Australian Welfare and Work Lab

Professor Mark Considine, Director

Professor Mark Considine is Professor of Political Science at the University of Melbourne. He is one of Australia’s most respected political scientists, with a career spanning both academic research and applied policy work for government and civil society organisations. He and his collaborators have won numerous major international research prizes, including the Marshall Dimmock Award (2000) and the Jan Kooiman Award (2013), for their comparative work on the contracting of employment services and the governance of welfare-to-work program delivery.

Mark has been an advisor to the OECD Local Economic and Employment Development Program, and has worked with state and federal governments in the design of social services and strategies for place-based innovation. He assisted the Brumby Government with its review of employment programs and was seconded by the Gillard Government to the departmental Working Group to review the jobactive Star Ratings system. He was later appointed to chair the federal Working Groups charged with developing a quality measure for rating job agencies.

Dr Michael McGann, Director

Dr Michael McGann specialises in the sociology of work and social policy on employment, with a particular focus on issues related to welfare-to-work and the marketisation of public employment services as well as ageing and employment.

From 2020 - 2022, he led the EU Horizon 2020 project, Governing Activation in Ireland. Prior to rejoining Melbourne, I was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the Social Sciences Institute of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Previously, I was also an ARC Research Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne (2012-2019) and a researcher for the Parliament of Victoria's Family and Community Development Committee and the Brotherhood of St Laurence's Research and Policy Centre.

Professor Jenny M. Lewis

Professor Jenny Lewis is Professor of Public Policy at the University of Melbourne, and was the Founding Director of the Policy Lab at the University of Melbourne. Jenny is currently President of the International Research Society for Public Management.

The author of six books and more than 70 journal articles and book chapters, Jenny is one of Australia’s most respected experts on public policy, with a career spanning policy roles in state treasury departments, academic research, and applied policy work for government organisations. This has included consulting for the Department for Victorian Communities on approaches to evaluating community development partnerships, and assisting the National Public Health Partnership and VicHealth to develop strategic public health priorities.

Vale Associate Professor Siobhan O’Sullivan

Associate Professor Siobhan O’Sullivan was an Associate Professor in Social Policy at the University of New South Wales and a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. She specialised in the study of welfare states, especially their delivery of employment services and ‘mission drift’. Her recent research focused on the delivery of contracted employment services.

Siobhan was a pivotal member of the Welfare to Work team from 2008 to 2023. We respectfully acknowledge the sad passing of Siobhan in 2023 and recognise her enormous contribution to our research over 15 years of working together.

Dr Phuc Nguyen

Dr Phuc Nguyen is a Senior Lecturer at La Trobe University, Australia. Before joining La Trobe University in 2018, Dr Phuc Nguyen was a lecturer at the Foreign Trade University in Vietnam, and a research fellow at the University of Melbourne (Australia). She also worked as an import-export specialist. Her current research interests include welfare state, especially the delivery of employment services; and service supply chain management. She has published three book chapters and nearly 20 journal articles in Public Management Review, Journal of Social Policy, Public Administration, Journal of Social Policy and Administration, Australian Journal of Political Science and Third Sector Review.

Dr Sarah Ball

Dr Sarah Ball is a lecturer in public policy. She is currently working on the ARC Linkage Project titled ‘The new digital governance of welfare-to-work’ and an ESRC project exploring 'Ethics and expertise in times of crisis: Learning from international varieties of ethics advice'.

Prior to this she completed her PhD at the Institute of Social Science Research at the University of Queensland. Her research explored the use of behavioural insights and experimental methods in the development of social policy in the Australian Federal Government. She has worked for both the Australian Public Service Commission and the Department of Social Services, where she developed a deep interest in public administration, knowledge sharing and evidence-based policy.

Dr Corey Carter

Dr Corey Carter is a postdoctoral researcher on the ARC Linkage Project titled ‘The new digital governance of welfare-to-work’. He holds a PhD in economics from Federation University and specialises in factors affecting labour force participation and employment in regional areas. Prior to his current role, he served as a research fellow studying labour force participation in the Latrobe-Gippsland region as part of a project commissioned by the Latrobe Valley Authority and the Victorian State Government.

