The 1990s will be remembered as the time when Australia slid into that morbid state of ‘new inequality’ that Will Hutton, writing about the British experience under Margaret Thatcher, called the ‘30/30/40 society’. In July 2003 the Australian Bureau of Statistics confirmed that income inequality had increased substantially during the 1990s. Whether a preoccupation with the ‘shrinking middle’, as Michael Pusey has recently argued, is therefore all that important is questionable. In Australia, one in four jobs are now part-time, and many are precarious. Persistent and long-term unemployment has contributed to the fact that one in three Australians are now relying substantially on government benefits. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that what Mark Peel in this new book calls ‘poverty news’ is back on the front page. By poverty news, Peel means the way Australia’s media has increasingly reported the problems occasioned by ‘welfare cheats’ since the late 1980s. Peel’s book challenges us to ask how we should think about poverty.

Poverty keeps on being discovered. Back in 1974, addressing its discovery by Professor R.F. Henderson, Geoff Sharp shrewdly suggested that such rediscoveries recur periodically. Sharp asked, ‘Why should we assume that “the truth” of the existence of poverty is any less ambiguous than the earlier assumption that it “was no longer with us”?’