Both documents are of interest for the data they provide, for questions about data collection/analysis, and for insights about how governments (and academia and NGOs) see the world.
The Australian Board is a national government agency established as part of the social inclusion agenda. Its report provides a justification for government initiatives that aim to address sectoral and/or regional disadvantage (including disadvantage in terms of infrastructure and employment opportunities.
The report reinforces challenges highlighted by Tony Vinson's Dropping off the edge report, which indicated that different kinds of disadvantage such as relatively lower educational attainment, higher unemployment, lower incomes, higher crime rates, poorer health, poorer housing and 'social connectedness' tend to coincide for individuals/families and locations.
It comments that -
Social inclusion is about ensuring that everyone is able to participate fully in Australian society. It is about people having the necessary opportunities, capabilities and resources to enable them both to contribute to and share in the benefits of Australia's success as a nation. Including everyone is important because, as a nation, we strongly value fairness.No mention of justice or dignity in the Australian social inclusion idiom, and - understandably - no reference to the 'sexual citizenship' characterised by David Evans in 2003.
Fairness has the potential to improve the well-being of everyone by: eliminating the threats to security and harmony that arise from excluding groups in our society; improving economic performance by allowing everyone to make a contribution; and enhancing pride in being a society which not only values fair treatment and opportunity, but actually works hard to achieve it.
The report notes that -
Despite a period of prolonged economic growth, and by world standards considerable resilience in the face of the Global Financial Crisis, we remain a nation where achievement in education and individual health bear a strong relationship to socioeconomic status:The UK report considers six 'strands' of inequality: gender, age, ethnicity, religion, disability and sexuality. In principle discrimination regarding those strands has been addressed by human rights legislation over the past decade. Critics currently appear to be having fun picking apart the report, for example arguing that data in the report provides a basis for quite different conclusions (eg uptake of higher education by some 'ethnic' groups) and questioning assertions that increased inequality is attributable to discrimination rather than to an (ostensibly neutral) meritocratic system.
+ Only 47% of people aged 20–24 years from the bottom 10% of the socio-economic ladder attain year 12, compared with 83% from the top 10%.
+ 35% of people in the lowest income quintile report fair or poor health compared to only 7% in the highest income quintile ...
Segments of our society can suffer more from economic downturns, for example between June 2008 and June 2009, the proportion of the population aged 15 to 64 years who have paid work fell from 73.4 to 71.8%, a fall of 1.6 percentage points, whereas for lone parents, the fall was close to 5 percentage points, and for lone parents with their youngest child under 5 years, the fall was 8 points.
The UK report states that -
For many readers, the sheer scale of the inequalities in outcomes which we present will be shocking. Whether or not people’s positions reflect some form of 'merit' or 'desert', the sheer degree of difference in wealth, for instance, may imply that it is impossible to create as cohesive a society as they would like. Wide inequalities erode the bonds of common citizenship and recognition of human dignity across economic divides. A number of analysts have pointed to the ways in which large inequalities in the kinds of economic outcome we look at are associated with societies having lower levels of happiness or well-being in other respects, and to the social problems and economic costs resulting from these.Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times responded dismissively, commenting that -
When considering whether the degree of inequality is 'justified' or not, an important distinction lies in how people judge inequalities between groups such as those between women and men or between ethnic groups, and inequalities within those groups. Where differentials in, say earnings, reflect differences in work experience, creating differences by age, this might be seen as reasonable. But systematic differences between groups – for instance, by gender, ethnicity or religion – unrelated to experience or qualifications, constitute what would be seen by some as being the most central issue, violating fundamental principles of social justice, rooted in recognition of equal worth and respect. At the same time, even if such differences were eliminated completely so that, for instance, men and women enjoyed equal incomes, but there remained large gaps between low and high income men and low and high income women respectively, many would still not regard the resulting distribution as fair, as society as a whole would remain more unequal than they thought was just.
This is, in part, because a crucial test of whether inequalities in outcomes are seen as fair or unfair will depend on whether they reflect choices made against a background where the opportunities open to people were equal to start with, or whether they stem from aspects of their lives over which they have manifestly little control. Most people and all the main political parties in Britain subscribe to the ideal of ‘equality of opportunity’. The systematic nature of many of the differentials we present, and the ways in which advantages and disadvantages are reinforced across the life cycle ... make it hard, however, to sustain an argument that what we show is the result of personal choices against a background of equality of opportunity, however defined. Inequality in turn then acts as a barrier to social mobility.
The class problems that progressive governments make it their business to manage have mostly been solved.
The problems that remain are problems of meritocracy, of which inequality is a natural result. As long as economies are growing, people are content to see others get a bit more relative income. When economies stagnate, there is more political agitation for redistributing the goods that remain, and society grows less meritocratic. Ms Harman [in releasing the UK report] makes an unconvincing argument for more equal distribution of income and wealth among citizens. In the present climate, however, the public is unlikely to require any convincing at all.
