"Since 1987, the politics of good causes in Australia has been turned upside down. The reality is that the people who have done the most to overcome poverty have been John Howard and Peter Costello."

Depends on your take on poverty John. Poverty of pocket, or poverty of happiness. Howard and Costello have done nothing for either. It was largely the reforms of the Hawke/Keating years that set the stage for the prosperity that the upper class feel so comfortable with today. The policies of Howard, particularly the draconian 'workchoice' legislation, have done extreme harm to the mental health of a largely unseen proportion of Australians. People like you, with your cushy job and silver tongue don't see what I deal with every day, as in people who have attempted to take their own life because Centrestink (Centrelink) forces them to perform degrading tasks which enables them to pick up an unsustainable income from our "oh so generous" Howard led Government.
John Howard hates workers with unbridled passion. He thinks of the unemployed as nothing more than potential slaves to big business and thanks to the introduction of workchoices, he's well on the way to archiving this task. Howard is nothing more than a bloody minded bully. Costello is his unwilling associate.
John, people have already woken up to Howard's agenda which is one of enslaving those on the lower aspects of society. His continuous strive for economic growth has seen housing affordability put out of the reach of young Australians and those lucky enough to be in a position to pay off a home are now paying more than double out of their weekly earnings than they were under a Keating/Hawke Government. That same strive for continuous economic growth will destroy the very planet on which we all have to live in due course. We can't exploit it for much longer.
I'm beginning to wonder if Liberal supporters have children or grandchildren at all. If they do, they certainly don't give a rat's cooter about them, much less the future generations of the rest of us 'commoners!"

Well said Aime. My left wing friends are amazed at how far right the Labor party has gone. We are appalled at the working conditions that most Australians are subjected to and appalled at the rise of working poor, workers who earn insufficient wages to live in because they are paid low hourly rates and/or rostered on for insufficient hours to earn a living.

I also despair at the lack of vision or perhaps its the shift of focus from an Australian society with a decent social safety net to a society that supports the super rich and too bad about the rest.

Why don't people protest more, well they are frightened of losing their jobs, too busy working or too busy filling in the extremely complex paperwork that is now part of daily living for any one who deals with government bureaucracy especially for tax payers or social welfare recipients.

"My left wing friends are amazed at how far right the Labor party has gone."

Unfortunately Billie, all so very true. For too long, marginalised people have been made to look like lazy and ungrateful non-participants in Howard's economic expansion regime. We urgently require a new direction in Australian politics as the two major parties have come up short. One panders to the US Government while the other tinkers around the edges with current policy. In the mean time, those on the fringes of society continue to suffer. They have no voice.....they're not wealthy enough. Those trying to pay off an unaffordable home loan don't have time to become engaged. Only those on high thrones in glass houses are currently enjoying a world of their own creation.
Wish I had more time, but right now I have to hurry off to my job of looking after the most marginalised of our society.

To you both I am a leftie who fully agrees. The left hasn't given up on the eradication of poverty, however with an ultra right federal government working only for the big end of town it is impossible to get poverty up as an issue.

Child abuse is another situation happening from Toorak to Townsville, from Perth to Proserpine and everywhere in between. I wonder when the police and army will swoop on Toorak to cross examine every resident as with the Northern Territory.

I live in Townsville North Queensland population 160,000 we have more than 1,000 homeless families living in poverty, the Howard Government doesn't want to know.

in my visit to the serengeti, i had many deep political conversations with the wildebeest, whose view of hyenas and lions were much the same as the views expressed by many ozzies about pollies and corporations.

when i raised the possibility of throwing off these parasites, the wildebeest always said: "oh, that's politics, we don't do politics."

pretty much the same here.

Roskam asserts that the most famous promise in national politics is Hawke’s: "By 1990, no Australian child will be living in poverty." I reckon Howard’s GST “Never, ever” promise, would give it a nudge for the GST's enormous impact on low income families. The wealthy with their enormous assets and income pay the same tax on consumer goods as those in dire poverty.

Roskam’s analysis of the political left is out of touch. He fails to understand the shifting dynamics in Australian politics. If you want to describe the political left in Australia today you don’t look at political parties like the ALP. You start with social movements like GetUp and myriad new organisations using new technologies as the means of mobilising public opinion. And with welfare agencies alert now to the danger of political co-optation.

That’s why the old media can’t understand the current opinion polls. Why aren’t people more grateful?, they lament, along with right-wing commentators like Roskam: “The reality is that the people who have done the most to overcome poverty have been John Howard and Peter Costello.” Unemployment, says Roskam, is at a 30-year low and the left, he alleges, ignore low unemployment as mere ‘economics’. Why has the left’s anti-WorkChoices campaign bitten Howard so heavily?

As a researcher, Roskam would know that all the research shows that these employment statistics – based on a politically-convenient construct (you're employed if you work at least one hour a week) – disguise the number of people living with income poverty. The official figures don’t show the hundreds of thousands of underemployed people who want to work more to earn a decent income but can’t get more work. The official figures don’t show the people intermittently employed who need to be in constant work to avoid the poverty trap.

The employment figures don’t show income as related to other poverty variables like size of family, distance to travel to work (rising transport costs), child care facilities, age at point of retrenchment, home ownership and rental costs, and so on.

Poor analysis, Mr Roskam. Try again.