Public Education and Transport – A new era for Making and Breaking Social Policy

[Music] Welcome to everybody watching live or watching and listening to us a little bit later. This is the live stream podcast for the topic policy power and human services. We were just having an argument before about whether it's policy power and human services or power policies. Yeah, that's all that matters. The three Ps are policy practice and power. Yeah, you see, I actually missed one. Just then you added it was practice. So it's definitely those three things in some order in human services. So this is of course for the bachelor and master's of social work program here at Vindy's University. Let's begin with an acknowledgement country. We are coming to you from the traditional lands of the Garner people here at the Bedford campus as part of Linners University. So we went in pair respects to our elders past, present and emerging and acknowledge the significance of their relationship to this land. So that's a really important starting point for any sort of menu of this kind. But particularly in this topic and the study of policy and the history of social work and policy. There's a long and fairly checkered history there that is probably a space to explore at another time. But I think it's really important for us to start with that as we start thinking about what the role of social workers have in thinking about policy and practice in human services. So this is the new setup for this podcast. And I have a new co-host. This is a new way for we're going to do this podcast going forward. So let me introduce Dr. Tena Blaser. Thank you so much for being co-host on this podcast. I am more than honored and I acknowledge the privilege of being here with the brilliant Dr. Bannelmeier. Okay, don't do it, don't do it. No, no, no, no. Seriously, I have always really enjoyed listening. Like even before I joined Flinders, I remember listening to a few episodes of your podcast. You said that I wanted to understand what you were doing. And I was like, this is a really cool concept. And so just to be here is actually a really, really enjoyable and special experience. Thanks for having me. Well, thank you. That's kind. It is a fun way to do something that's part of the social work program to do a podcast like this. And you know, it's a chance to meet and talk to a whole bunch of interesting people as well. And you've been on this podcast previously as well. You were one of those interesting people. I have leveled up from like a podcast guest and now I'm a co-host and got promoted. And so quickly as well. Like you just, you're a kid once and they're straight into the co-host. It's just showing your excellence. That's nice. That's very generous. Thank you. But we should start. Can you tell us just a little bit about yourself? Because I think this is going to be part of what makes this podcast really interesting. Is our contrasting disciplinary experiences and knowledge. And I think that's going to make for some really interesting conversations. So tell us a bit about yourself and stuff. Cool. So I guess what I think about my disciplinary background. I would just say I'm trained as an economist. So my undergraduate, my postgraduate training has always been an economics. But then I did my PhD at the University of Queensland. And that was more broadly in the social sciences. I used quantitative methodologies in my research. And I think we can kind of go back to that a bit later on. Because it does influence how, as an economist, I see knowledge. Which is quite different from how someone like you, a trained sociologist and someone with a youth work background, would kind of think about how knowledge is created. So yes, so that's me. As I mentioned earlier, they may pay a sheet at UQ. But I've also done a bit of industry work as well. So I consulted for several international organizations, Asian Development Bank, World Bank, a lot of economists in there. But here in Australia, I also worked as a manager at the health economics and social policy department at the Lloyd-Naxis economics. So I do have, I guess, a diverse kind of range of background. But again, very economics oriented, but on social issues. I guess is how I would correct raise that. And then please do remain us and the viewers. Tell us a little bit about your background, because I think it does have a nice contrast. Thank you. That will be relevant for a later discussion. Absolutely. I think there's so many really interesting contrast. It's straight away you're talking about that largely being a quantitative researcher. I'm largely a qualitative researcher. And I enjoy collaborating with quantitative researchers, but I often just baffled by how that actually works. Whatever it is, you do with the magic with the numbers. So that's nice to have those, I think, like you say, contrasting perspectives and the kinds of knowledge that we value and the insights that they bring. So that should be really interesting. I'm looking forward already just to come to the chat. We're going to have a little bit later about some of the current kind of policies. They're being rolled out in South Australia and what they all mean. But I think that should be really interesting. And my background is in youth work. So working with young people, and that's again probably why I like doing the research that I do. I feel I'm really interested in their stories and their experiences. Starting from that lived the experience base and thinking about how those