Watch the Queensland Parliament or Federal Parliament live online and observe the operations of Parliament during parliamentary business or Question time for at least an hour and write a report (report style) on what you observed and what you learnt about the operation of policy and Parliament. In your report you must link your observations and the content of the discussion with theory and literature from the course. (Watching an hour live is not necessarily, I can provide a transcript that I found.)

Provide a reference list which conforms to APA reference style.

You need to link information about social policy from the first lecture and information about values and principles and formal government institutions from the second and third lectures and any readings that you think are relevant to support your points.

It is hard to clearly outline exactly what you need to address because it will depend on what it debated in parliament when you watch/go there, and which parliament session you watch, however, things you could look for may include:

– A brief outline about the context e.g. is this federal parliament or state parliament; is it the House of Representatives or the Senate, how are they different and why?

– What was happening at the time e.g. was the opposition party questioning the government about its policy agenda; was the government outlining its policy agenda, was legislation being debated?

– What do you think the policies of the government and/or opposition are from what you heard? (You don’t have to have a full analysis of this at this point). How does this fit with ideology/values?

– How do you think the government and/or opposition sees the respective balance between the roles of the state/government, market/economy, community and families?

– Did you see any impacts for social work and social work clients in the debate?

These are just suggestions to get you thinking and are not comprehensive.

Both the Australian and Queensland Government Parliamentary websites provide quite a bit of information that you can use to assist you understand the respective government systems and you can reference this material.