Senate debates

Wednesday, 26 February 2020

Adjournment

Poverty

7:54 pm

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

I rise tonight to speak on a report by the Australian Council of Social Service, ACOSS, and the University of New South Wales. That report is Poverty in Australia 2020. It makes very distressing reading. The report shows that we are not doing a good job. In fact, we are doing a very poor job of addressing poverty in Australia. To start with, we are just above the OECD average level, placing us amongst a group of wealthy nations with above-average poverty. If we pride ourselves as being the country of a fair go, then why do we have such a high poverty rate? When it comes down to it, are we really giving people a fair go when they really need it, when they are living in poverty?

The clearest trend to emerge from this report is the rise in poverty during the so-called boom years between 2003 and 2008, and it's plateaued since then. So, for more than a decade we have not seen an improvement in addressing poverty in this country. It's quite disturbing that at a time when the economy was going well we failed to invest in our community, we failed to invest in our children, and only certain cohorts did well during those boom times. Now, we have an estimated 3.24 million people—yes, 3.24 million people!—living below the poverty line and 774,000 of those living below the poverty line are children under the age of 15.

This report shows that a clear driver of increasing child poverty is the freezing of Newstart Allowance for over 25 years, together with the transfer of so many sole parents onto Newstart. In 2006, the Howard government started moving sole parents from the parenting payment-single to Newstart, once their youngest child turned eight. In 2013, 80,000 sole parents, who were the so-called grandfathered cohort, were transferred by the Gillard government to the lower Newstart Allowance. The decisions and policies of these two different governments have had such a big impact on the poverty rates of some of the most vulnerable people in our community—children—because, when you transfer single parents, you transfer their children onto those payments as well.

Poverty in early childhood leads to poorer outcomes, potentially throughout a person's life. If we don't address this now, we are condemning members of our community to poor health and education outcomes. We have very clear indicators of the causes and the impact of poverty on our community, but still the government refuses to do anything about it. We still have no plan to address poverty.

The rate of child poverty in a country as wealthy as ours is shameful. An increase in Newstart is urgently needed. This is agreed across business, the community and social services. In fact, most people you talk to in the street now will say we need an increase in Newstart. The only people refusing to address this are the government. It appears that they'd rather see people left in poverty than increase the rate. They are even ignoring the clear economic benefits of increasing Newstart. Their refusal to increase Newstart flies in the face of evidence of what we need to do to ensure that we have healthy and thriving people and communities. Instead of supporting people to have a fair go, they are relentlessly pursuing programs such as the illegal robo-debts, demonising people who are doing it tough, including single parents, sick and disabled people and older Australians. We all know that everybody can be hit suddenly with misfortune. Anything can throw our lives into disarray: a sudden illness, a loss of a family member, family breakdown, poor mental health, or a natural disaster.

Poverty is a barrier to work and a well-established social determinant of health, including psychological health, and persistent poverty plays a demonstrable role in increasing levels of psychological distress. In a wealthy country like Australia, it is simply unacceptable that our government willingly leaves members of our community in poverty—and it's willing, because they know the statistics. They know that Newstart needs to increase. They've been told that numerous times. It's time we increased Newstart. It's time we had a plan to address poverty, so that we're not condemning 3.24 million fellow Australians to living below the poverty line.

Senate adjourned at 19:59