and analyzed drawing on Zelizer and Risman to conduct a gendered analysis of economic abuse in intimate relationships. The studies identified seemingly innocuous, but ultimately controlling behaviors that served to establish the financial gender order within and beyond relationships. The evidence showed that it is fairly straightforward for economically abusive male partners to exploit the established financial gender order to their advantage to assert power within their intimate relationships. Patterns of abuse could often be difficult for women to identify given the cultural acceptance of men’s financial authority and autonomy. The included articles, however, highlighted points in abusive relationships where catalytic events ruptured the victim-survivor's perspective on their financial or physical safety. After leaving an abusive ex-partner, however, some women endured institutionalized economic abuse through government systems, such as child support and family law court proceedings, whereby fraudulent economic behavior continued to be enacted. The research studies included in this review, and our synthesis of their findings, have brought women’s experiences to the fore in order to shed light on the often invisible experience of economic abuse. The processual framework of the financial gender order helps to identify points within intimate relationships where economic abuse escalates. An ongoing, yet concerted effort is required to identify and dismantle the individual, community and institutional sites at which unquestioned and archaic gendered financial assumptions are enacted and proliferate.

This article conceptually explores housing justice through the worked example of shared housing in the private rental sector (PRS), where people live with non-family. Drawing on interviews with 25 shared housing tenants in Melbourne, Australia, this article asks how the experiences of shared housing tenants can inform an understanding of housing justice. Analysis finds there are three sites of relationality where injustice can occur within shared housing: the built form of the dwelling; relationships with housemates; and the policy and regulatory context, including relationships with property managers. Across these three sites, tenants discussed strategies to manage injustices, including using legal mechanisms, confrontation/negotiation, leaving the dwelling, and acquiescing. Housing justice for shared housing tenants is multi-dimensional, going beyond the landlord-tenant relationship. The article concludes with a discussion on expanding the conceptualization of housing justice more broadly to include nuances of relationality experienced by and within households.

In this chapter, we outline the demographic and social policy conditions that frame the nature, purpose and function of the Australian child support system. We begin by setting out the social context in which the system operates. We then provide an overview of patterns of parental education, employment, and the distribution of wealth and poverty over time. We outline the social welfare policy context that frames the role and function of the child support system, including welfare-to-work requirements and childcare accessibility and affordability. Australian child support policy is being asked to do some heavy lifting in terms of minimising state responsibilities for children's wellbeing upon parental separation in a context of low wages, income insecurity, high childcare costs and housing unaffordability. Given structural changes to employment, households and care, child support as a policy is becoming increasing incapable of achieving this task.

Canada and Australia, two liberal welfare states whose market-based ECEC systems consistently rank poorly on international measures, embraced similar short-term childcare policy responses to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic: widespread closures, reduced capacity of centers, establishment of publicly funded emergency childcare programs for essential workers, and short-term wage subsidies for essential workers (sometimes including educators). Rooted in a feminist political economy (FPE) theoretical framework and using a what-is-the-problem-represented-to-be (WPR) methodological approach, this article explores the extent to which the first and second "waves" of the COVID-19 pandemic policy responses in Canada and Australia framed childcare as a concern about gendered, reproductive labor within political representations of the policy problems to be solved.

Financial abuse is a form of violence that can extend well beyond intimate partner relationship breakdown. A survey of 540 Australian separated parents examined how financial abuse was perpetrated, with a focus on child support and other government systems. Women reported that their ex-partners minimized and withheld child support payments to inflict direct financial harm, while interactions between the family court, taxation, and benefit payment systems were taken advantage of to threaten or control them. Findings revealed how the mandatory and complex Australian child support system provided perpetrators with a useful means of perpetrating financial abuse across households.

This book takes a novel approach to child support policy analysis by locating the transfer of payments between separated parents within a wider social policy ecosystem.While work has begun to compare child support systems across countries, such studies have focused primarily on technical legal, administrative, and policy settings.In contrast, this book examines how child support policies align conceptually with other social policies.When child support is embedded within a broader suite of policy settings, its potential contribution to improving children's wellbeing can be understood.As such, the aim of the collection is to advance the conceptualisation of comparative post-separation family policy research while allowing best-practice principles of child support program implementation to be identified across contexts.Child support is money paid by a non-resident parent to a resident parent for the purpose of supporting children following parental relationship breakdown (OECD, 2011).In the overwhelming majority of cases worldwide, payments are made by a non-resident father to a resident mother, reflecting the deeply gendered distribution of work and care that is almost universal.In doing so, child support recognises and compensates mothers for the opportunity costs incurred as a result of being a child's primary carer.As a result, child support does not exist in a policy vacuum, but exists in reference to other policies that shape the opportunity costs of motherhood, and post-separation motherhood, such as parental leave, childcare, welfare, and employment policies (Hakovirta, Cook and Sinclair, 2020).Children's right to parental child support payments, and the state's role in facilitating and enforcing these, is set out in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1990) which 196 states have ratified.Of the ten countries included in this collection, all bu the U.S. are parties to the Charter.Across the countries included here, there is significant variation in how child support sits within government institutions and systems.At one end of the spectrum, Nordic and Northern European countries provide guaranteed payments when non-resident parents do not transfer child support to the resident parent.At the other end of the spectrum, African, Southern Asian and South

Shared housing in the private rental sector (PRS) is becoming a globally significant household arrangement. However, research indicates that shared housing is associated with problems including financial and housing insecurity. Given the growth of shared housing in the PRS, it is necessary for policy solutions to appropriately address the needs of shared housing renters. This paper aims to investigate the relationship between housing policy and non-commercial shared housing in the PRS - that is, autonomous households in self-contained dwellings - and how this has been conceptualised and examined in academic scholarship thus far. To achieve these aims, we conduct a scoping review on non-commercial shared housing in the PRS. Research illustrates that the reality of shared housing is not accommodated well in existing housing policy systems. We analyse reasons that housing policy may not adapt easily to non-commercial shared housing, and outline the need for further research on policy implications and recommendations about shared housing in the PRS.

