Jason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is with great honour that I stand here today and support the member for Goldstein's motion on Anti-Poverty Week. Mr Wilson has spent a lifetime trying to improve people's lives, not just in a material sense but in a real sense, in our community. It is appropriate that he has moved this motion today to recognise so many community groups who have been involved in trying to solve the problem of poverty in our nation.

We live in one of the richest countries in the history of humanity. Yet we cannot feed all those people who are hungry, we cannot house all those people who are homeless and we still cannot educate all those people who are illiterate. We have spent hundreds of millions of dollars—billions of dollars—on trying to reduce poverty. The fact is that over our lifetime we have not shifted the needle on this problem in our society. This motion reminds us that poverty is not just a matter of money. Poverty is a matter of much, much more. As Roger Wilkins has said, 'Measuring poverty is a task fraught with controversy.' If we cannot even agree on how to measure the problem, then it is a demonstration of the fact that it is very difficult to agree on how to solve the problem.

We are reminded that poverty is about opportunity. It is about opportunity to access both education and a stable community. A lot of research in the United States has shown that children from poor inner-city households have great difficulty breaking away from the poverty which they are born into because they find it difficult to deal with stress later in life. This is a fact of the communities in which they grow up—the problems that they face with high crime levels and the ability that they have to deal with stress. If we cannot provide stable communities for children, then it is very difficult for them to move out of the poverty to which they have found themselves subjected. Therefore, it is appropriate that we recognise the role of community groups as part of the solution and the progress that can be made into the future.

We live in a modern and dynamic society. Our solutions to this problem need to be modern and dynamic. We cannot simply rely on increased government funding to resolve poverty. Government spending on the welfare bill will increase to $4.8 trillion over our lifetimes. Spending must be about improving lives, not just spending. The most critical part of the reforms recently announced by Minister Porter was the Try, Test and Learn Fund of $96 million. The language that he used was very similar to that which Franklin Roosevelt used when he was seeking election in 1932, when he said that the one philosophy that would drive his administration would be bold experimentation.

The Try, Test and Learn Fund will be more about trying to divert people from ending up in the tyranny of continuing poverty throughout their lifetimes, diverting people away from programs that ensure that they will be entrenched in the poverty to which they have been born. It is important that we continue as a government to invest in these sorts of programs, because the answer is not one size fits all. The answer must be to continue to experiment and to find different ways that we can resolve this problem. Over our generation, we have massively increased the amount of money that we have spent on social spending, yet, as the previous speaker pointed out, income inequality has increased. It must be that spending is not the only answer to reducing poverty and income inequality but, most importantly, opportunity in our society. I commend this motion and congratulate the mover.

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