At the other extreme from the wealthy are the poor within Australian society. There is some sense in the traditionally pessimistic remark that ‘the poor are always with us’. Indeed, economic misfortune can affect individuals and families for all sorts of reasons, some of which are difficult to anticipate and avoid. But a hallmark of a good society is that poverty not be pervasive and systemic. There is a world of difference between individual poverty that is exceptional and societal poverty that is regularly reproduced.

How does Australia rate in regard to the extent of poverty? Not very well, considering its overall level of affluence. The United Nations Human Development Report 2006 ranked Australia fourteenth among eighteen OECD countries according to a human poverty index. This puts Australia ahead only of the UK, the USA, Ireland and Italy in terms of its success in eliminating poverty (UN 2006: 295). The extent of poverty in Australia has been variously estimated at between 8 and 17 per cent of the population, according to the level of income for which the poverty line is set for different household types (King 1998). Lloyd et al. (2004a), for example, note that, if the poverty line is set at half of the median income of different types of Australian households, about 11 per cent of households fall below it.