Towards New Indicators of Disadvantage Project: Bulletin 3: Social Exclusion in Australia
This Bulletin is the third in a series that describes some of the main findings from the Left Out and
Missing Out: Towards New Indicators of Disadvantage project. The project is funded by the Australian Research Council and is based on a collaboration between the SPRC and our Industry Partners Mission Australia, the Brotherhood of St Laurence, ACOSS and Anglicare, Diocese of Sydney. Previous Bulletins have examined community views on the essentials of life (No. 1) and the scale and scope of deprivation in Australia (No. 2).
The project report Towards New Indicators of Disadvantage: Deprivation and Social Exclusion in
Australia was released in November. It can be downloaded from the SPRC website, www.sprc.unsw.edu.au
The focus of this Bulletin is on social exclusion – what it means, what forms it takes and who is
experiencing it. The concept of social exclusion has had relatively little impact on Australian policy formulation, although it was one of the factors that shaped the thinking and recommendations of the McClure Report on welfare reform, released in 2000. It has received far
greater attention in Britain, where the Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) has exerted a major influence on the ‘whole of government’ policy agenda, allowing it to break out of the cross-departmental rivalries that often impede or prevent action.
The importance of policies that promote social inclusion and social cohesion (the former a prerequisite for the latter) has also grown in the European Union, where the ‘Lisbon Agenda’ agreed to by EU Heads of State in 2000 places these issues at the centre of the European social policy agenda (Atkinson, 2007).
Towards New Indicators of Disadvantage Project: Social Exclusion in Australia
