This paper examines national and spatial trends in the number and proportion of children with jobless parents during the past decade. At the national level, we found that the number of dependent children living in households where no parent had a job fell from around 756,000 in 1995-96 to around...

Despite the widely-acknowledged importance of high quality, affordable child care, quantitative research into child care policy in Australia is relatively limited. In this study, recently-released data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ 1999 and 2002 Child Care Surveys are used to...

Currently there is only a scant literature available on the business cycle effect upon the private rate of return to higher education in Australia. This is despite the expectation that the business cycle would be of a significant consequence to the relative income of degree holders. This paper...

There have been substantial changes in the costs and benefits of investment in tertiary education in Australia in the past twenty years. This paper compares the ex ante private rate of return to investment in a university education based on cross section data, for cohorts studying at the time of...

Given their ongoing economic disadvantage, many Indigenous families are long-term dependents on social security income support. Their well-being continues to be a critical challenge for government and Indigenous organisations. The paper presents an analysis of quantitative and qualitative data...

This paper reports the results of a case study of an Affirmative Action program developed by the National Australia Bank (NAB) to promote employment opportunities for Indigenous Australians. The program is part of a Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP) launched by NAB in 2008 to strengthen the...

Much research about child poverty and disadvantage provides national estimates of child wellbeing, due to the ready availability of microdata at the national level. However, an increasing body of evidence suggests that there can be major differences in wellbeing between children living in...