David Feeney (Batman, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Justice) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Goldstein for putting forward this motion recognising Anti-Poverty Week and its aims. We are fortunate in Australia; in many ways we live up to our name of the Lucky Country. We have levels of prosperity that many other nations desire and we have a welfare system which acts as a safety net to catch those who are doing it tough. However, these things do not disguise the fact that poverty remains a stark reality for millions of Australians and that inequality is higher than it has been in many decades.

The last poverty report by the Australian Council of Social Service revealed that there are over 2.5 million Australians living below the poverty line. Over 600,000 of these Australians are children; this means that over 17 per cent of all children in Australia are living in households that are below the poverty line—a staggering statistic. At the same time, inequality has reached a 75-year high, with hundreds of thousands of Australians unemployed, over one million underemployed and many more facing the challenges of insecure work. For perhaps the first time in our history, we cannot be confident that the next generation will be better off than we are.

Our most vulnerable are most affected by poverty—women, children, seniors, sole parents, the unemployed, adults born overseas and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The consequences of poverty for individuals are heartbreaking, but poverty and inequality also have broader social consequences: they reduce social cohesion and undermine economic participation. Poverty costs the individual, the community, the economy and the nation.

We all have a responsibility to care about this issue and to do what we can to help those in need. However, I believe the greatest responsibility by far belongs to us, the parliament. We have a responsibility to put tackling inequality, inclusive growth and social investment at the heart of the agenda for government. At the very least, this means not increasing the burden on those who are already disproportionately vulnerable to poverty, as those opposite have sought to do. You cannot seriously speak about addressing poverty while at the same time attacking pensions, increasing the cost of health care, attacking pay and conditions and increasing the burden on Newstart recipients.

There is no doubt that budget repair is important, but it must be fair. I believe it must be used as an opportunity to increase systemic fairness, not to foster even greater inequality. Instead, we must put jobs first. We must invest in education that fosters opportunity. We must improve universal access to healthcare and build stronger, more resilient communities so that we can tackle social exclusion. This goes to the heart of Labor values and our mission as a political movement.

In closing, I would like to acknowledge the organisations in my own electorate, Batman, who dedicate their time, energy and passion to addressing the causes and consequences of poverty in our local community every single day. We are fortunate to have over half-a-dozen neighbourhood and community houses in Batman. These hubs bring us together and build community capacity through training, early education and support for a very diverse range of local groups and needs. Many of them also provide much needed food parcels, fuel vouchers, crisis support and hygiene packs. We are also home to some great philanthropic organisations such as the Inner North Community Foundation, which works with local organisations to create programs that help move people into employment and to build philanthropy across our community.

There are far too many organisations such as these to mention them all by name. But the fact that there are so many food banks and the fact that this work is being undertaken by such a diverse miscellany of groups speaks to the fact that these issues of inequality and poverty are growing, not receding, both in my community and more broadly. While the work of these organisations is something our community can be, and is, immensely proud of, it speaks to the incredible and increasing need for these services.

Finally, I thank all of those locals who have given so generously to my Anti-Poverty Week non-perishable food drive that I undertook in conjunction with the Salvation Army.

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