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The article focuses on the Australian Living Standards Study of 5000 families in 12 rural and urban areas of Australia. The survey covered a host of issues associated with living standards and the contribution that service provision makes to family well-being. The study showed that the middle urban areas had a lower problem profile than other geographic areas in the study, as far as providers and parents were concerned, and the two outer urban areas of Campbell town and Elizabeth/Munno-Para featured among the top areas in many of the issues mentioned. In a needs-based allocation of resources, the funding of services for marital problems might therefore need a slightly different geographic formula from the allocation for child abuse, if the responses of providers are anything to go by. Those differences may not be major, but they do ensure that we cannot assume that outer areas are significantly more disadvantaged than other urban areas in all issues. They also indicate that problems can vary across the rural sector, sometimes mire roring urban trends but at other times not.

This article reports that the 1996 divorce figures in Australia showed a rise in the age specific divorce rate to the highest level for more than a decade. The annual rate at which children under 18 years have experienced the divorce of their parents, over the period since 1976, is shown in the article. The article depicts the numbers of children aged 0-17 years in each year whose parents divorced, expressed as a rate for all children under 18, and is referred to as the child specific rate of parental divorce. One of the consequences of the divorce of parents is, of course, the creation of a one-parent family. Hence the observable difference in growth between children impacted by divorce and children in one-parent families suggests one of two possibilities. The first is that children in one-parent families are more frequently being drawn from sources other than the divorce of parents. The second possibility is that a lone parent is spending longer in a one-parent family because of the slowdown of exit factors.

The article focuses on various issues discussed in the Australian Living Standards Study of 5000 families in 12 rural and urban areas of Australia. The major issues affecting service delivery for outer urban areas were high number of low income families, high cost of travel to work for residents, absence of important facilities from the area, difficulty of attracting services to the area and high number of non-English-speaking residents. The major issues affecting service delivery for middle urban areas were high number of non-English-speaking residents, high number of low income families, and scarcity and high cost of available land. The major issues affecting service delivery for inner urban areas were high number of low income families, high number of non-English-speaking residents, high number of Aboriginal residents, scarcity and cost of available land, high cost of living, and absence of important facilities. The major issues affecting service delivery for rural-remote areas were high number of low income families, difficulty of attracting services to the area, high cost of transporting goods to the area, high cost of travel, high cost of living in the area, absence of important facilities, and the distance from other services and facilities.