Shattered Myths: 20 years of ACT Council of Social Service work on poverty

In 1999, ACTCOSS and the ACT Government started the Poverty Task Group, beginning a concerted effort to quantify poverty in Canberra and highlight its lived experience.

Shattered Myths is a retrospective of twenty years of work on poverty, tracing ACTCOSS’s continued efforts to shatter myths about prosperity being available to everyone in Canberra. The publication shows that ACTCOSS has a long history of speaking up about uncomfortable realities, through a commitment to robust data and engaging Canberrans to speak on their lived experience of poverty. From 1999 to 2019, ACTCOSS has influenced public and political discourse – from creating a basic understanding that people in Canberra experience financial hardship, to reframing poverty through the lenses of social exclusion and entrenched disadvantage.