ACTU Whitlam Lecture, Melbourne, Tuesday, November 30, 2010
In writing and talking about equality and inequality, I always feel myself at a disadvantage.
Everyone thinks they know more about it than I think I know. Just about everyone has it firmly fixed in their mind that the gap between rich and poor is growing - the rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer. This trend, they know, has been running for decades, perhaps forever. My disadvantage is that when you express your opinions in a respectable newspaper rather than the pub, you’re supposed to base them on actual evidence. And when I recount the evidence, it’s never as bad as everyone knows to be the case.
Even so, let me try to summarise the evidence about the distribution of income....
Is Australia the Land of the Fair Go
