The limitations of income‐based poverty lines are widely acknowledged, but Australia lags behind many other countries in implementing new measures of social disadvantage based on the deprivation approach. A new suite of questions included in wave 14 of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics...

Social vulnerability for older persons, especially older women, due to insufficient income in retirement and earlier in life and low market earnings may be attributable to many sources, both demographic and economic, in our globalizing world. This paper examines the problems of population...

Shortly after its re-election in March 1993, the Australian government established an expert committee to advise it on how best to respond to the unemployment crisis. Between May 1990 and May 1993, the total number of unemployed people in Australia rose from 549,000 to 924,000. Over the same...

Those elements of activity testing described as ‘mutual obligation’ are becoming increasingly important in social security policy towards unemployed people. In order to provide more information about public attitudes to this policy, the SPRC included a set of questions in its survey on...

The completion of the recent SPRC budget standards study represents the latest in a long line of Australian budget studies. Although the modern research on budget standards is more sophisticated than budget analyses conducted earlier this century, there is considerable similarity in the...

This paper provides an overview of the historical development of poverty research in Australia, focusing on the impact of Seebohm Rowntree’s first study of poverty in York, conducted one hundred years ago. It also reviews some of the recent Australian evidence on the extent of poverty and...

This Discussion Paper brings together two short papers reflecting on current proposals for reform in income support policy in the context of continuing high levels of unemployment and underemployment. In the first, Sheila Shaver reviews the conflicting arguments for Participation Income and...

Social policy is having to adapt to changes in the Australian economy and in Australian society more generally. The role of the state is receding and expectations of what it can achieve are being lowered at a time when the economy is generating increased material prosperity combined with growing...

This paper discusses issues associated with the measurement of poverty and how future trends in work and welfare will affect poverty in Australia, One of the main aims is to illustrate why and in what sense the measurement of poverty remains important in the broader policy debate. The role of...