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

I would like to talk about poverty and its impacts on our community. This year, Anti-Poverty Week helped to focus attention on the growing number of people in our community who are entrenched in poverty, while also highlighting how the government's policy that keeps unemployment payments so low has created a vicious cycle that makes it even harder to get into secure work and helps to entrench poverty. Unfortunately, the government and the coalition marked the lead up to Anti-Poverty Week by voting together to drop the income of 150,000 single parents by up to $100 a week as part of a cost-cutting scheme to deliver a so-called budget surplus for the 2013-14 financial year.

Given that this government has pursued policies which undermine our social security safety net, it is not surprising that at least five new reports came out, either during Anti-Poverty week or in the lead-up to it, warning that many in our so-called lucky country are falling further and further behind and into poverty. A common thread throughout these reports was a sense that the benefits of the boom have not flowed through to everyone in our community, particularly some of our most vulnerable people. Emergency relief agencies reported that a significant proportion of the people accessing their services are single parents, while a report released by FoodBank just a month and a half ago found that some agencies had reported an increase in demand for its services in excess of 30 per cent on the part of low-income and single-parent families in the preceding twelve months. This seems to me a clear indication of what has happened to those single parents who have already been subject to the Welfare to Work regime introduced by the Howard government. In other words, they are the people who are having to access emergency relief services.

The most recent social security legislation, which was just passed by the government and coalition, has moved another 150,000 parents—the single parents who were grandfathered from the first round of changes to Newstart—onto Newstart. At the same time, during Anti-Poverty Week, reports such as Anglicare's When there's not enough to eat painted a picture of a society where poor nutrition, skipping meals and hunger are increasingly common. Anglicare's report found that 45,000 of the households using its emergency relief services were unable to properly feed their families. I will read some quotes from real-life accounts of families who participated in Anglicare's face-to-face survey. One person said:

I reckon it does mentally and physically get you down. It gets to the stage where you can't think. It makes me want to burst into tears. It's very hard. It affects you very badly. You think of yourself as a failure. Sometimes you just want to go to sleep and never wake up.

Another one said:

You can't see straight. I've become suicidal over food. You don't have energy. You start getting stomach pains. You get to a point where you do not feel like eating anymore because you become nauseous and stressed. Sometimes you can go two or three days without eating.

That is just a small sample of responses by Anglicare's clients on not having enough to eat. Three-quarters of the adults participating in an Anglicare's survey said that they had run out of food in the last three months and could not afford to buy more, seven out of ten adults said that they had cut the size of meals and six in ten said that they were regularly skipping meals altogether. Clearly, people—including children—are going hungry with little hope of a change in their circumstances.

Evidence from another report released during Anti-Poverty Week, ACOSS's Poverty in Australia, demonstrated the strong link between poverty and unemployment. It said that 63 per cent of people in unemployed households lived below the poverty line. Similarly, Anglicare found that 77 per cent of households with no-one in paid employment were food-insecure. ACOSS reported that 25 per cent of single parents and their families lived below the poverty line and that almost 600,000 children lived below the poverty line. This is not surprising, given that Newstart, our main source of income support for the unemployed—and now single parents—is more than $130 below the poverty line and only rises in line with CPI, which does not reflect the real cost of living for low income households.

The Cost of living report 2012 by WACOSS—the WA Council of Social Services—found that the weekly income of single-parent families and unemployed singles is approximately $30 below the level needed to maintain a basic standard of living and to buy the basic necessities. WACOSS found that the resilience of households on low incomes is of concern, as tight budgets and little or no capacity to save means that WACOSS's model households are at significant risk of financial crisis or unsustainable debt. WACOSS found that low-income households are spending less on food than they need to ensure a healthy and nutritious meal plan. WACOSS's analysis of current food spending patterns against the costs of a healthy meal plan suggest that WACOSS's model household needs to spend two per cent to three per cent more on food—that is, between around $400 and $1,400 per annum more, depending on household size—to meet the requirements for healthy nutrition. When WACOSS looked at unemployed singles, it was found that they were most at risk of poor nutrition. WACOSS said, though, that the community also needs to be concerned about the long-term consequences of children growing up with food stress and inadequate nutrition. Households on low and fixed incomes were more susceptible to rises in the costs of essential items such as housing, food, utilities and transport than those on medium and higher incomes, who benefit more from decreases in the cost of discretionary and luxury items.

When households are in financial stress, WACOSS said, the first symptoms are often utilities hardship—because power and water bills are large, intermittent and unpredictable—and food stress, when cheaper, energy-dense foods with poor nutrition are bought. So, if the rent goes up or if there is a bigger than expected phone or power bill, people have to cut down on food or miss meals. Food is a 'discretionary' item in that people have control over how much they spend on it. The evidence presented by Anglicare, FoodBank and others demonstrates that living in poverty and going hungry are not just about going without but have other consequences, such as social exclusion, isolation, depression, embarrassment, a sense of shame and a loss of self-respect. In the quotes I read out earlier, there is a very strong sense of social exclusion, isolation, embarrassment and depression. Thirty-eight per cent of households surveyed by Anglicare said that their children were regularly not eating enough. These children are likely to become more isolated, less engaged at school and are less likely to complete their education, which is well established as a barrier to secure work.

It is clear that poverty and its associated impacts are yet another barrier to engaging with the workforce. It affects how people function, their capacity and their self-esteem. Trapping people in this cycle through pitifully low social security payments will never, ever contribute to getting people into secure work and jobs that lift them out of poverty. There is a strong social and economic advantage to reducing poverty, increasing the level of education and employment in our community and reducing the barriers to employment.

We believe an increase in Newstart is a modest way of starting to address the issues associated with poverty and income inequality. At the same time as the other reports were released, evidence came out from Professor Wilkins that showed an increase in the Gini coefficient in this country—in other words, an increase in inequality. Again, inequality is associated with the issues that I have been talking about. Social inequity is growing as well, leading to a number of other social problems.

We believe we need a solid investment in income support and associated services such as employment services. And yes, this will cost money. But in the bigger picture we will reduce demand on our social security system, increase workforce participation and reduce poverty. That seems to be far more valuable than going for a razor thin surplus in the next budget and it seems a much more worthwhile investment in our future.