The Wire

Do politicians and university researchers on comfortable incomes really know what it means to be poor? In fact, has Australia been looking at the whole problem of poverty in the wrong way? Well, new research released today by the University of New South Wales, in conjunction with groups such as Mission Australia and Angicare, says this is in fact the case. Rather than drawing an arbitrary line in the financial sand, a research team led by the uni’s Social Policy Research Centre has identified a combination of factors that define poverty by listening to the actual experience of those affected by it. The result has been a much more complex picture that draws the dots between the haves and have-nots in society. The director of the Social Policy Research Centre, Dr Peter Saunders outlined where researchers may have been going wrong up to now.