experiences are shaped by the large kind of social systems that we exist within. So that's always the tension in sociology. And I think something we'll come back to and talk about throughout the semester is this idea of the sociological imagination. So the connection between the individual's experience or see-right meals as the guy who came up with a study and talked about individual biographies and then the kind of collective histories of society. So what's the connection between those two things? That's the fun, imaginative bit of sociology that I really like. Wow, and could not be more different from I guess from how I've been trained to think. Which is really more about macro and macro. Looking at the big picture of a particular problem and really using data, big data sets to actually understand and try to address those problems. So I think we'll see a bit more of that later on in the discussion. Nice. I think yeah, it's going to be so complimentary. Well hopefully, maybe actually we're really contrasting. We can just fight about things. That could be fun as well as tell us how wrong we are about that in the perspectives. And I think that's also the value of having different disciplines actually trying to understand a particular topic. Because one would hope actually that we don't always agree. Totally. And that kind of adds richness to the analysis. Yes, yeah, exactly. So then I think it's probably worth explaining a little bit how this is going to work. How this sort of podcast self is going to work in the previous iterations of it we've had really just a guest on. And I've had a conversation with them and unpacked some of their expertise. And that can be say a policy maker or an academic or somewhat lived experience and bring the conversation into our classroom space. Which is being great. In this iteration we're going to do a bit of that. We've got some experts that we've got coming on. Very exciting. I'm very excited about that. And so we will together interview them and ask you that sort of conversation. And so it still has that same flavour of. I like thinking about it as inviting people to participate in the kind of process of critical thinking around these issues. So rather than it being a policy podcast where we just talk about big drive bits of writing in terms of policy. We're talking about big ideas and thinking critically about them and then inviting other people through the podcast experience to listen in on that. And to a degree participate as well. So if you are listening in live or if you're listening back later remember to do this next time. Please participate by the Q&A function that we've got going live with this. So if you have a question for us or our guests that come on later in the semester. Just chuck it in the Q&A part and we'll be able to respond to that line. Which is exciting. I hope you can give it a look at that. I love that. It feels like a natural evolution or extension of the policy podcast that you had before. Because now we're actually having audience participation. Yeah, hopefully. Ideally. And if you're feeling like you don't want to be brave and putting it out of their life, that's okay. If you're a student listening to the podcast, you could also put it on the discussion boards on our topic page. You can put questions up there. We're happy to respond to those in the next episode and other things that might come up as well. So there's a few different opportunities to participate really, which is exciting. The other thing to say about this time is that we will have a bit of that interview. But we're also going to have a general bit of discussion about some policy that are happening this week. So it's kind of an exciting time to do a podcast like this. It is. It is. Here in South Australia released. Yeah, so there's an election obviously having in a couple of weeks. And I'm quite excited about talking about some of the policies that are coming out. No, actually, I did want to ask you. Oh, yeah, perfect. So we do know that this is primarily for bachelor's and master's students in social work. So as someone who's just coming into this, why do you think social workers need a social policy topic? Nice. Great question. Yeah, so it's an interesting question because I say this a little bit to particularly the students. So they may have heard this before. And I also kind of make a bit of a joke of it. Sometimes when I'm out in other places and they have to give my role title, because my role title is senior lecturer in social policy, which sounds impressive at one level, but also sounds really boring at the moment. And that's really the joke, right? It's that very few people like policy. And the fact that we're sitting here creating a podcast about it is kind of funny. Because it's never really going to go viral, is it? I don't think there's a bigger audience globally to make this a huge deal. You never know. Yeah. I'm not opposed to having it. I'm not going to have that possibility. We'll see. We'll track the data. It is known that kind of globally, social work students don't really enjoy on the whole, like in the majority, enjoy the podcast. The podcast, sorry, policy topics. Yeah. Enjoy podcasts. Enjoy the policy topics. They find it kind of intimidating, it's a bit unpopular, and do we say a little bit boring? So given that context, that is part of the reason why we've decided to do something like this, to try and make it a little bit more interesting and engaging. And we hope that we've designed the rest of the topic