Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak about a campaign that I will be taking part in. Hopefully, in the five minutes that it takes me to give this speech, I will be able to convince my parliamentary colleagues here in the chamber today—like the member for Maribyrnong, the member for Oxley, the member for Parramatta, the member for Blair and maybe even you, Mr Speaker—to participate with me. I will be taking part in a fantastic campaign called Live Below the Line, which is a joint initiative of the Oaktree Foundation and the Global Poverty Project.

Live Below the Line aims to raise awareness of extreme poverty around the globe by challenging all Australians to spend only $2 per day for five consecutive days on their food. At the same time, participants raise money for international aid projects and help to spread the word about the impact of extreme poverty and what all of us together can do to help. This year’s campaign officially runs from 16 to 20 May, but participants can take part at any time of the year by signing up to the Live Below the Line website at:

www.livebelowtheline.com.

More than one-quarter of the world’s population live on less than $2 a day, which means that more than 1.4 billion people around the world are classified as living in extreme poverty. ‘Poverty’ means more than just being poor. It means not having access to the basic things in life that we in this chamber and in Australia take for granted, such as food, shelter, safe drinking water, sanitation, education and medical services. It means that 17,000 children starve to death around the world every single day. In the five minutes it takes me to speak on this issue, 60 children—60—will have died from starvation.

This level of suffering and hardship is difficult for us in Australia to comprehend. We all know that Australia is second only to Norway on the United Nation’s Human Development Index, which means we are right up at the very top. Our standard of living, education and per capita income is among the best in the world. An Australian earning $50,000 per year is in the top one per cent of the richest people in the world. Whichever way you look at it, it is extremely hard to deny that we are a prosperous and fortunate nation with enormous capacity to give, and we do give. The Australian government has increased foreign aid spending to record levels since being elected in 2007.

Nonetheless, it is easy to lose sight of the global picture. As we go about our daily lives, we can forget that even very small amounts of money can help smash the poverty cycle for whole families, communities or villages in some Third World countries. The deprivation the participants experience during the campaign will be nowhere near the deprivation experienced by people in Third World countries. We will only be doing it for one week and there will be light at the end of the tunnel; for a lot of these people there is absolutely no light at the end of the tunnel. By experiencing it firsthand for a few days, I hope I will gain a better understanding of what it feels like to be trapped in grinding poverty, right at the bottom of, or outside, the economic ladder that we take for granted.

Like many Australians taking part this year, I have made the commitment to take on this challenge with a degree of trepidation. But each time I think about it I remind myself that my deprivation will hardly be the same as that of people living in real and extreme poverty every single day of their lives, knowing that their future will not change. I might have only $2 per day to spend on food, but, for the 1.4 billion people we are doing this for, $2 is their total spend for the day, including for shelter, clothing, medicine, and education. Unlike them, I will also have a roof over my head, I will have water that I can safely drink from the tap at any time I wish and I will have access to a doctor if I get sick. These are all the things that we take for granted every day, but for one-quarter of the world’s population they do not even come into the picture. (Time expired)