Adept Economics would like to congratulate Aurelius Consulting and IBKN for placing as winner and runner-up respectively in the UQES & PPES Adept Economics Policy Pitch Competition held on 17 September 2020. Twenty teams from the University of Queensland applied to the competition and the judging panel was thoroughly impressed by the quality of their policy proposals. In this post, Adept Economics is proud to showcase the policy pitches from Aurelius Consulting and IBKN.
Aurelius Consulting takes a three-pronged approach to address homelessness in Queensland, recommending policies targeted at moving the homeless into permanent housing, and preventing those on the verge of homelessness from becoming homeless. We first recommend the introduction of a Housing First model of providing permanent accommodation, due to its financial benefits to government and increased resident retention rates. We additionally recommend the expansion of social housing through capital grants, to correct the decline in the proportion of social dwellings and build public equity. We finally recommend a top-up to Commonwealth rental assistance (CRA), as almost half of CRA recipients still experience rental stress.
Aurelius Consulting’s PPT slides are available here.
IBKN recommended tackling the issue of youth unemployment via a two-pronged policy overhaul. The first facet of the recommendation was the ‘Youth Future Guarantee’ which ensures that every youth has access to either a job, or vocational education and training which fill a skills gap in the labour market. The second pillar of the proposal was the streamlined governance structure, in which a singular government agency would be formed to oversee the implementation of these youth unemployment programs. This body would also aggregate the relevant data between various government departments, allowing for more effective monitoring and evaluation of policies.
IBKN’s PPT slides are available here.
While Adept Economics does not necessarily endorse these policy solutions, we would like to once again congratulate all participating teams for setting an outstanding level of competition. We trust that the competition was successful in its attempt to expose students to the difficult and interesting problems they may confront in public policy in the future.
Adept Economics looks forward to supporting future student competitions, and is open to partnering with student organisations from across Australia.