• Alfred Michael Dockery, Rachel Ong, Stephen Whelan, Gavin Wood
• Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute

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02 September 2008This report provides an important contribution to our understanding of the relationship between public housing participation and employment outcomes in Australia. It has been made possible through the availability of a unique dataset. The state Department of Housing and Works (DHW) manages public housing programs in Western Australia through their public housing agency. For the purpose of this project, DHW extracted a confidentialised data set from its administrative records of all people who entered the wait list for public housing from January 1999 onwards, including records on their subsequent public housing tenancies until November 2005. The wide array of socio-demographic and income variables in the data allows the construction of income and employment profiles from the date of first appearance on wait lists, through entry into public housing to the most current recorded income and employment situation.