The Australian Welfare and Work Lab pioneers collaborative research with industry partners on new ways of commissioning and delivering employment services to help some of the most disadvantaged people in Australia into sustainable employment.
The Lab builds on a program of policy-engaged research that has been tracking the impacts of welfare reform on the frontline delivery of employment services in Australia and internationally for over 20 years.
The Lab is focused on developing collaborative research partnerships with industry and government to test practice innovations in welfare-to-work programs and to build the evidence base for ‘best practice’ models in the governance and delivery of employment services.
- For more information or to work with us on our research, please email us at:
- welfare-worklab@unimelb.edu.au
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.
Dr Emily Corbett, Research Coordinator
Dr Emily Corbett is a Research Fellow and the Research Coordinator of the Australian Welfare and Work Lab at the University of Melbourne. Emily works closely with government and industry partners to understand how public and social policy is designed, implemented and experienced on the ground. Her current research focuses on welfare governance and the development of trauma-informed and relational approaches to frontline public administration.
Emily's work is deeply informed by critical and intersectional feminist research methodologies. She holds an industry-based PhD from the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health & Society (ARCSHS), La Trobe University and the Centre Against Sexual Assault Central Victoria (CASA-CV). Prior to her PhD Emily spent a decade working and volunteering in the domestic and sexual violence sector.
Fellows
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 Chabel Khan
Dr Chabel Khan is a Senior Research Fellow in the Australian Welfare and Work Lab and a political sociologist and policy scholar whose research critically examines welfare governance, labour market activation, and the shifting policy and institutional landscape of social care. His current work focuses on improving disability-focused employment services through service innovation panels, action-learning and knowledge mobilisation methods, with an emphasis on strengthening connections between research, policy and practice.
He brings extensive experience in complex consortium research, including multi-partner projects involving universities, government, community organisations and service providers. As a former Research Fellow in the Melbourne Social Equity Institute (2023–2026), he worked on the ARC Linkage project Activating Employment Futures Through Work Integration Social Enterprise (LP220100323), investigating how jobs-focused social enterprises can reshape employment pathways and employment service delivery. Across his research, he examines the lived impacts and logics of welfare and employment service systems, and explores how more inclusive forms of social care and economic participation can be advanced through the design and governance of welfare institutions, public services and social innovations.
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 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.
Dr Michael Moran
Dr Michael Moran is an Academic Specialist and Lecturer in Social Enterprise in the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Prior to joining the University, he was a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Social Impact (CSI) Swinburne and National Education Director for the CSI network administered by the UNSW Sydney. Mike is a political scientist whose research uses institutional theories from policy and organisational studies in exploring the institutions and actors in the social economy including charities and other not-for-profits (NFPs) (particularly work-integration social enterprises) and philanthropy and charitable trusts ('private foundations'). He explores the relationship between these actors and the social service system and how this is shaped by policy, law and regulation. His current research focus is on resourcing dynamics – how organisations are funded and financed – including through blended social finance and impact investment; outcomes-based contracting in public sector commissioning, particularly social impact bonds, and the role of support programs (accelerators and incubators) in developing early-stage social enterprise.
Mike has published in leading journals including Public Administration Review, Journal of Business Ethics, Policy & Politics, Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management and Australian Journal of Public Administration and has served on the international advisory boards of Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly and Policy & Politics.
Associate Researchers
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.
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 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. Her research explores how knowledge and evidence are translated into policy design and implementation. Previously she explored the use of behavioural insights, experimental methods, codesign and is now interrogating digital transformation in the development of policy.
Dr Ball is currently completing an 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'. In August 2025, she will be undertaking a DECRA project titled 'Behind the Screens: Interrogating Digital Service Design and Delivery'. Prior to undertaking her PhD, Dr Ball worked in the Australian Public Service, where she developed a deep interest in public administration, knowledge sharing and evidence-based policy.
PhD Students
Jonas Lim
Jonas Lim is a PhD graduate research student in Political Science at the University of Melbourne. Before joining the lab, he was a social policy analyst with the Singapore Administration with experience in street-level bureaucracy and designing innovative approaches in helping low-income families access state assistance.
His research project looks at the concept of relational bureaucracy, more specifically at how governments and employment service providers can invest in building relationships with their citizens/clients to enable better welfare-to-work outcomes. More broadly, this relational approach is compared with traditional active labour market policies and what it means to provide “effective” welfare. On top of his research, he is currently working with the lab as its research assistant on a key project in Strengthening Participant Engagement in Employment Services.
Suzanne Findlay
Suzanne Findlay is a PhD student in the School of Social and Political Sciences. Her thesis is examining if outcomes-based contracts can be scaled and retain personalisation through a comparative examination of social impact bonds and payment by results social service delivery in Australia.
At Sacred Heart Mission she negotiated Victoria’s first social impact investment and its payment by results extension, using experiences in AustralianSuper’s infrastructure investment team and as a consultant. She is a co-author of AHURI reports on Social Impact Investing, Homelessness and Affordable Housing and worked on the 2016 and 2018 Benchmarking Impact Reports on impact investing in Australia. She holds a Master of Science (Mathematics) from the University of Melbourne and a Master of Social Investment and Philanthropy from Swinburne University of Technology.
Visiting Scholars
2025
Dr Katy Jones, Head of the Decent Work and Productivity Research Centre, Manchester Metropolitan University
In January, the Australian Welfare and Work Lab hosted Dr. Katy Jones, Head of the Decent Work and Productivity Research Centre at Manchester Metropolitan University, for a seminar titled "From Work First to Good Work? New Developments in UK Welfare and Employment Support". Dr. Jones explored recent UK employment service reforms under the new Labour government, including a renewed focus on “good work”, stronger employer engagement, local government responsibility, and a new jobs and careers service. Drawing from her research on labour market disadvantage and job quality, she examined whether these changes genuinely enhance support for those facing structural barriers. The session offered timely insights and comparative reflections for Australian policy and practice, sparking lively discussion on creating pathways to meaningful, sustainable employment.