This paper charts the accounts of front-line workers in 'Australia' who work with men who use Domestic and Family Violence (DFV) on the extent, nature, and context of antifeminist and / or right-wing extremist (RWE) sentiment among their clients, and its overlap with 'manosphere' content and sentiment. It has previously been established that lone-actor terrorism and right-wing extremism that manifests in acts of public violence, have deep connections to male supremacy and the manosphere. However, despite the shared drivers of both DFV and lone-actor terrorism, there remains a dearth of research that interrogates the extent to which DFV users are also informed by manosphere or RWE content. The data reveals that service providers frequently encounter sentiment from their clients that strongly aligns with and draws on manosphere content and that we conceptualise as masculinist in sentiment: it is anti-diversity and anti-feminist, supports men recapturing a sense of masculism, and deploys 'alternative facts' to give credibility to the affective idea of male victimhood perpetrated by a system that is supposedly against men. We argue that some mainstream 'Australian' discourses amplify these sentiments; and that men's aggrievement needs to be carefully acknowledged without collusion in both DFV and countering violent extremism contexts.

Mothering and motherhood can be a very challenging experience in the 21st century, where cultural pressures, on the one hand, and health experts' regular parenting surveillance, on the other, continue to influence mothering decisions and practices. The socially constructed "good mother" discourses and associated pressures/influences can be amplified for vulnerable mothers who may feel marginalized from or judged by the broader society. This article presents findings from a study that involved interviews with ten young mothers and 12 staff working at a leading family welfare agency supporting young parents in Melbourne, Australia. The study examined how digital technology could promote a sense of agency for vulnerable mothers as well as barriers and enablers of accessing digital knowledge and online parenting support. In addition, the study explored how technology could assist community organizations' staff in helping their clients better. This paper argues that, overall, digital technologies can positively influence the experience of mothering and can empower vulnerable mothers by increasing their access to various sources of support. Furthermore, our findings suggest that technology can enhance community and family service providers' practice, opening possibilities for a more supportive relationship with clients by empowering them and increasing agency over their situation.

This article examines the changes in social security measures introduced by the Australian government during the first wave of Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020. These measures were basic income-like in that they became both more unconditional and adequate for a reasonable standard of living. This was achieved through a significant supplementary payment, suspension of mutual obligation requirements, and the relaxation of eligibility criteria on a range of unemployment-related payments. Through drawing on the results of an online survey, we examine the impacts of these measures and find that they significantly helped to alleviate poverty and improve wellbeing. These gains were not insignificant for the individuals involved, and offer empirical insights into studies of basic income. While seeing the Australian government embrace more generous and basic income-like measures, we also note that during Covid-19 gendered and class inequalities increased. This reminds us that basic income is never a silver bullet and, alongside implementing basic income payments, there also needs to be a concerted effort to restructure economic relations more generally.

Purpose Burgeoning research on intimate partner perpetrated economic abuse highlights the devastating and lasting impacts of economic exploitation, economic control, and employment sabotage, most often endured by women. Despite recognition of the potential outcomes that can result from intimate partner perpetrated economic abuse, such as lifelong poverty, and housing and employment insecurity, there is a dearth of evidence on prevention interventions into economic abuse, and interventions to help women recover from such abuse. This exploratory qualitative meta-synthesis examines existing research to identify key areas for systemic intervention into prevention of economic abuse. Methods Drawing on Bacchi’s ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ approach, this qualitative meta-synthesis analyses ‘problem representations’ in 11 studies that report on interventions into intimate partner violence, including economic abuse. Articles were identified through a systematic literature search in EBSCOhost and SCOPUS using the following search terms: ‘financial abuse’ OR ‘economic abuse’ AND ‘prevention’ OR ‘intervention’ OR ‘crisis.’ The inclusion criteria were that the study must report: (1) empirical data from an intervention; (2) focus, at least in part, on EA given such abuse is often reported alongside other forms of abuse; (3) abuse occurring within the context of a current or former intimate partner relationship. Results We found that across the reviewed studies, economic abuse was not often explicitly defined, and within descriptions of tactics that constitute economic abuse, the perpetrator remained largely invisible. Interventions into intimate partner violence tended to focus on individualistic prevention/intervention through psychoeducation, men’s intervention programs, clinical interventions, women’s economic empowerment. Relational economic empowerment was also recommended alongside gender-based training to motivate couples to recognise traditional gender power dynamics in relationships. Conclusions We argue that most interventions individualise the prevention of and recovery from economic abuse, promoting women’s self-improvement through financial literacy, economic empowerment, and education as responses to economic violence, rather than making male perpetrators accountable for the harm they cause. This gap in existing interventions reveals an opportunity for financial and government institutions to act through transformative structural reform that disrupts – rather than responds to – male perpetration of economic abuse.

The Australian Child Support Scheme is heralded as a landmark policy reform that sought to govern how children in separated families were financially supported, moving responsibility away from the state and back onto previously 'breadwinning' parents. However, given the scale and scope of the intervention which required government to intervene in the private, financial affairs of families, child support policy has been a site of ongoing contest. This chapter examines Australia's child support policy history through the lens of contested social truths, whereby policy solutions serve to render complex social problems into technical, administrative concerns. Through this lens, child support can be understood as a tool do depoliticise the reduced government support provided to single parent families, while also normalising parental responsibility. However, in light of ongoing concerns with the purpose, function and operation of the scheme, the underlying contests are never far from the surface.