Some Aspects of Poverty, Deprivation, and Social Exclusion in Australia
Keywords:
Disadvantage, Social exclusion, Poverty, Deprivation, Welfare, Marginalised, Social changeAbstract
Conventionally, a universal measurement of poverty is to see how many people pass through those ‘poverty lines’- finding the number of people above and those below to conclusively suggest that those who live beneath the unacceptably low-income level are certainly poor. In Australia, the Henderson poverty line, established during the Henderson inquiry into poverty in the 1970s, is still in vogue, though more recently, yet another method of measuring poverty has come into play. This method began by looking at what essential items people are missing out on as a result of lack of sufficient income, for instance, paying more for rented accommodation, electricity, and gas bills as opposed to food. This phenomenon is known as ‘deprivation’.
In this paper, I present issues for welfare planning, and problems generated by poverty, deprivation, and social exclusion, tagging them as ‘quasi-problems’ and the tendency of some of these problems are to be normalized in Australian society. Affected individuals and groups seem to wear ‘normalisation’ and seem to cope and strive towards resilience in a welfare-deprived environment. It is some of these absurdities that I wish to tease out and explain as I explore the principles of social justice that aim to bring about change in those vulnerable, disadvantaged, or marginalised sections of Australian society. A debate always ensues when people ask this question: Is Australia a land of ‘fair go’ or a land of ‘far between?’
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