In 2006, the Howard government’s Welfare to Work reforms placed new eligibility requirements on recipients of the Disability Support Pension (DSP) and Parenting Payment (PP), with the aim of reducing their numbers. Since then, the number of people on PP has dropped by about 20%: a remarkable result. However, the number of people on DSP...

The three-hundred page reform ‘blue print’ from the National Health and Hospital Reform Commission has endorsed a range of health reform measures that will not solve the hospital crisis in this country, argues Jeremy Sammut. Executive Summary Beside the perennial and serious problem of ever-lengthening waiting lists for elective surgery, major public hospitals are unable...

It is not underfunding or an overwhelming workload that has caused child protection services to fail the vulnerable children they exist to protect, it is the failure to investigate reports and remove children in danger, argues this report.

The government should reconsider the introduction of a 10-year jail sentence, on top of already significant financial penalties for cartels, as they are not as economically damaging as is being claimed, argues this paper.

Since the 1980s, more than 20,000 Indigenous university graduates have joined the Australian labour force. In 2007 alone, almost 1,500 graduated, an average of four a day. The proportion of Indigenous students enrolled in degrees and post-graduate courses has risen to more than 90 percent of Indigenous university enrolments, signaling the terminal decline of ‘Aboriginal’...