to address that. And doing things like talking about big ideas and having conversations with experts and bringing them in, rather than just giving people lots of things to read. Sorry. There is that approach, but having said that, globally, it's recognised that policy is important for social workers. Okay. It's not just something that kind of you have to do or it should have been add on, but it's an important integral part of social work training. And the kind of reason for that is that social work exists in a context, and we should talk about that context. Okay. You are a social work student. Again, the researcher says that you're probably here because you really like to talk to people and to help people. And you're motivated to do that, and that's why you came into this career, and that's what you want to do in your career. Usually in some sort of case management sort of context. Right. That's the context that most students seem to want to graduate into. But that opportunity to do that work, to get paid to do that work, is this within a policy context? It's usually government funding, non-government organisations here in Australia. That's usually the way around it works, and then kind of increasing globally. But that's how that work gets done. It says, "We want this thing done." And so they fund somebody to do it, and at the end of the day, to social workers do it. Of course, there's also social workers working in government, but it's the same kind of mechanism. Government sets the priorities, and then social workers do it. That mechanism is the policy. Right. This is the thing we want done. And so if there's a new government, or a change of direction, those whole positions, organisations, industries can change in shape. Wow. I mean, I love how you explain that. I guess one way to conceptualise the link between social work and social policy is that as you said, social workers operate within a specific policy context, and that kind of shapes a lot of the things that social workers use. For example, what services social work clients can actually access, the rules for accessing those services. But even the working lives of social workers could be impacted by policy, because then if government decides to go funding for a specific type of service or organisation, then that directly affects as well the lives of social workers. But I kind of want to link it back as well, because that's one end of the spectrum, right? And then you actually name this original podcast as policy, well, making and breaking social policy. I think that kind of hints at another link, another kind of link between social work and social policy. So can you tell us a bit more about how that title actually links back to one other roller, another type of roll for social work? Definitely. Yeah, so it's not my idea of the language, right? So it's my idea to use it to name the podcast, but it comes from, I don't know, I forget all the authors now, but there's also his first name, Alasna, his faucet. I think they've printed the book in around 2010, and they talked about this relationship as making and breaking, and it being a kind of a two-way relationship. And so that policy, in the way that we describe, can make or create opportunities for social workers to work, and so like I said, fund certain organizations, create the direction of the policy, what sort of services, how much, in which way, policy sort of sets all those parameters. So it makes them, in that sense. But when they change, they can break social work, like you can say, well, you're not allowed to do that anymore, or you have to act in this way instead. And breaking can sound a bit extreme, right? But it can be, it can be, it does reflect that, and then policy doesn't always align with social work values, or social work best practices. Sometimes it might say, I don't know, like a really fundamental level, like if you are doing a case management service, and you have to deliver services to, let's say, 25 people, and you have to see them all weekly. So if you had 25 people, you had to see weekly. If you think about how much time you have in a day, seven hours, and let's say you take an hour, lunch break, or other breaks, and you might give yourself another hour to do administrative tasks, then that leaves you 5 hours in a day. And so you can see, five hours each day, over five days, is 25 people. So it gives you one hour per person per week. Which is not very long. And depending on the complexity of their needs, and the services are providing, and whether they come into you, or you're going to them, all those things, that can be a very restricting amount of time to spend with them. And my knowledge of case management services, which is maybe a little bit old, but I think it's still relatively accurate, is that case loads are rarely that low. You would know right away. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I have never worked this practitioner, but this is a very common story that you hear from people, is that there's never enough resources to attend to everyone. But I guess the interesting thing for me as well, like joining a social work department as a trained economist, is I'm finding that social work is not just about enforcing policies, or kind of like being at the receiving end of policies. What I'm learning is also that, at least in Australia, social work actually also comprises of an advocacy kind of peace, right? Because like, I guess as someone on the ground, implementing or enforcing a policy, social workers almost have this unique view about what's working, what's not working, what's being missed. And I think one key value of social work, that maybe not a lot of people appreciate about social work, is that social workers can advocate for change. And maybe this is a different interpretation of policymaking or breaking, but in that sense, I guess social workers could contribute, like, proactively, to the policy-breaking and remaking process. 