The Disability Support Pension (DSP) is more generous yet less demanding than unemployment assistance. Few commentators believe that a 117% increase in DSP claimants in 23 years reflects a real increase in disability and incapacity in the working-age population. The author argues that DSP rules need to be tightened to reduce the number of claimants...

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 paper analyses recently released ABS data on the distribution of income which allows, for the first time, estimates to be made of the distribution of income in 2000-01 and how it has changed since the mid-1990s. It is now possible to examine how inequality has changed since 1994-95 and since the election of the...