Moving the Conversation Forward: A Decade of Reform Recommendations for the Community Services Sector

A partnership between the Centre for Social Impact UNSW and the Community Services Industry Alliance (CSIA) has examined a decade of reforms for the community services sector, scrutinising over 92 Commonwealth-level reviews from the Productivity Commission, Royal Commissions and Senate Enquiries.

The research found that these bodies have been making the same recommendations year after year, suggesting that the government is caught in a continuous cycle of reviews without fully enacting or implementing recommendations.

Launched in December 2020, the resulting report, Moving the Conversation Forward: A Decade of Reform Recommendations for the Community Services Sector, asks the question: how does the sector move forward in calling for change? The themes analysed throughout the report, which spans from 2008 to the present, indicate that the big issues impacting the industry are long-running and require refreshed collective leadership to shift the dial.

CSIA will use this report to support deeper analysis of these themes and their effectiveness, highlighting areas of successful reform to break the pattern of constantly reviewing the problem.