100%. Absolutely. You've noted, because it's worth the two-way relationship, right? Policy can make and break social work, but social work can make and break the policy. Correct. So you can do the advocacy kind of work that you're talking about to break it, to try and change it. Or you can also just subversively resist the way that it wants. And you can look at that phrasing. If you were creatively or whatever you want to consider, so it's not breaking what you're funded for necessarily. So there was one case management service that I was part of for a while, where we were required to report on the activities that we had done with our service users. And the report was pretty minimal. Like, he only had to say some fairly straightforward facts, if you like, about what they'd achieved during their time. But we felt that the organisation felt that the report didn't do justice to the young people's lives and the complexity of their lives. And just saying they didn't achieve something doesn't speak to all the barriers they experienced, and all the effort that they may have put into almost achieving, which are still significant. So what we would do is overreport. So we would provide this incredible excess of deep-how saying, "This is all the things you need to know as well." So it's not breaking it in a sense of not delivering the service, but it's pushing back and saying, "This is a more context that you need to understand what's kind of work in great a depth." I know that. That's really inspiring. I mean, I don't know. But as a potential social work student, I feel inspired by that, because it's not just enforcing being at the receiving end, but social work can actively shape policy as well, like in small and in big ways. Totally. And if you just implement the policy as it's instructed, then you are making that policy, right? You are making it work, and maybe you're making it work in ways that you shouldn't from your values, friends. That's true. Well, that's been a really enlightening discussion about just the link between social work and social policy, I guess. But maybe now we can actually talk about some interesting policies that are coming up as part of this whole election thing. Definitely. Yeah. So it's a really good timing, I think, to run this topic. There's not always an election having, thankfully. Yeah. And so not always lots of current things, but some really interesting ones happening, I think, at the moment. It's definitely interesting to us. It is interesting to us. We are, I guess, a bit of a policy nerd. Yes. You can see. It may not be as interesting as everyone. No, that's true. But the good thing is the couple that we picked for this week, I think, relatively accessible, and quite short as well. So I'm actually going to use our massive screen behind us and see if I can bring up these two examples. Here we go. Nice. So what we have here, this is kind of weird to look at now, but let's see how we go. You can always Google these yourself as well. You want to find them and read them in more detail. But the two that we thought we'd talk about are two relatively recent policy announcements. So of course, in the lead up, we have two major parties in Australia. Generally, there is a whole conversation to be had about the challenges particularly facing the Liberal Party at the moment in Australia and nationally. But we're just going to put that aside for today. Yeah. So the two typical major parties have these two policies which are different, but they think have some interesting crossovers in the way they're talked about. So maybe we'll start with what's to start with the public school one. So this is an announcement by the current Labour government saying in their future term that they will make a bullish all public school fees. And so the backstory and context here, I think, is essentially public education is supposed to be free and accessible to everyone in Australia as compared to private education, where, of course, parents pay fees for the student that children to attend. But there are some fees that go along with attending schools and public schools. And those are typically fees that are compared to private schools relatively small. So we're talking about, I'm not sure if the list is here. So $300 for a primary school student, $700 for a secondary student. And these are materials and services charges is how they're kind of just fine. There are other things that go along with costs for attending school. And some really obvious things like a uniform, for example, you have to purchase. My kids have recently started new schools and my daughter had to get a new laptop. And so that tops down cheap. But they're additional costs. But these are just getting rid of those kind of service fees. So the justification is the interesting part for this. And they'll say one other thing, because I think you're jumping the justification stuff. But the other interesting thing is that I think the Labor Party only announced this over the weekend, or relatively recently. And I think it was just yesterday afternoon that the Liberal