Over the past decade social exclusion has increasingly been positioned at the forefront of political, academic and lay discourse as the cause of disadvantage (Marsh, 2004). While the definition, measurement and solutions to social exclusion remain open to debate, housing has progressively been positioned as a central variable creating neighbourhoods of exclusion. Much of this debate has positioned areas of public housing as the most disadvantaged and socially excluded neighbourhoods. However, the multiplicity of social...

This paper discusses some recent proposals to replace the tax threshold or zero step in the income tax rate scale with incometested tax rebates. The paper outlines the rationale for current arrangements and shows how they have developed over the past twenty years. The paper then evaluates the specific proposals made most notably by the Centre of Policy Studies at Monash University, in terms of their redistributive effects and implications for effective marginal tax rates...

We are currently experiencing an important period of change in the social circumstances of sole parents. Equally significant developments are also taking place in the policy arrangements affecting the well being of sole parents and their children. This conference, sponsored by the Social Policy Research Centre as part of its program to promote public discussion of issues in social policy, was held at an important moment it this history. The same broad patterns of change...

The five papers delivered at the conference are included in this report. Peter Saunders reviews some of the principle arguments advanced by critics of welfare state performance and examines the demographic challenge facing it, its affordability and the crisis of legitimacy in welfare before considering the reforms that are being introduced. Jim Ife goes further afield and looks at the tension between globalisation and localisation and the ways in which they are meeting human need,...