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 Social Policy  
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Social Policy    
 
A free society rests on strong communities of self-reliant, enlightened and independently-minded people. Good social policy enables such communities to flourish. Bad social policy kills them, albeit often inadvertently, and with the best of intentions. This is why CIS has been working in the area of social policy ever since the 1980s.

The aim of this work is to inform public debate and to promote policies that will protect individual liberties, emphasise personal responsibility and strengthen community life. Good policies should help people take control over their own lives and enable them to contribute in a positive way to the society in which they live.

In recent years, our work has focused on six major areas of social policy. Research on community has focused on strengthening informal norms of civility and autonomy and has investigated policing and penal policy. In education we have promoted the case for school choice and for higher standards and greater use of markets in schools and universities. Health is a new area of work where we consider how best to balance private and public initiatives in responding to escalating costs and rising expectations.

Work on families has collated research evidence on marriage and parenting and examined ways to strengthen family life to maintain a satisfactory ‘work-family balance.’ The work in Indigenous affairs has documented the appalling state of health, education and welfare dependency in remote and regional Australia and identified policies to put it right. Finally, research on the welfare state addresses issues of poverty and welfare reform and asks how self-reliance can be protected against the growing intrusion of government.

The rationale for the social policy research program was set out in a 2001 Occasional Paper, The Social Foundations of a Free Society, and a digest of recent social trends, State of the Nation: An Agenda for Change, was published in 2004. A full list of publications is given under each policy heading. In addition to these books and papers, research is disseminated through TV, radio and newspapers (with print articles reproduced as CIS ‘Executive Highlights’), and through conferences, seminars and workshops.

 
Peter Saunders
Peter Saunders has been Social Research Director at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney since September 2001. He is also Professor Emeritus of the University of Sussex in England, where he taught sociology for nearly twenty-five years. He has held visiting academic posts at universities in Australia (the University of Melbourne and RMIT), New Zealand (The University of Canterbury), Germany (The University of Bremen) and the United States (Brown University). Between 1999 and 2000 he was Research Manager at the Australian Institute of Family Studies in Melbourne.

His research over the years has focused mainly on social policy and social inequality. His major academic publications include empirical studies of social mobility (Unequal But Fair, 1996), the impact of mass home ownership on British society (A Nation of Home Owners, 1990) and the political and social significance of privatisation (Privatization and Popular Capitalism, 1994). He has also published several theoretical and analytical works including Capitalism: A Social Audit (1995), Social Class and Stratification (1990) and Social Theory and the Urban Question (1981/1986).  He is co-author of a best-selling text book on British politics, now in its third edition, and of a student text on survey methodology (The Survey Methods Handbook, 2004).

Professor Saunders’s research at CIS has focused mainly on issues of poverty, welfare reform and tax reform, and these interests are reflected in CIS publications such as Poverty in Australia: Beyond the Rhetoric (2002), Australia’s Welfare Habit, and how to kick it (2004), Taxploitation: The case for Income Tax Reform (2006), and The Government Giveth, and the Government Taketh Away (2007).  He also writes regularly for newspapers and is a frequent contributor to radio and television current affairs programmes.     
 
 

 
 
 
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