Party decided to match it. So they would also abolish those fees. So it looks like this would happen no matter what the election outcome is. Okay, interesting. Well, I'll throw you. What do you see here? What's your initial impressions? What are the justifications? I just remembered that one thing I wanted to mention, as we were talking about the link between social work and social policy, is that I think one of the key analytical tools or analytical skills that we want the social workers who are kind of listening here to have is the skill of policy analysis, right? Because you can't make or break a policy without having that kind of skill. So you need to be able to analyze a policy. And the whole world of policy analysis is in itself very complicated. But in this topic, there is a specific policy analysis framework that students will be learning about. And that's going to be something that is called the WPR approach. But today we're not going to be talking so much about the details of that. It's really more of explaining how policy analysis can be approached from different lenses. And you think this is where our kind of different disciplinary backgrounds is going to be really useful. Because policy analysis can be done in different ways. And so I guess relating that back into these two policies, I can start by explaining how a positivist policy analysis person or an economist, or someone who is not even just an economist, but someone who works in within a positivist policy analysis framework, how they would approach this. So the first is through the problem identification. One thing that is common in both of these policies is how they've rationalized or justified why they think these policies are warranted. And one common thing that you'll see actually is the phrase on cost of living. So for example, liberal priorities actually start to be saying "South Australians are doing it right now." And so even labor says something. We know this creates pressure on family budgets. So the discourse is about cost of living crisis essentially. So how would a positivist person actually identify that issue of cost of living or policy or price pressures, right? They would use objective quantifiable data. So for example, just over the last week, there were news articles that actually said that real wages in Australia have lagged behind inflation. So when you look at the data, you could look at the CPI, which is a consumer price index, which then changes in consumer price indices with then reflect inflation. But on the other hand, you have what you call a wage price index. And the wage price index tracks the growth in real wages. And what they found, and as the news articles have said, the WPI, the wage price index, has lagged behind the CPI, the consumer price index. So that is one kind of evidence that the positivist would cite as, you know, look at this, there's cost of living pressures, inflation, outstripping the growth in real wages. Now, the other example that I would cite as well is recently the Flinders University actually came out with this Wicked Problems report, where they actually surveyed 30,000 Australians about what are the top concerns that you have right now in Australia. And overwhelmingly, the number one, more than 60% of their respondents actually said cost of living was their top concern. So from a positivist lens, these are different sources of data that you would draw on and say, look, there is the objective problem of cost of living. And so we recognize that as a problem that exists on its own. And I'm going to stop there because I think your lens would be super different from that. Yeah, I mean, I think that's really an important starting point though. That's very clearly the justification provided in these policies. And so it's worth asking the question, you know, is there a cost of living pressure? What is that? Was that realistically look like and can we measure that in some way? So that's all really, really important. Because the other thing that immediately makes me think about is, okay, these cost of living pressure exists, does this offer anything for that? And when my immediate kind of critique of this policy would be, you're saving $732 per year per student. Is a family going to notice that in a really significant way? I think probably not. Like I think if you look at the costs that are part of our family life, I think this is one of the lower ones. Not the same as the lowest, but you know, it's over every year. Families would spend 300 bucks on food a week if that might even just be a conservative kind of estimate, depending on your family size, etc. So it's a great idea to do cost of living relief and we can tell that there are cost of living pressures. Does this policy address that? Great question. And I'll go back to our positiveist framework, great. Because that's a post, I guess, post-positivist post-structural. I don't know how you call it, but within a positiveist framework, once you've identified the problem, let's assume that the problem is a given. The problem is that there is a cost of living crisis. So what the positivist analyst would do is, if we know this is a problem, let's come up with different policy solutions. And how would they come up with that? It actually derives from causal thinking. So you would think then, all right, if we look at the household budget, what are the key items that are actually contributing to most to that household budget? And what is within the power of government to actually change