SPEAKER PROFILES
Please select a speaker below.

Mr. Noel Pearson	Dr. Ken Henry	Prof. Marcia Langton
Ms. Tania Major	Mr. Sandy McCutcheon	Mr. Michael Meyers
Prof. Lawrence Mead	Prof. Ron Duncan	Mr Wilfred Gordon Dr. Judy Bennett
Dr. Chris Sarra	Prof. Peter Saunders	Mr. John Wenitong
Jane-Frances Kelly	Colin Rubenstein	Prof. Helen Milroy

PROF. PETER SAUNDERS

DOWNLOAD SLIDE PRESENTATION HERE


Peter Saunders has been Social Research Director at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney since September 2001. He is also Professor Emeritus of the University of Sussex in England, where he taught sociology for nearly twenty-five years.  He has held visiting academic posts at universities in Australia (the University of Melbourne and RMIT), New Zealand (The University of Canterbury), Germany (The University of Bremen) and the United States (Brown University).  Between 1999 and 2000 he was Research Manager at the Australian Institute of Family Studies in Melbourne where he worked on family and welfare policy and published Reforming the Australian Welfare State (2000).

His research over the years has focused mainly on social policy and social inequality.  His major academic publications include empirical studies of social mobility (Unequal But Fair, 1996), the impact of mass home ownership on British society (A Nation of Home Owners, 1990) and the political and social significance of privatisation (Privatization and Popular Capitalism, 1994).  He has also published several theoretical and analytical works including Capitalism: A Social Audit (1995),  Social Class and Stratification (1990) and Social Theory and the Urban Question (1981/1986).  He is co-author of a best-selling text book on British politics, now in its third edition, and of a student text on survey methodology (The Survey Methods Handbook, 2004).

Professor Saunders’s research at CIS has focused mainly on issues of poverty, welfare reform and tax reform, and his CIS publications include books in all three of these areas (Poverty in Australia: Beyond the Rhetoric (2002), Australia’s Welfare Habit, and how to kick it (2004), and Taxploitation: The Case for Income Tax Reform (2006)).  He is currently completing a book on tax-welfare churning (What the Government Giveth, the Government Taketh Away).  He is also a regular contributor to newspapers and radio and television current affairs programmes.