Rob Watts

Rob Watts is Professor of Social Policy at RMIT University and the author or co-author of a dozen books including Foundations of the National Welfare State, Sociology Australia, and Discovering Risk.

Rob Watts reviews ‘Imagining Australia’ by Macgregor Duncan et al., ‘Restructuring Australia’ edited by Wayne Hudson and A.J. Brown and ‘Australia’s Welfare Habit’ by Peter Saunders

October 2004, no. 265 • 01 October 2004

Though reviewing books is a humble enough task, it frequently leads to elevated thinking. As I read these books, it occurred to me that, perhaps, unwittingly, they pointed to the ambiguous legacies of the Enlightenment. One of those legacies is found in the conventional political distinction drawn between ‘left’ and ‘right’; the other concerns the role of the expert. For most of the twent ... (read more)

Rob Watts reviews ‘The Lowest Rung: Voices of Australian poverty’ by Mark Peel

September 2003, no. 254 • 01 September 2003

The 1990s will be remembered as the time when Australia slid into that morbid state of ‘new inequality’ that Will Hutton, writing about the British experience under Margaret Thatcher, called the ‘30/30/40 society’. In July 2003 the Australian Bureau of Statistics confirmed that income inequality had increased substantially during the 1990s. Whether a preoccupation with the ‘shrinking mid ... (read more)