that? So for example, you could say, "Oh, I'll just give income support to every South Australian family." Well, state government doesn't control income support policy federal government does, but state government control schools, state government controls transportation. So these are available policy levers from a state government perspective. Now, the next step to that is, once they have all of these feasible policy options, they would then conduct a systematic cost-benefit analysis, basically saying that if we change this much, or if we gave this much, this is how it's going to affect families and individuals in South Australia. And so the end result will be hopefully that they would have made a rational decision about which of these policy options would generate the greatest welfare for South Australian families. And so that's kind of like the linear kind of logical way a positivist would think about policy analysis in this context. And again, I think that's really great and really useful, because if we look across the kind of sweeter different policies that these parties are offering, a lot of them are about cost-living. And so it would seem that there are a few different levers that they are trying to pull and to address that. Well, I think we could argue about which one of those levers are the most effective. And there are probably some others, particularly around housing, that would be more effective to pull and that are within the scope of state government. But I think that's a really important start to that conversation. And there's another element to this which we didn't add to that, because we're just going to run out of time to talk about all the things. But there's a Greens policy, which is again very similar to this, but it goes a step further and says we should provide free education and lunches and uniforms. And so, like, whilst the costs escalate there with those, it is going to address some of those cost-living pressures in additional ways, or arguably perhaps even more tangible ways than $700 a year. Like a lunchtime program would save families more than that. And I think, you know, like an economist would argue that in every policy there's always an externality. So these are basically effects that are beyond what you originally just intended. So for example, if you make public school free, it's not that you're just helping families with a bills. You're actually helping develop human capital. And that in itself has its own benefits long term. Transportation, right? So if people take public transportation, then that might mean that they don't use their own cars, which, you know, if you follow that causal logic or reasoning could be even linked to climate change. That maybe if we reduce cars on the road, it reduces traffic, it reduces emissions. So I guess, again, from a positivist framework, you always think about what are the other broader benefits or costs that a policy might have? 100%. That's great. And some of those things are kind of present here as well, but in less of the greater than we. Sure. We haven't talked a lot about the public transport one, but we should really just include that in the conversations as well, particularly because like you just described some of the externalities, I kind of listed here at the end. Yeah. Without described as being improving our use of transport network, down to fair evasion, if that's a priority, less traffic on roads, improved the environment. Yeah. But this is where my kind of post-structuralist was particularly. Yes, I would love to hear more. I was about to ask. Right. I would look at just that element of it and say, "Well, those ideas were just jammed in at the end. Like there's about three or four ideas, fit into one sentence. The rest of it is really about cost-living." So we can ask the question, "What's the. in this topic, we're going to ask, what's the problem represented to be?" So you said that the. and a positive perspective will think about the problem as kind of existing in concrete reality. And then how do you calculate the kind of cost and benefits of that if you like? Whereas a post-structural perspective will say, "Well, the problem doesn't exist in that way. In fact, the problem is not well defined until we define it. And what we have in terms of knowledge and information about it is what defines the problem. So it doesn't really exist out there in abstract world. It only exists once we represent it in a particular way. And that is the problem representation. We'll talk about it in this topic. And that's why we interrogate knowledges. We interrogate the information that we use. Because that tells us how the problem is being represented. So that's a really interesting question, I think, to ask with these policies, because we go, "Okay, well, what's it represented to be? What's the discourse?" Which is also some language that you were using as well. And the discourse is around cost-living. So that's the major argument provided, or language being used, the discourse, the knowledge being used to present this problem. But it doesn't have to be the only way to present this problem. I think this problem, particularly of public schooling and public transport, has historically been framed in a very different way. And particularly from some of these sort of different parties. The example is the Labour Party actually starts with, we believe public education is a fundamental right. And so that's a right-space discourse that's different to a cost of living pressure. Similar to the