Fair Australia: Social Justice and the Health Gap

The 2016 Boyer Lecture series, presented by the President of the World Medical Association, Professor Sir Michael Marmot, is underway.  The topic for the four lectures is Fair Australia: Social Justice and the Health Gap, with the first lecture last weekend being "Health inequalities and the causes of the causes."  You can listen to it (and the others as they are delivered) at the ABC Radio National Boyer Lectures site, and you can also read a transcript of this lecture at The Conversation.

In this first lecture, Professor Marmot discusses the correlation between high income and education and better health, in both the indigenous and non-indigenous population.  He explains how the conditions of where people are born, grow up, work and age lead to inequities in power, money and resources, which have a direct flow-on to health, crime and civil unrest.

The lectures to come over the next three weeks are "Give every child the best start", "Living and working" and "Social justice and health - making a difference".  Another Conversation article by Sharon Friel from ANU is useful as background to this topic: "Social determinants – how class and wealth affect our health"