The Northern Community Legal Centre Podcast Northern Community Legal Centre

In the first episode of our Podcast we speak with Professor Roger Wilkins from the University of Melbourne and NCLC Lawyer Cassandra Meade. We examine the impact of COVID-19 on the economic well-being of Victorian and we explore themes and findings from our COVID-19 Response legal clinic.
TRANSCRIPT
KATE DURMAN 00:00):
Welcome to the Northern community legal center podcast. We'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners on the lands on which this podcast was recorded, the Wurundjeri people and pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging.
CASSANDRA MEADE (00:14):
Excerpt from Cass "Fines are being issue to people who just don't have the ability to access that information "
MORGAN WRIGHT (00:19):
That was Cassandra Meade the community lawyer from our COVID clinic. We will hear from later in the episode, I am Morgan Wright. I'm the mental health support coordinator at Northern community legal center. In this episode, we will be discussing the most significant post-World war two event COVID-19. We will hear from economist, Roger Wilkins and community lawyer Cassandra Meade both offering unique experiences and understandings of COVID-19 impact on Victorians COVID-19. And the government's response to COVID has impacted all Australians, but some more than others to better understand economic wellbeing pre and post COVID in Australia. I spoke with economist, Roger Wilkins,
ROGER WILKINS (01:03):
My name's Roger Wilkins. I'm a professorial fellow at the Melbourne Institute of applied economic and social research at the university of Melbourne. My research areas are income inequality, poverty, and socioeconomic disadvantage, and the operation of labor markets. So the household income and labor dynamics in Australia survey is Australia's nationally representative longitudinal household study.
ROGER WILKINS  (01:29):
So what that means is that we interview the same people every year. So we started in 2001 with 13,969 respondents from right across Australia. And we've been going back to them every year since to ask them a range of aspects of life in Australia, including their, their employment, their incomes, their health and wellbeing and a range of other aspects of, of life in in Australia. Our distinguishing feature is that because we are going back to the same people every year, we really get our moving picture of people's lives and how they evolve over time, which is something you don't get from any other survey in Australia. That's certainly that's representative of the Australian population. How do we measure in the household income and labor dynamics in Australia survey? How how satisfied people are, how happy people are.
ROGER WILKINS  (02:30):
What we've been doing every year is simply asking them a range of questions about, about their satisfaction with various aspects of their life, but also just their life overall. And and it's simply that people are asked to report on a scale of zero to 10, where zero means completely dissatisfied and 10 means completely satisfied how satisfied overall they are with their, with their lives. And it's an, it's an amazingly powerful measure. It's, it's it's, it's been used internationally in, in many, many studies and, and it's been shown that this is is a very valid as a valid measure of, of, of how well off people feel like they are. And and certainly, you know, you see that, that, that measure is, is, is strongly impacted by employment health. The quality of our relationships Africa, how safely feel, and our degree of social connection actually also comes out as something that's really important to how often you interact socially with people outside of your own household, whether you participate in community sport or a community organization, these are all very strong contributors to our life satisfaction.
ROGER WILKINS  (03:46):
And of course Relevant issue when when. Social interaction has been for much of this year significantly reduced because of the the responses to th