Established in 2001, Families Australia provides policy advice to the Federal Government and Parliament on ways to increase the wellbeing of families, especially those experiencing the greatest vulnerability and marginalisation. It does so on behalf of around 800 member organisations around Australia, all of whom work to advance family wellbeing and participation. Between 2005 and 2021, Brian Babington was the Chief Executive Officer of Families Australia, and since 2006 he has worked with Lyndall Strazdins to generate policy engagement and interest in (and reconceptualise) family wellbeing, work and family, the importance of time, the valuing of care and relationships, and children’s voice in policy thinking.

 

Together this partnership generated 4 large policy forums, a series of workshops and agenda setting seminars, policy think pieces and ideas, most were hosted or co-hosted by the Federal Government, Families Australia and ANU. The seminar will start with a conversation about how this partnership started, how it evolved, what we hoped to achieve and why we did, and didn’t achieve, what we hoped for, then a dialogue and Q and A with the audience.

 

Professor Lyndall Strazdins is a leader in work, family and health, authored or co-authored > 150 peer reviewed journal papers, commissioned reports or discussion papers. She has been a lead or co-lead on competitive grants, consultancies and partnerships > $8M, an ARC Future Fellow and awarded the EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie International Fellowship Seal of Excellence in 2017. Her papers have been repeatedly ranked among the top 5 in their year in the work and family field.

 

Professor Strazdins leads research on time as a determinant of health. Lack of time is the most common reason for not eating healthy food or being physically active and her work shows why time is a problem and for whom. Most recently she has been using new methods to reveal the health harms of long work hours, which are reinforcing social and gender inequity, including among the ageing workforce.

 

Dr Brian Babington AM has worked to improve child, family and community welfare in Australia and overseas in a career spanning more than four decades. In 2021, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for service to child safety and wellbeing initiatives. Between 2005 and 2021, Brian was the Chief Executive Officer of Families Australia – a national, peak, not-for-profit organisation – and played a leading role in relation to the National Framework for Protecting Australia’s Children, Australia’s first-ever plan to improve child safety and wellbeing. Brian’s international work focuses on promoting child rights.

 

He is the author of For the benefit of children alone? The story of Indonesia’s orphanages and founder of the Indonesian Orphanages Research Centre. He holds a PhD in public policy and child rights from The Australian National University, is a Sir Winston Churchill Fellow, and an alumnus in public leadership from Harvard University. His first published books focused on resilience-building. As a diplomat in the 1980s and 1990s, he represented Australia in Myanmar and at the Australian Mission to the United Nations in New York on community development and humanitarian issues.