By 2020 only the rich will be at home in Australia
8 July 2008
It used to be that the ‘Australian Dream’ was to own your own home – a tangible sign of achievement in an egalitarian society. However, for many people the dream has become an expensive fantasy.
Indeed, there is a growing perception that the gap between rich and poor is widening; that the middle class is at risk of disappearing and that we are headed to a time when only the wealthy will feel comfortable in this land.
Perception or reality?
Will the mythical Aussie battler end up being priced out of the centre of Australian life – relegated to the margins?
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Speakers
Chair:
Simon Longstaff is Executive Director of St James Ethics Centre. Simon spent five years studying and working as a member of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Having won scholarships to study at Cambridge, he read for the degrees of Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy. He was inaugural President of The Australian Association for Professional & Applied Ethics and is a Director of a number of companies. He is a Fellow of the World Economic Forum and a member of the International Advisory Committee of the Foreign Policy Association, based in New York. Simon has been Executive Director of St James Ethics Centre since shortly after it was founded.
For:
Sharan Burrow became the second woman ever to be elected President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) in May 2000. In November 2006 Sharan was elected President of the global union body, the International Trade Union Confederation. The ITUC represents 168 million workers in 154 countries and territories and has 307 national affiliates. In December 2004 Sharan became the first woman president of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, which joined with the World Confederation of Labour to form the ITUC in November 2006. Sharan was born in 1954 in Warren, a small town in western NSW, into a family with a long history of involvement in unions and the struggle to improve the lives of working people.
Professor Bob Gregory is a graduate of the University of Melbourne and the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is currently Professor of Economics at the Research School of Social Sciences in the Australian National University, Canberra. Professor Gregory has been closely involved in Australian economic policy development. He was a member of the Board of Management at the Australian Institute of Family Studies. Through 1990 to 1993 he was principal consultant in a series of Aged Care Reviews for the Department of Community Services and Health. In 1998, he was a member of the committee that recommended the introduction of student income contingent loans, collected by the Tax Office. The scheme has been adopted by a number of other countries in addition to Australia. Professor Gregory is an elected fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (1979). In 1996 he was awarded the Order of Australia Medal. He has been President of the Economic Society of Australia and has been awarded the Economic Society Medal.
Michael Pusey left school at fifteen and worked in Tasmania as a photographer, a farm labourer and a shop assistant before studying at the Sorbonne and later at the University of Melbourne. He was a high school teacher in Tasmania before moving to The United States where he completed his doctoral studies in sociology at Harvard University. Michael is a Professor of Sociology at UNSW and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. His writings on 'economic rationalism' (a term that he brought into public usage) and on the changing Australian middle class have involved over two hundred and fifty commentaries and interviews on radio, television and in the metropolitan press. He loves growing bromeliads and travelling in outback Australia and in Asia. He is now researching media regulation and political communication in Australia.
Against:
Ross Gittins is Economics Editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and an economic columnist for The Age, Melbourne. His journalistic experience includes editorial writing and stints in the parliamentary press galleries in Sydney and Canberra. Before joining the Herald he worked as an auditor with the national chartered accounting firm Touche Ross & Co. In 1993 he won the Citibank Pan Asia award for excellence in finance journalism. He has been a Nuffield press fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and a journalist-in-residence at the department of economics of the University of Melbourne. He has written various books, his latest being Gittinomics (Allen & Unwin). He is married and lives in inner-city Sydney.
John Roskam has been the Executive Director of the Institute of Public Affairs since July 2005. Immediately prior to joining the IPA he was lecturer in political theory at The University of Melbourne. From 2000 to 2002 he was the Executive Director of The Menzies Research Centre, the Liberal Party's think tank based in Canberra. From 1998 to 2000 he was the Manager of Government and Corporate Affairs for Rio Tinto, the international mining company. He was chief of staff to the Federal Minister for Education, Dr David Kemp between 1996 and 1998, and prior to that he was senior adviser to the Victorian Minister for Education between 1990 and 1996. He has a fortnightly column in The Australian Financial Review, and The Age newspaper. He also appears regularly on the Jon Faine program on ABC Radio in Melbourne.
Elizabeth Proust is a company director. She is on the board of Perpetual, has joined the Risk, Nominations and Remuneration Committees of Sinclair Knight Merz and is a mentor at Merryck & Co. She spent eight years at ANZ where she held the positions of MD, Esanda, MD, Metrobanking and Group General Manager Corporate Affairs and Human Resources. Prior to joining ANZ, Ms Proust was Secretary of the Department of Premier and Cabinet in Victoria. Other positions she has held include Chief Executive Officer of the Melbourne City Council. She also spent seven years with BP Australia and BP International Limited. Ms Proust is Chairman of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, member of the National Breast Cancer Foundation Board of Trustees and a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
