2nd COVID lockdown in Australia elicits frustration, debate over inequalityFamily of 5-year-old boy shot and killed by a neighbor: 'We shouldn't even be here'Georgia trooper charged with murder in traffic stop shootingCouple suing city of San Jose, police over use of force in hotel altercationEarly cases of COVID-19 are believed to be linked to a live-animal market in Wuhan, China.Early cases of COVID-19 are believed to be linked to a live-animal market in Wuhan, China.An Australian Defence Force member conducts a swab test at a drive-through COVID-19 testing facility in Hoppers Crossing, Melbourne, Australia, July 17, 2020.An Australian Defence Force member conducts a swab test at a drive-through COVID-19 testing facility in Hoppers Crossing, Melbourne, Australia, July 17, 2020.Cars enter a drive-through COVID-19 testing facility in Hoppers Crossing, Melbourne, Australia, July 17, 2020.Cars enter a drive-through COVID-19 testing facility in Hoppers Crossing, Melbourne, Australia, July 17, 2020.People walk along Princes Bridge in Melbourne, Australia, July 17, 2020.People walk along Princes Bridge in Melbourne, Australia, July 17, 2020. As a result, the migration of COVID-vulnerable workers to the outer areas will add to the existing concentration of spatial inequality in Greater Melbourne. "We've been unable to exercise and get fresh air, let alone leave our apartments." Concerningly, it also will reduce the power of economic growth to reduce poverty, as the benefits of growth will be felt less by the poor. This second wave has been tougher on some more than on others. It is well-balanced and identifies the multiple dimensions and measures of inequality while accurately portraying the nuanced story of inequality in this country over the last three decades.

Persistent disadvantage is of considerably more concern than temporarily experienced poverty.More refined identification of persistent disadvantage requires more and better data. Finally, corruption is thought to contribute to inequality through its diversion of public expenditure.Unfortunately, analysis to date has tended to be piecemeal, making it difficult to account for the exact contribution of each of the above factors, and the interactions between them, to increasing inequality.To get a better picture, we used the well known Kuznets’ hypothesis, which predicts that from a starting point of low inequality and low levels of income per capita, inequality will spike as per capita income starts to rise, but will eventually fall again, with continuing further increases in incomes.Countries move along the Kuznets’ curve due to changes in their structural factors: levels of education, economic sector activity (for example, a shift in economic activity from the agricultural to the industrial sector), rural-urban transformation, and rates of informal to formal work. Moreover, only about half of these people have low incomes for at least two consecutive years.That is, only about 2.5 per cent of the population can be regarded as persistently disadvantaged –although this still translates to more than 500,000 Australians.

04/2019 Inequality in Australia An Economic, Social & Political Disaster Senza Arsendy presents…The Policy in Focus series is supported by the Knowledge Sector Initiative (KSI), a partnership between the Australian and Indonesian governments that aims to improve the use of evidence in development policymaking.Asep Suryahadi is the executive director of the SMERU Research Institute.Receive a fortnightly email digest from Indonesia at Melbourne His lockdown experience has been starkly different. The elderly have high rates of poverty as measured by income below half the median income. Food and medical supplies slowly trickled in. Disability, poor health, low educational attainment, living outside major urban areas, living alone or in a single-parent family and Indigeneity are all consistently associated with persistent disadvantage.Indeed, on most measures, many more than 90 per cent of people experiencing persistent socio-economic disadvantage have one or more of these characteristics.A theme common to many people with these characteristics is barriers to employment, deriving from disability, poor health, child care requirements, lack of skills or a lack of jobs where they live. Moreover, only about half of these people have low incomes for at least two consecutive years.That is, only about 2.5 per cent of the population can be regarded as persistently disadvantaged –although this still translates to more than 500,000 Australians. But, because of their high rate of outright home-ownership, they have much lower rates of poverty when wealth is taken into account.

Carl Grodach. Experience of financial stress is also much rarer among the elderly than among younger age groups.There are, however, demographic groups that show up with higher rates of disadvantage regardless of the particular measure. Commodity booms – and the so-called Dutch disease – can also alter the distribution of wealth in a country significantly, contributing to inequality.

Although in general everybody is better off, the gap between rich and poor is widening.Welfare improvement, as measured by consumption per capita among the richest group, is growing much faster than that of the poorest group, suggesting that the rich are getting richer much faster than the poor.

But such an approach ignores other economic resources available to people, most notably in-kind income, such as publicly-provided health care and housing, and wealth. For example, even with maximum rent assistance, single people receiving the Newstart Allowance receive less than A$18,000 a year, well below the A$24,000 poverty line.It is consequently hard to escape the logic that at least some benefits, but particularly the unemployment benefit, need to rise to give recipients an acceptable standard of living. We don't put up a paywall – we believe in free access to information of public interest. A University of Melbourne experts says some people are more likely to face discrimination and inequality in the workplace during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this regard, the HILDA shows that, while about 10 per cent of the Australian population is poor using the standard OECD measure, this falls to about 5 per cent if “being poor” also requires that a person has low wealth (less than half the median). Why coronavirus will deepen the inequality of our suburbs .