Patrick Gorman (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Newstart is too low. The government should act urgently to increase it. Australians living in poverty cannot wait for the next Labor government, and people on Newstart won't feel any benefit from feel-good motions from the Greens political party. The evidence is clear across the Perth electorate. Anglicare recently conducted the Share the Benefit challenge. This is about encouraging families to try living on Newstart for a week. Elizabeth, a year 11 student in my electorate, tried with her family to live on Newstart for a week. She's smart and determined and is going to go very, very far in this world. But she and her family could not do it.

In the electorate of Perth we are facing a very unfortunate increase in homelessness, as many of my Western Australian colleagues know. This is, no doubt, a symptom of the challenges people are having living on inadequate government support payments. The national figures in May 2019 show that some 46,799 Western Australians are living on Newstart. Some 4,000 of those are in my electorate. When I say 'living', they are attempting to get by. Three million people live in poverty in Australia today, and 739,000 of those are children. Ten years ago this parliament acted to help lift pensioners out of poverty. We should do the same. It's time for the government to increase Newstart.