Life Course Centre re-bid

New chief investigators to take centre into a new direction

After a successful re-bid, the Life Course Centre (LCC) continues to research ways to tackle economic disadvantage.

Written by Deborah Cobb-Clark, Nick Glozier and Agnieszka Tymula

The Australian Research Council in 2019 announced over $32 million in research funding to continue the support for the Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course. Professors Deborah Cobb-Clark and Agnieszka Tymula from the School of Economics and Professor Nick Glozier from the Faculty of Medicine and Health are the Chief Investigators involved in this Centre. The Centre aims to deliver transformative research and policy recommendations to break the cycle of deep and persistent disadvantage for Australians.

While it may seem that in a country as wealthy as Australia, the problem of economic disadvantage is not significant, unfortunately in the last 20 years, economic inequality in Australia has increased dramatically. The income share going to the top 1% has increased so much that in 2015, an Australian in the top 20% of income earned five times as much as someone in the bottom 20% and held 70 times the wealth. On current rates of social mobility, it is projected that Australian children now in the bottom decile of family income will have to wait more than 100 years to attain average incomes. Currently, more than one third of Australia’s population receive welfare payments, and their future lifetime cost is estimated at $4.8 trillion, or approximately three times Australia’s current GDP.

The Life Course Centre will focus on developing new knowledge and solutions for Australian children and families to overcome the challenges of disadvantage. The centre was originally established in 2014 and is led by the University of Queensland. Since then, the Life Course Centre has undertaken ground-breaking work on deep and persistent disadvantage, particularly in the area of transgenerational transmission of disadvantage and welfare dependency.

The new direction of the Life Course Centre is to tackle disadvantage in specific contexts to understand how people negotiate it daily in real places, and how best to design policies and programs that support improved life pathways.

Currently, more than one third of Australia’s population receive welfare payments, and their future lifetime cost is estimated at $4.8 trillion, or approximately three times Australia’s current GDP.

Professors Cobb-Clark, Glozier, and Tymula will be central to the development of pioneering work on the cognitive science of disadvantage, a major innovation in the centre’s research program that will investigate the reciprocal relationship between economic disadvantage, cognition and decision-making. The Sydney node will link researchers across the two Faculties combining strengths in such areas as neurodevelopment and sleep science with neuroeconomics, and drawing on research approaches from different disciplines.

The collaborations with academic and non-academic institutions across Australia in the new Life Course Centre will enable the scale of work required to understand, and intervene in, the individual, family, and community factors causing the entrenched poverty, homelessness, food insecurity, and unemployment experienced by too many Australians. The Life Course Centre’s industry and government collaborators include the Department of Social Services, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, NSW Treasury, Anglicare, Brotherhood of St Laurence, NSW Treasury, CBA, Goodstart Early Learning LTD, National Growth Areas Alliance, the Trustee for the Minderoo Foundation.

By understanding life course contexts much more finely and using new methods and better data to personalise responses to disadvantage, the Centre will deliver the evidence, infrastructure, capacity and partnerships to reduce disadvantage and better equip Australian children and families for emerging challenges.

To learn more about the Centre: https://www. lifecoursecentre.org.au