There is increasing interest in men's involvement in child care due to declining popular support for the traditional sexual division of labour, greater 'gender equity', men's own increased interest in fathering, and corporations seeking to become 'employers of choice' for skilled employees. Michael Bittman, Sonia Hoffman and Denise Thompson review the advantages and disadvantages for...

Prepared for the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia, this report provides new estimates of the income older Australians need for a comfortable, sustainable standard of living. For a 70 year old woman in September 2003 the standard was $611.50; for a man, $597.50; and for a couple, $795.20.

There have always been differences of view on what poverty means in conceptual terms, and even greater differences on how to measure it. These differences span a broad spectrum of normative and ideological positions and raise a number of technical issues surrounding the statistical measurement of poverty. In this paper Peter Sunders explains the role...

Recent debate on welfare reform has acknowledged the important role of economic and social participation. This report reviews current knowledge on social and economic participation by FaCS customers, identifies the factors that determine different types and levels of participation among different groups of customers, and examines how income support recipients view the purpose and value...

This report focuses on the 'economic' concept of poverty. In Australia, different data sources have led to quite different estimates of poverty. The authors examine the proximate causes of child poverty and canvass a range of policy strategies to address this. It is argued that Australia's relatively high rate of child poverty can be seen...