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Rob Watts

Rob Watts is Professor of Social Policy at RMIT University and the author or co-author of a dozen books including Foundations of the National Welfare State, Sociology Australia, and Discovering Risk. 

Rob Watts reviews ‘The Lowest Rung: Voices of Australian poverty’ by Mark Peel

September 2003, no. 254 01 September 2003
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 mid ... (read more)