Taylah Bell

I believe in a fair, inclusive and compassionate Australia, where we are all supported to live a decent life, and none of us are left behind by the systems meant to support us.

I'm a community lawyer at Welfare Rights & Advocacy Service WA, where I represent people facing hardship in the social security system. I also work to reform the laws and policies behind it at Economic Justice Australia. Over the past three years I led a research project, Social Security for Women Outside Our Cities, speaking with more than 160 community workers across regional, rural, remote and very remote Australia. That work produced three reports and an evidence base for law and policy reform.

Again and again in these conversations, whatever first brought people through the door — a relationship breaking down, debt, hardship — it came back to the way our system decides who counts as a couple. These rules sound technical, but I know what they can do: they keep people tied to violent relationships, weigh them down with debt, and reach into the most private corners of their lives. They were designed many decades ago around assumptions about how we live that no longer hold.

I centre the people I work with and their experiences, and I look for practical, rights-based solutions. These rules were meant to make the system fair. Instead, they too often do the opposite.

My Fellowship will explore how other countries build better, fairer systems, and how their advocates and governments won the reforms that got them there. I'll learn from countries with different approaches — Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Austria and New Zealand— to bring home ideas for a social security system that gives us the stability and support we need to get on with our lives.