Guest editor's introduction.

Baxter, Janeen

The underlying theme of each of the papers in this issue is social inequality and the role of social policy in regulating and legitimating various forms of inequality on the one hand, and exposing it and reshaping it on the other. Inequality can of course take various forms. The papers in this volume examine inequalities in earnings and income, access to housing, employment benefits, welfare services and time. As some of the papers show, and all of them imply, inequalities in access to these resources may impact not only upon material wellbeing, but also upon general levels of psychological and social wellbeing. Australia has undergone significant social and demographic shifts over the last two decades, including the increased involvement of married women in paid employment and enormous changes in patterns of family formation and dissolution, as well as major changes in economic and political frameworks, most noticeably the move toward a more deregulated, marketised economy and a neoliberal political framework. The papers in this volume enable insight into the ways in which this new social, political and economic environment is experienced at the level of the individual and overall they confirm the view that these changes have resulted in shifts rather than a reduction in the patterning of inequalities.

A second theme underlying many of the papers is the value of large-scale individual level surveys for unpacking and examining the processes leading to these various forms of social inequality. Ten years ago, Australian social scientists faced a dearth of good quality. national datasets on these kinds of issues. This lack of data is now in the process of being redressed with the increasing availability of not only good quality cross-national datasets, such as the Australian Bureau of Statistics Time Use surveys, but also several longitudinal datasets including Negotiating the Lifecourse (NLC), the Longitudinal Study of Women's Health, the Households, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey (HILDA) and the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children survey (LSAC). The development and funding of these surveys take us some way toward achieving what social scientists in other countries have had for many years. The United States, Canada, Britain and many European countries have been collecting longitudinal data on social change for some considerable time. While we are still some way from realising the full value of the various Australian panel studies, we are nevertheless moving in the right direction. The NLC is about to commence interviewing for Wave 4 having begun in 1997 and conducting follow-up surveys with the original sample in 2000 and 2003. HILDA is about to release wave 4 data having begun in 2001 and interviewing respondents on an annual basis.

Five of the papers in this issue use these recently available datasets. Baxter and McDonald use NLC data to consider changing rates of home ownership in Australia. They ask to what extent home ownership rates have fallen as opposed to being delayed. Their conclusion supports the latter view with declines linked to delays in other lifecourse events such as relationship formation, and in particular first marriage. Interestingly they also show that the likelihood of purchasing a home is greater for those with no children and that this likelihood declines with increasing numbers of children. Perhaps this reflects difficulties of housing affordability for couples where one partner is occupied with unpaid caring duties. Although we have seen a dramatic rise in the participation of married women in paid employment over recent decades, it is still the case that women's labour force involvement declines significantly when there are young children in the household. Home ownership is possibly more affordable for those with few or no dependants.

Whitehouse's paper delves into the effects of parenthood on employment more deeply by examining access to parental leave in Australia. The analyses, again based on NLC data, indicate that respondents have clearer understandings of entitlements to sick, holiday and long service leave, than parental leave or family care leave. Moreover, there were marked differences across employee groups in access to parental leave, with permanent workers and those in the public sector having much greater access than casual employees. Interestingly those with young children (under 6 years) were least likely to have access to parental leave suggesting that parents of young children may be forced to take jobs that have the least entitlements.

Both of these papers show the value of using individual level data to examine social trends. Baxter and McDonald point out that census data on home ownership rates are based on rates for the household reference person rather than rates for all persons. A second problem is that the census does not record if a person owns or is purchasing a home elsewhere but is renting or residing in a different place of residence. Similarly Whitehouse shows that rates of perceived access to workplace entitlements, such as parental leave, may vary widely from rates of availability obtained from measuring formal rates of entitlement. Data such as that collected by the NLC is essential for supplementing estimates based on official data.

Evans and Gray use the NLC data to examine issues concerning the effect of previous children on the desire to have more children. They report that Australian couples favour a balanced sex composition for their families with some evidence of younger cohorts more likely to have a third child if the mother already as two daughters, but not if she has two sons. This raises questions about the value of children in Australian society and possible differences between high and low fertility societies. Fertility rates have fallen significantly in Australia since about the mid 1960s and this may have implications for the desired sex of children.

Craig's paper continues the focus on gendered patterns within households but shifts the focus to considering time spent on childcare within households with a focus on comparing lone and couple-headed families. Her results, based on analyses of the 1997 ABS Time Use Survey, show that children in lone parent households receive about the same amount of parental care as children in couple-headed households, largely because lone mothers spend longer hours performing childcare than married mothers (when primary and secondary activities are included). At the same time, fathers' childcare often overlaps with that of their wives, so that in total, there is very little difference in the amount of care given to children in lone parent families compared to married parent families. Craig's analyses point to the importance of measuring primary and secondary activities and the presence of other adults in the household when tasks are being undertaken. The ABS Time Use survey is one of the few studies in the world to collect this kind of data, and in doing so, has provided an important reassessment of the extent to which women "multitask" compared to men, and the extent to which men perform childcare primarily in the presence of their partners. Craig's analyses of these data provide important new information on the complexities of the gender division of household responsibilities.

As she notes however, there are clear differences between married and lone parent households in terms of poverty rates. To the extent that lone parents are able to make up for the potential care deficit faced by their children by devoting more time to childcare, they do so at the expense of employment time resulting in significant economic deprivation compared to married family households. The issue of economic deprivation is taken up directly by Headey, Marks and Wooden with analyses of longitudinal data on poverty using HILDA. The value of longitudinal data is distinctly evident in this paper. In the vein of seminal work on this issue carried out overseas, Headey, Wooden and Marks investigate the extent of cycling in and out of poverty and the risk of persistent poverty. Their analyses suggest that the majority of Australians living in poverty do not live that way for long. But at the same time, those who move out tend to move just above the threshold suggesting that they are at risk of moving back into poverty at some point in the future. And of course, as the authors note, there is considerable debate in Australia, as elsewhere, on exactly where the poverty line should be drawn. As Headey, Marks and Wooden suggest, a broader conclusion is that those at the bottom of the income hierarchy tend not to move significantly up the scale in the short term. Future waves of HILDA covering a greater time span will enable further investigation of this issue.

The final paper by McConnell and Llewellyn continues the theme of social inequality by investigating the links between social disadvantage and child protection policies. They begin from the premise that social disadvantage is often linked to child maltreatment, but argue that rather than blaming parents within a "reform parent or remove child" discourse, it would be preferable to investigate and address the link between social disadvantage, impoverishment and family problems. As they note however, this would entail a fundamental shift in how parenting is conceptualized in order to move to a more child-centred focus. Such a focus would recognize that parenting is not just the responsibility of individual parents, but is a community concern involving a wide range of people including teachers, neighbours, friends, grandparents and others. If parenting was viewed as a social responsibility rather than a solo activity, then some family problems may not arise and at the same time, the policy and practice for dealing with child maltreatment would be quite different involving addressing social disadvantage rather than just parenting practices.

While we are some way from developing and implementing the frameworks that would enable us to redress the social inequalities examined in each of these papers, the careful and detailed empirical analyses that are presented here enable greater understanding of the patterns of disadvantage within the current social, political and economic environment in Australia. This is a necessary first step in the right direction.