Reports document growing social inequality in Australia

The social policy issues paper, Winners and losers: the story of costs, is a further salvo in an ongoing conflict between the Howard government and welfare organisations over the level of poverty in Australia.

According to the paper’s principal author, Gavin Dufty, its background was an attempt to answer critics who dismissed the charity’s reports of increasing demand for its services as “exaggerations,” as well as the government’s insistence that higher costs of living were being counterbalanced by rising incomes, leaving poorer people better off.

Published on December 19, Winners and losers found that since 1990 the most vulnerable people had been hardest hit by rising costs, notably for essential services such as health, education and public transport. The aged, disability support pensioners and the unemployed had experienced “harsher changes in the costs of living,” with parents also bearing a disproportionate burden of cost increases.

Rising costs had impacted on low-income households at variable rates, however. A typical outcome showed that aged or disability support pensioners reliant on the rental market and the public transport system had borne cost increases 30 percent higher than the underlying inflation rate.

The study used a range of official measures such as the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the Household Expenditure Survey (HES) and the Relative Price Index (RPI). Whereas the government uses the CPI to measure inflation, the RPI more accurately reflects the true cost of living for the poorest households. It is derived from the HES, which details expenditure patterns for various groups, taking into account the value of concessions or government entitlements.

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jan2006/pove-j04.shtml