liberal party where they've got all these additional ideas at the end, they kind of the Labour Party tructose ideas at the start, and then move on into cost-living. So it kind of is mentioned once and then we go through. So if we think about a representation of the problem, and we have the cost of living as one way to represent it, this is a problem of cost of living, reduced the cost of school and proves a cost of living, public education can be thought about in a different representation, which is rights. And your analysis kind of hinted to that before you said it's a public, to the public good, to have a better educated populace. But how we're thinking about that good might be slightly different. It's a good in terms of if the population is better educated, then we're likely to get better employment or produce better goods, and so it's good for the economy. Whereas this rights perspective says, no, it's good for people. It's good for a person to be better educated and has access to education. There should be a right for them as a person to do that. Which in theory aligns a little bit better with say that the foundational roots or what we might typically think of as a Labour Party policy, because they have their foundations, their history and the workers movement and in representing the working class. And so typically they have been on the side of providing rights to access different kinds of public services. And hence the public education bit, right? Like it's a public service, people should be able to access that if they have that right. Similarly with public transport, right? You can make the same kind of idea that people have a degree of right to access or at least there is a good, a public good for government providing access to transport rather than being an individualised experience. So that's I think a different style than ours. It is definitely different, because it's almost like even if it's trying to do the same thing, which is like caught public transport fees or provide public education for free. I guess it's how it's framed, that is very different, right? Because like a positivist would then think about outcomes, always thinking into outcomes. Like yes, if we provide public education for free, you get all of these outcomes down. They're a better employment, better economic security, etc. But you're saying that maybe it can exist just because it is right. Like just the fact that it is right warrants the policy itself, which is a very different way of thinking. And I think it's probably a harder way to think at the moment, because so often the justifications in policy are economic. Like there's almost no argument with an economic policy at the moment. Like you just say, this will be better for the economy, you can't really, I can't owe you against that. And that's often the discourse that we see between the major parties in Australia as well is like, who's the better economic manager, and that ultimately swings people's brains. So it's not, I don't suppose it's not that one is inherently better than the other. Right, and they can coexist. That seems like you're right. Although they don't always. Usually not. Like usually it's one has a dominant side of the other. And I think the value of this WPR approach that we're getting. I love that you're getting to that, yes. I was going to ask. Like obviously, you know, there's even within the world of post-structuralism, which is the world where you come from. There seems to be different approaches, right? So WPR, what the problem is represented to be, is only one of many possible approaches in that world. So I guess one question that students might have, one question I have as well is, what's special about the WPR approach? Why is that the approach raising is something? Yeah, similarly, I don't think necessarily one approach is better than the other, but this one is quite good. And I think it does help for a social work perspective, which again, this is where this is podcast and this conversation is kind of grounded in, because that's where the topics that it's created for. So if you're a social worker, I think there should be an immediate level of discomfort that comes with and justification is based, purely on economics. Now say that kind of carefully, because obviously economics are part of the world that we're in, and we, unless we start again from scratch and get rid of capitalism, which some sort of, not few people would be against, then we would, we have to kind of work in the space that we're around the standard economy. So the economics do help provide a certain standard living in Australia. But social work as a profession is a values based profession, and so it starts from there, and one of the fundamental values is respectful persons, which is a rights based perspective. And so if you are looking at a balance of, you know, it is this policy or other decisions, practice decisions that social workers have, or might make, then the rights based perspective should be strongly represented in their values or orientation from a professional practice perspective. So the good thing about the WPR approach is that it is critical, but it's not necessarily cynical. It doesn't just see all politics as bad. It would see all politics as potentially dangerous, kind of paraphrase, Shilfiko. So the theory that we're drawing on is, as we've mentioned, post-structuralists and a lot of social theory will link that back to Michelle Foucault, French theorist talking about power. And so Foucault would talk about