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Homeownership has traditionally been high in Australia, where a broad range of tax and social security concessions are designed to promote ownership and reduce housing costs for owners. These have allowed homeowning age pensioners to avoid poverty despite receiving a pension that is low by international standards among high‐income countries. This approach provides the fourth pillar of the Australian retirement income support system, an example of 'Australian exceptionalism'. We examine recent trends in two measures of social disadvantage—poverty and deprivation—focusing on the changing role and impact of homeownership and housing costs. The comparisons reveal important differences in how housing costs are incorporated into the estimation of their impact and in how different social groups have fared, although our findings also indicate that the groups with highest incidence of poverty and deprivation have benefited least from the gains that others experienced over the period examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Income‐based studies of child poverty treat children and young people as effectively invisible and determine the poverty status of families or households on the basis of information that is provided by, and is primarily about, adults. In contrast, the consensual deprivation approach provides a way of developing measures that reflect the views of children about what constitutes poverty and can be applied to data that children themselves provide. This paper extends earlier Australian studies of adult deprivation by applying a similar approach to children aged 11–17 attending a NSW government high school. Focus groups were conducted with children to help identify items regarded as essential for all children, and the results informed the development of a survey that was completed by over 2,600 students. The survey asked about 24 items, 18 of which were retained after statistical testing, and these items form the basis of the deprivation analysis. The findings indicate that a substantial proportion of survey respondents experience either or both of material deprivation and social exclusion. A new Child Deprivation Index (CDI) is developed and used to compare the circumstances of different groups, highlighting some of the factors that are associated with higher levels of deprivation and providing some initial pointers to possible underlying causes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: 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 in Australia (HILDA) survey allows the deprivation approach to be applied. This article describes the advantages of the deprivation approach and shows that while the income and deprivation approaches can produce similar overall results, the circumstances of some sub‐groups vary greatly according to which measure is used. A measure based on deprivation alone and/or a combined measure would be an important complement to conventional income‐based poverty rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]