Peter Travers

Resources and Functions: A New View of Inequality in Australia

The degree of inequality in the levels of well-being of its citizens tells us a great deal about a society. It enables us to judge its social and economic system, to identify those citizens with a claim on community compassion, to identify the sources of hardship, and to devise strategies for reducing levels of hardship. The value of such information is undoubted. But we confront a severe practical problem in first defining, and then measuring, what we mean by well-being. It is surely multi-dimensional, and difficult to reduce to a scalar-valued index.

Proxy Indicators and the Real World

Measures of standard of living and of poverty are plagued by the obvious gap between the relative simplicity of the indices and the infinite complexity of what they are trying to capture. Some trade-off between the simplicity desirable in an index, and real-life complexity is inevitable. The paper takes the approach of defining standard of living narrowly, but then using a relatively elaborate index, full income. Full income supplements equivalent income (the measure normally used in poverty studies) with the value of assets, of time, and of receipts in kind. Using this measure, and drawing on data from the Australian Standard of Living Study, the paper asks what story it tells of inequality in ownership of possessions, ranging from those most commonly held, to the goods of affluence. It then asks how useful it is as a proxy measure for peoples level of participation in society. The paper concludes with a cautionary note about the limitations of even a rich index such as full income.

Book Review: Social Policy in the Post Welfare State.Australians on the Threshold of the 21st Century

violence and distress. The data collected for this study indicates that Aboriginal suicide is possibly treble that of non-Aboriginal suicide (p. 93). Tatz rejects biomedical perspectives of suicide and mentions that the vast majority of Aboriginal peoples also reject the view that suicide is a medical problem. ‘Distress’, says Tatz, ‘is not a mental disease’ (p. x). Moving away from Durkheimian explanations of suicide, he draws instead from the observations and theories of Louis Wekstein, Albert Camus, Victor Frankl among others in order to develop a unique sociology of Aboriginal suicide in contemporary Australian society. His ideas possess imagination and insight, and are based on the findings of this study as well as a long fascination and connection with Aboriginal culture and heritage. Chapters focusing on the contributing factors of community and societal values include balanced expositions of government initiatives such as the CDEP scheme and literacy programmes, and also highlight problems such as alcohol and drug use and contributing factors such as a disjunction between cultural values upheld by traditional Aboriginal people and nonAboriginal communities. Alleviation proposals comprise the last and largest chapter of Tatz’s book. Proposals include adopting ‘coolness’ advertising campaigns which stress the coolness of adopting a healthy lifestyle and a policy of introducing sport into Aboriginal communities as a realistic cultural alternative which could provide an ‘acceptable morality’ for Aboriginal youth to embrace (p. 152). For any reader well versed in the problems facing Aboriginal communities in Australia this book is well worth reading for this chapter alone, as Tatz provides some unique and imaginative alternatives to current policy and practice that are (mostly) firmly grounded in realistic commitment to the empowerment of Aboriginal Australian people. His depth of knowledge of the subject suffers brief descents into paternalism that could be offensive to some readers; however, Tatz’s book is a worthy and valuable addition to the sociological, historical and cultural library. There is an urgency about this publication that underlies and emphasizes the seriousness of its subject matter, and is also something more. Tatz’s book is an exposé and as such it is a call to action, a cry for help to those who are learned and wise enough to know that what he documents is no exaggeration – we as Australians are facing a national tragedy. This book must be read by all who care to learn more about the steady self-destruction of the Aboriginal Australian population; by anyone who takes an interest in our shared culture and heritage; and most of all by anyone who wishes to participate in the creation of a vision of a brighter future for the Aboriginal communities of Australia.