his job being not about saying everything is bad, but it's pointing out the things that are dangerous because they appear neutral. Because they appear neutral, you don't see the power that is operating in them, and that his task was to kind of point it out. So the WPR approach kind of picks up on that and says, "Our job is to think critically, not necessarily cynically, about where power is operating." And so when we look at a policy like this, we see that the problem is represented in a powerful way. This is good for cost of living. Everyone goes, "Yeah, my budget is too tight." Or like, "It's actually really expensive things. That's a great idea." It's presented powerfully, but is that the only representation of a problem, or even necessarily the best one, or even necessarily the one that most aligns with our professional values. And so it helps us to look past that initial representation and see other ones. Yeah, I love how you explain that. And I think, you know, again, bringing it back to the social work focus. It's not that we don't want social work students to have, to not have economic literacy. In fact, if anything, we want social workers to be familiar, at least with the economic justification for policies. But I think by using a WPR approach, we're almost like going one level higher and saying, "Economics is only a part of a broader picture." I think what the WPR approach is, it allows us to look at unexamined assumptions or pre-suppositions, which, you know, will cover in another week. But also, by doing that, we can potentially uncover new solutions to existing problems. 100%. Yeah. And so we apply different kinds of knowledge, or draw different kinds of knowledge to understand a problem. Then we can think about it differently, and then we can find different solutions to it. I also really like the idea that these problems. No, actually, I'll skip over that. Okay. I was thinking of that as something that maybe we should say for another week. Okay. And there are no. My tendency is to dive too much into the WPR approach, gets a little bit boring at the outset. And speaking of that, I'm just conscious of time, and it's 112pm. And so, for those of you who are watching our will is, and we were actually wondering whether we would have enough to discuss on this first episode. But it looks like we've had the opposite problem, which is that we've been talking too much. That is going to be a problem, especially if we plan to start with a couple of these policy things. We're going to get stuck into that. And then we're like, "Oh, yeah, we've actually got a guesswitty, the most supposed to bring out a. And let's hope that this tool is. That's right. So, look, let's end on a question. And you know, you've had a lot of guests on your podcast. You're always the one asking questions. That's my favorite position to be asking the questions. And I understand that as qualitative research, or that you would like to be the one asking questions. But for this episode in particular, let me be the one to ask you a question this time around. Okay. So, as we're kind of closing down, I am wondering if our students remember only one thing from this social policy topic. Let's say five years from now, their practitioners are out in the field. And then they remember Dr. Ben Lomair and his podcast or livestream. What is one thing that you hope students will remember or take away from this topic that they're doing now? That's a really good question. I think I would really like if students felt like they could and wanted to be able to have conversations about policy. Which is, it sounds like a very modest aim, right, in some sense. But given the context that we've talked about, where people come in not really necessarily wanting or feeling like they can do that, I think it's actually quite a challenging aim culturally as well. Like Australians tend not to talk about politics too much. But then we have this kind of global phenomenon at the moment where it is quite a bit of heat in the political conversation. There's a lot of division, a lot of extremist views emerging. And so it gets really difficult to have these kind of conversations. And I think about family and friends who I would like, yeah, I probably wouldn't talk to them about that. But I think really important for all the reasons that we've talked about. Social work internationally in Australia as well has had a strong political element to it in the past. Because it's not a neutral, we talk about values array, but it's not a neutral discipline. It is something that has a political agenda if you like. And those are around equality, rights, those sort of big issues. And has had been successful with publics. So if people can come in and go, no, we had conversations. I have things to say it does connect to my professional values. And if better, I have a framework for thinking critically about it. Excellent, that would be a win. Exceeding expectations. That would be an excellent question. Alright, I think that's really good. That's probably a good point for us to sign off on. Thank you so much for the question. Thank you. Thanks for listening. The music in this episode is by Anthem of Rain, source from the free music archive.org. There are links and resources that were mentioned by the guests in the episode. In the show notes, along with links to their social media and my social media stuff, you can check that out there. If you really like the episode, please do all the regular things, like, share, comment, all that stuff.