2024
Dr Eleanor Carter, Research Director, Government Outcomes Lab, Oxford University
Research Director of the Government Outcomes Lab, Oxford University, Dr Carter’s research focuses on innovations in social policy including outcomes-based commissioning, and she is internationally renowned for her work on relational contracting, social impact bonds, and their potential to drive innovative approaches in the delivery of active labour market programs. During her visit, Dr Carter gave the plenary address at the Lab’s flagship workshop ‘Innovating employment services: where to next?’, which was attended by 47 people from across academia, industry, and government. Dr Carter also participated in an internal work-in-progress workshop with the Australian Welfare and Work Lab.
2023
Marthine Thøgersen, Oslo Metropolitan University
Marthine Thøgersen is a PhD Candidate at the Centre for the Study of Professions at Oslo Metropolitan University. In her PhD project, she is researching the organisation of service provision and interagency collaboration concerning youth not in employment, education, or training (NEETs) in Norway. Marthine is a social worker and holds a master’s degree in Collaborative Management in Health and Social Services.
2019
The Entitlement to Experiment research project hosted Niklas Andreas Andersen (University of Aalborg), and Associate Professor Jo Ingold (University of Leeds), for short visits and research collaborations.
Niklas Andersen, University of Aalborg
Niklas Andersen is a PhD Fellow at the University of Aalborg within its Centre for Labour Market Research, who is currently undertaking a research project on local innovation in social and employment services.
Associate Professor Jo Ingold, University of Leeds - now Australian Catholic University
Associate Professor Jo Ingold conducts research that focuses on the overlap between public policy and human resource management, and has led research projects studying employer engagement in welfare-to-work programs in the UK and Denmark.
2018
Dr Sophie Danneris, University of Aalborg
In 2018, the Entitlement to Experiment project hosted Dr Sophie Danneris Luthman for two months to conduct comparative work with the Employment Services research team.
Sophie holds a PhD in Sociology, and is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Department of Sociology and Social Work at Aalborg University, Denmark. Her areas of research are social and employment policies, labour market participation for hard-to-place unemployed as well as qualitative longitudinal studies, conversation analysis and practice research.
During her visit, Dr Danneris Luthman presented a public lecture on her research examining changes in the Danish approach to welfare income support for those out of work. While Denmark is widely perceived to have a more socialist welfare regime, changes in its approach over recent decades have mirrored similar developments in liberal welfare regime countries like the UK and Australia. This has been accompanied by a shift towards putting income welfare recipients into work placements and developing their work experience to transition them into employment. In her qualitative research focusing on the experience of the long-term, vulnerable unemployed, Dr Danneris Luthman shows how these large-scale ideologies play out and are negotiated locally in meetings between the recipients and the government case managers. This research provides novel insights into the experiences of the hard-to-place long term unemployed and illustrates the difficulties and frustrations they experience with the system. It sheds light on how benefits and services are received and administered as well as on what is received.
Dr Sharon Wright, University of Glasgow
Dr Sharon Wright is an international expert in welfare reform, specialising in the marketisation of employment services. Her research focuses on the lived experience of welfare policy recipients and front-line workers, and considers the agency of welfare subjects in networks of welfare governance. She is an expert Adviser to the Scottish Parliament Social Security Committee, and is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Glasgow.
The Entitlement to Experiment research project hosted Dr Wright for two weeks in 2018. During this time, she gave a keynote address at the Jobs Australia National Conference on conditionality in welfare policy, and participated in a workshop comparing implementations of conditionality in welfare-to-work policies across Australia and the U.K., jointly hosted by the Brotherhood of St Laurence and the University of Melbourne.
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Relational Contracts
An alternative approach to commissioning public services, particularly in complex areas like employment and disability services.
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Relational and trauma-informed practice in employment services
Exploring how to assist very long term unemployed jobseekers with complex challenges into employment
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The New Digital Governance of Welfare to Work
Examining the success of Workforce Australia in moving towards a 'digital first' employment system.
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Exploring reintegration programs for people leaving prison
The Australian Welfare and Work Lab is partnering with Vacro to explore their Reintegration Practice Framework for people leaving prison.
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Quickly commencing and engaging jobseekers in employment services
Opendoor is partnering with the Australian Welfare and Work Lab on a 12-month study of its organisational practices for quickly commencing and engaging jobseekers in employment services.
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SDET model: best practices in placing DES jobseekers into work
Exploring how to improve overall servicing and ultimately employment outcomes for jobseekers with intellectual and developmental disabilities
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Evaluation of Geared4Careers Youth Employment Program
This evaluation examined the program’s implementation, delivery model, and overall impact across participating schools.
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Evaluation of Pre-Employment Card Implementation
This research project evaluated the implementation of Re-employment Card program – a major shift in the Indonesian government’s approach to helping jobseekers.
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Entitlement to Experiment (2016-2019)
This major research project investigated the important organisational dynamics that are generating major changes to contemporary welfare states.
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Increasing Innovation and Flexibility (2011-2015)
This project explored how tax-funded social services are delivered by non-government agencies in Australia.
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Activating States (2008-2012)
Using benchmark data collected in 1998, the project investigated whether and how the so-called ‘activation’ of welfare clients has changed the frontline delivery of welfare-to-work services.