The idea that there is a large number of people who, in crude terms, you might think of as being losers, who are basically beyond help, it's factually incorrect.

Normal statistics are like photographs. They can tell us only that X percentage have a problem. They can't tell us whether those problems are short term or long term, ... HILDA enables us to get a far better understanding of things and the news is good. HILDA tells us the number of people in Australia who are truly disadvantaged is small and many of them can be helped.

The underclass, if there is one, is quite small and most people who fall into a position of disadvantage overcome their problems and get back on their feet, ... It's bloody hard but the message is: we shouldn't give up on people. The evidence, at the moment, is that most people who become poor don't stay poor for long, so let's not write them off.

I want to see then doing -- such as intervening when young people become unemployed -- but it tends to be concentrated on childhood and teenage years, and ... programs need to be made available to people over the course of their lives.

From an individual point of view, wouldn't you rather be a person who has a problem for one year instead of for three years? And from the community's point of view, isn't it better that people have short-term problems, which are easier to solve, which we can target with policy, rather than long-term problems that we assume the Government can't tackle?

I could quite happily run a florist or a bake shop.