Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to contribute to the debate on this matter of public importance. Wage growth has stalled considerably. Significantly, from 2008 to 2013 it was growing by an average of 3.3 per cent per annum. From 2013 to 2018 it was growing by an average of 2.2 per cent per annum. To put this into perspective, the CPI growth in 2018 was 2.1 per cent. This meant there was virtually no real wages growth last year. In fact, from 2010 to 2017 there was, on average, an increase of only 0.3 per cent in real wages. So much for this government's claims about being able to manage the economy! The government can stand there and try to claim that they are the economic managers and that they are pre-eminent in this space, yet we see these terrible statistics. The Gini coefficient, which measures economic inequality, has been increasing steadily and now stands at 0.337. We are one of the most unequal OECD countries in the world. In fact, it seems that we are rubbing shoulders with Greece, a country that is still recovering from a major recession.

My question is: what do families do with rising power prices when this government continues to invest and wants to invest in inefficient, carbon-polluting power instead of going for clean, renewable energy, which is the energy of the future and will help bring energy prices down? We are seeing one million Australians putting off seeing a doctor because they can't afford to. These are the real impacts of living without real wage growth. But then, with these rising prices, my major question is: what do people living in poverty do? In Anti-Poverty Week, I want to focus on those people. Of the three million people living in poverty, 740,000 are children. One of the major things the government, who claim to be good economic managers, could do is raise the rate of Newstart by at least $75 a week. You'd get an instant injection into the economy of up to $4 billion and 12,000 more jobs would be created—a lot of those in rural and regional areas. That is how we can help people meet the rising cost of living. That's how we can help people out of poverty.

Those struggling to make ends meet are having to go to places like Foodbank. At the beginning of Anti-Poverty Week, on the weekend, the Foodbank hunger report 2019 was launched. That report found that, over the past 12 months, the number of people seeking food relief increased by 22 per cent. Three in 10 food-insecure Australians are going a whole day without eating at least once a week. Single-parent households have the highest likelihood of experiencing food insecurity, at a rate of 47 per cent. Many of those affected are living in deep poverty. On average, they are $135 a week below the poverty line.