It can happen to anyone: redundancy, a relationship breakup, illness and before you know it you've fallen behind in your financial commitments and may be facing bankruptcy.
QUT consumer insolvency researcher Nicola Howell, who is part of QUT's newly founded Commercial and Property Law Research Centre at QUT's School of Law, is investigating how individuals recover from bankruptcy and the factors that contribute to their ability to make a "fresh-start".
"More than 20,000 Australian individuals were declared bankrupt in 2012-2013," Ms Howell said.
"Bankruptcy affects more of us than you might think but little research on the immediate and ongoing impact of bankruptcy on individuals and families has been recently done in Australia and there is an urgent need to do so.
"One of the issues I'm looking at is the impact of bankruptcy upon current and future employment prospects, given that a person's bankruptcy is a public record," Ms Howell said.
"I'm interested in whether the availability of bankruptcy information might provide a barrier to employment for people who are, or have previously been, bankrupt, and if so, is that reasonable?
"I'm also interested in the impact of bankruptcy upon access to housing, particularly in the rental sector, as both housing and employment opportunities are likely to be critical to achieving a fresh start after bankruptcy.
"Bankruptcy legislation provides a fresh start in terms of discharge of debt, but could or should legislation or policy do more to help former bankrupts on the way to achieving longer term financial security?"
Ms Howell said legislation around responsible lending had recently been enacted to help prevent people taking on more debt that they can reasonably repay.
"Excessive use of credit is the second most common reason given as the cause of consumer bankruptcies.
"Credit laws and bankruptcy laws are designed to minimise and/or respond to overcommitment, and I will be watching the implementation of the responsible lending laws to see what impact they have on bankruptcy rates.
"There are also new credit reporting laws which increase the types of information that can be included on an individual's credit report."
Ms Howell's research is one strand of a number of areas that QUT's School of Law's new Commercial and Property Law Research Centre large team of legal researchers will focus on.
The Centre's director Professor Sharon Christensen said the Centre had been established to bring together legal experts to work on several research projects aimed at providing research and knowledge to inform Australian policy and lawmaking.
"We are taking a national approach. For example, one of our projects is researching a legal framework for specifying and defining carbon property rights and another is looking at consumer issues in the national energy market," Professor Christensen said.
The areas of current research investigation for the Commercial and Property Law Research Centre include:
- e-commerce and e-information security in business and government
- property law and community title reforms
- competition law reform
- consumer credit
- insolvency law.
The Commercial and Property Law Research Centre was officially launched on Thursday March 27.
- Media contact: Niki Widdowson, QUT media, 07 3138 2999 or n.widdowson@qut.edu.au
