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Children's poverty has long been a central concern for policy makers and policy researchers. The body of extant research conducted and the range of programmatic interventions undertaken by successive governments in this and other countries is extraordinary. Nevertheless, children remain in poverty. Clearly there are many reasons for this, not least of which is the maintenance and intensification of market capitalism with its attendant blatant inequalities. Even so, the moral, political, social and economic imperatives for developing workable responses to children's poverty remain. This paper argues that we, in Australia, should adopt an approach increasingly taken in the UK. Drawing on, among other things, the new sociology of childhood, this approach begins not with the expertise of adult researchers and policy makers, but with that of children. In doing so, the case is made for why children's perceptions and experiences of poverty are key concerns for policy. The paper outlines in theoretical terms why children's voices matter. Invoking the new sociology of childhood and the sociology of identity, a conceptual framework for understanding why policy scholars and makers should carefully attend to the voices of their subjects is sketched - in this case, the subjects are children. Finally, some methodological implications of this for undertaking policy research informed by this approach are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A similar trend is apparent in Australian and Canadian programs to enhance work incentives and program effectiveness, but the Canadian provinces are increasingly insisting that low-income mothers with school-age children enter the workforce rather than accept social benefits to care for their children at home. There is no Canadian counterpart to the Sole Parent Pension or Parenting Allowance, although the provinces pay higher rates of social assistance to needy families than to individuals. Furthermore, there is little public support for the idea that low-income mothers should care for school-aged children at home at the taxpayer's expense. This paper discusses the similarities and differences in rhetoric and policies for low-income mothers, and seeks reasons for the stronger social support for mothering at home in Australia. Although the current discourse of economic rationalism suggests that enhancing work incentives and 'employability' will bring prosperity, this paper illustrates that neither paying mothers to care for their children at home nor pushing them into the workforce has reduced family poverty. To make employability programs more effective, governments need to deal with low female wages, the shortage and high cost of child care, and the lack of full-time permanent jobs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concern over the reliability of conventional poverty studies has focused attention on the need to demonstrate that those identified as poor are actually experiencing hardship. This paper takes a step in this direction by examining poverty using a living standards approach derived from the literature on deprivation and social exclusion. Deprivation - defined as an enforced lack of socially perceived necessities - has emerged as a way of identifying who is missing out on what the community regards as the necessities (or essentials) of life. Social exclusion - which exists when individuals do not participate in key activities in society - has opened up new areas of inquiry relating to a lack of connectedness between individuals, the communities in which they live, and key economic and social processes. The findings indicate that many Australians face deprivation and exclusion in numerous aspects of their lives, and that those defined as poor in income terms are different from those who are deprived or excluded. The low overlap between the three indicators implies that they all have a role to play in documenting the extent of social disadvantage and helping to identify the factors that contribute to its various manifestations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the Australian historical record in health and gender inequalities since the mid nineteenth century through to the end of the twentieth century, using survival data from an historical cohort of impoverished people born in the Melbourne Lying-In Hospital between 1857 and 1900. This data reveals the long shadow cast by disadvantage in early life and the critical importance of secure households in supporting infancy and childhood. Above all, the income security and support of mothers, was critical to survival of infants and children, and those households trapped in the casual economy, remained the most vulnerable to premature death. Only the improvements in labour force regulation, government employment and trade education after World War II, broke the cycle of poverty that had persisted in Australia since the earliest days of European settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports an analysis of income poverty dynamics in Australia using longitudinal data from the first three waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. As in other developed countries, far fewer people are found to be living in persistent poverty than are poor on an annual basis. With a poverty threshold set at 50 per cent of median equivalised income, just over four per cent of Australians were measured as being in income poverty in all three waves. Among those who were poor during 2000-01, about half subsequently had incomes above the 50 per cent threshold. However, the longer people remained in poverty, the less likely they were to exit, the greater was their risk of re-entering poverty, and the lower were their incomes if they temporarily escaped poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents four decades of research on poverty in Australia. At first glance, poverty does not feature prominently among the many articles that have appeared in The Australian Journal of Social Issues (AJSI). The article reviews how the published material has contributed to the literature in this important but controversial area of research and policy. Australian poverty research was also about to take a quantum leap in terms of its sophistication and impact. In 1962 Ronald Henderson migrated to Australia to become the Director of the Institute of Applied Economic Research and the famous Melbourne poverty survey began under his leadership and inspiration. Some critics have argued that the growing importance of non-standard forms of income such as superannuating, in-kind fringe benefits have made cash income an increasingly unreliable indicator of well-being, undermining its use in studies of poverty. The foundations of the Henderson approach to the measurement of poverty were set out in an excellent AJSI paper by Alison Harcourt, one of the contributors to the original Melbourne poverty study. The results presented by Harcourt also illustrate how supplementary (qualitative) evidence can be used to flesh out the statistical profile of poverty and point to areas of policy failure.