Dr Emily Corbett, Research Coordinator

Dr Emily Corbett is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, and the Research Coordinator for the Australian Welfare and Work Lab. She is currently exploring best practice models in employment services provision, with a focus on trauma-informed care principles.

Emily completed her industry-based PhD with the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society (ARCSHS) at La Trobe University, in collaboration with the Centre Against Sexual Assault Central Victoria (CASA-CV). Her research provided insights into rural women's experiences of sexual revictimisation, viewed through a material feminist lens. Emily brings extensive expertise in trauma-informed practices and methodologies to her current role, backed by nearly a decade of professional and volunteer experience in the domestic and sexual violence sectors.

Dr Lutfun Nahar Lata

Dr Lutfun Nahar Lata is a Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Lutfun's primary research area focuses on work, welfare to work and labour movement. She has written about gig economy, urban marginality, poverty governance, housing and place-based disadvantage. She is a mixed-methods researcher with extensive experience in conducting and publishing qualitative, quantitative and digital research and working with multidisciplinary teams that include stakeholders from academia, industry and local and central governments.

Lutfun is the author of Spatial Justice, Contested Governance and Livelihood Challenges in Bangladesh (Routledge 2023). Her research has been published in a number of high-ranking international journals such as Current Sociology, The Sociological Review, Sociology Compass, Gender, Work & Organization, Cities, Geographical Research, Housing Policy Debate, and Government Information Quarterly.

Associate Professor Sue Olney

Associate Professor Sue Olney is the UoM-BSL Principal Research Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Her work examines market-based reform of public services, with a focus on disability services and employment services. Her research on services and supports available to people with disability of working age outside the NDIS, conducted in partnership with the Brotherhood of St. Laurence, was cited in the final reports of both the Disability Royal Commission and the NDIS Review in 2023.

Sue has worked in universities, government and in the not-for-profit sector, and been involved in a range of cross-government, cross-sector and interdisciplinary research projects, government and community sector initiatives, committees and working groups to promote access and equity in employment, education, training and disability services in Australia and internationally. She is on the editorial board of the Australian Journal of Public Administration and is the Director of the social policy discussion platform Power to Persuade.

Dr Jeremiah Thomas Brown

Dr Jeremiah Thomas Brown is a Lecturer in Public Policy in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Jeremiah’s research interests are in the relationship between freedom and public policy, and the role that both organisations and the welfare state play in shaping the wellbeing outcomes of democratic citizens. He is particularly interested in the principles that underpin policy choices, and the impact that both government and organisations can have in supporting the economic dignity of people and improving wellbeing outcomes in people’s lives.

His recent work analyses the role that administrative burden and application forms can play in preventing access to social security support, and how using a systems approach to financial wellbeing can improve individual financial wellbeing outcomes. He is currently working on the role that the transition to digital first welfare policy is having on transforming the citizen-state relationship, and the administrative burdens this may be presenting for some citizens in need of support from the state.

Dr Aaron Hart

Dr Aaron Hart is social policy scholar who works in the Sociology discipline at the School of Social and Political Sciences, where he is a Unit Coordinator in the Master of Social Policy course. His also works as Strategic Research and Evaluation Designer with Vacro—a Victorian NGO that works with people who are affected by the justice system. There, Aaron researches designs and evaluates a wide range of programs supporting post-prison reintegration across the Victoria, funded through a Victorian Government social impact bond. Aaron also helps facilitate people with lived experience to contribute to program design, advocacy and policy making.

He has previously worked on policy development for children and families affected by parental imprisonment; service system responses to place-based disadvantage; applications of the capabilities approach within social service contexts; homelessness services; responses to disengagement from employment, education and training; and out-of-home care for young people in the child protection system. Aaron has contributed to the development of submissions to government inquiries, position papers, practice frameworks, evaluations, tenders for funding in competitive environments, executive briefing papers and topical presentations to board members and government policy makers.