Senate debates

Tuesday, 17 October 2017

Adjournment

Anti-Poverty Week

8:07 pm

Photo of Louise PrattLouise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Environment, Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

Tonight I also rise to speak about an issue that is of utmost importance to our nation, especially this week, Anti-Poverty Week. Today, on the United Nations International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, despite economic growth, we continue to see the number of Australians living in poverty in our nation rise. In 2003-04, according to the Social Policy Research Centre, 11.8 per cent of Australians in our nation lived in poverty. In 2014, that number rose to 12.6 per cent. In 2016, ACOSS released a report indicating that poverty has risen again to 13.3 per cent of Australian people—that's 2.9 million people living below the internationally accepted poverty line.

The international United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child says that children have the right to 'a standard of living adequate for the child's physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development'. These statistics mean that there are too many children in our nation failing to meet that basic test. Family payments and Newstart should at least cover the basic costs of children in a family. They should be adequate enough to cover food, housing, education and health. Sadly, too often in our nation they do not.

It is clear this government either does not understand or does not believe in the right of children in our nation to live free from poverty, and we can see this in its relentless cuts to social security in our nation. The Poverty in Australia report released by ACOSS and the Social Policy Research Centre in October last year showed that people on income support, particularly those who were unemployed or sole parents, had higher rates of poverty than the rest of the population. Over the last decade the rates of poverty among single parent families increased, with around 29 per cent living in poverty in 2013-14. And that number was even higher for those on a parenting payment, at 51.5 per cent. So you can see here that we've got single parents who are the working poor in our nation. Indeed, 51.5 per cent of those on parenting payments are living in poverty.

Earlier this evening I met with representatives from Foodbank Australia, who made obvious to me the ramifications of this level of poverty in our nation. They told me that the number of people who are regularly food insecure—that is, people who can't afford to put food on the table on a regular basis—has increased by up to 60 per cent from previous figures. Two out of five of those food-insecure families have dependent children, and most of those children are under the age of 12. Because there is simply not enough food to go around, 65,000 people are turned away from Foodbank services.

We keep hearing from the government that the social security system in our nation is out of control and unaffordable. But do you know what is unaffordable in our nation? What is unaffordable is nearly three million Australians living in poverty in our nation. There are more than 730,000 children in our country living in poverty. That is what is out of control. There are 65,000 people a month being turned away from emergency relief services. That is what is out of control. In the long-term, it's this kind of poverty that is unaffordable.

Research by the National Council for Single Mothers and their Children found that, since 2005, social security payments for children have in meaningful terms been reduced. For a single parent with no private income and two children over the age of eight, policy changes since 2005 have left those families more than $5,000 a year worse off, 17 per cent of their household income worse off. What we have had from the other side is continued attacks on these families. Those opposite froze family tax benefits for two years and are now looking to continue to cut payments to single parents undertaking study and extend waiting periods—and who knows what else is still to come.

There is only one job in our nation for every 10 jobseekers, and what we have from those opposite is no plan to tackle unemployment. Instead, we've got a $65 billion tax cut to big business that is supposed to trickle down and create the jobs that these families need. But there is no plan that actually simulates employment for these people. What we also know is that child care is more difficult and less affordable than ever. These attacks are hurting real people in our community. They are attacks on families and they mean more than just numbers for the government's bottom line. What we're talking about here is parents who can't afford fresh fruit and vegetables and parents who skip meals, as Foodbank told us today. It means mums and dads have to make a choice: do they put fuel in the car or food on the table?

It means kids missing out on going on school excursions, buying equipment for school, participating in sport and participating in basic social interactions and activities. It means people being unable to afford medical treatment or dental check-ups.

When the government attack people on welfare—when they imply that people somehow aren't doing enough to get a job and are not doing enough to earn money—they're actually attacking the children in these households and taking away the resources that they need and their parents need within that household. Changes to social security most often impact those families who are already most disadvantaged in our community. They are families who are already relying on organisations that provide emergency relief, like Vinnies, the Salvation Army, Anglicare and migrant resource centres, just to get through the week. We know that in 2014-15 the government ripped nearly $270 million from frontline social services. So, while the government are attacking families, reducing the money they have to care for their children, they are also ripping money from the services they need in order to live.

The fact is, though, that we can reduce poverty. It has been done before. Prime Minister Bob Hawke made a commitment to this nation 30 years ago that no child would be living in poverty. He was ridiculed for that in time, but the simple fact is that the commitments made by the Hawke-Keating governments reduced poverty in our nation, and child poverty specifically, by 30 per cent. They did this through a range of really important reforms that focused on giving families what they need to raise children, including a supplement for low-income families to help meet the cost of living. They increased family payments to reflect the cost of children and linked family payments to wage growth to maintain pace with the cost of living and living standards. These reforms also included rent assistance. They expanded child care and improved fee relief. The reforms also meant more education and employment support for single parents. These are the kinds of things that belong in a real plan to attack inequality in our nation.

So today, as part of Anti-Poverty Week, I want to reiterate the right of children in our nation to live free from poverty, just as Bob Hawke, our former Prime Minister, said.

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