How did we get here, and why does Australia, allegedly the land of the fair go, fail to make progress on lifting the bottom 10% out of poverty?
Ronald Henderson, the chair of Australia’s only comprehensive inquiry into poverty, had what a friend called “an offended conscience”. His inquiry, whose main report was released a few months before the Whitlam government was dismissed in 1975, did as much as any single act before or after it to prick the bubble that Australia was a country of the fair go for all.
To read it is to be struck by how much has changed – women have poured into the workforce, we have been buffeted by globalisation and a rise in precarious employment – but also how much has stayed the same. Henderson insisted that poverty was a moral question. “Poverty is not just a personal attribute: it arises out of the organisation of society,” he said, a statement at the heart of the tension over poverty today. And a few years later: “For some 2 million people, including over three quarters of a million children to be left in deep poverty in this rich country is a disgrace.”
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2Ixv346
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