Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) acknowledges that Australia is a prosperous nation with a high standard of living and low levels of poverty by international standards;

(2) recognises that despite our national prosperity, poverty remains an issue for some Australians;

(3) notes that 11 to 17 October is Anti-Poverty Week, a week where all Australians are encouraged to organise or take part in activities to highlight and overcome poverty in Australia and overseas;

(4) understands that the main aims of Anti-Poverty Week are to:

(a) strengthen public understanding of the causes and consequences of poverty and hardship; and

(b) encourage research, discussion and action to address these problems, including action by individuals, communities, organisations and governments; and

(5) commends the organisers and sponsors of Anti-Poverty Week for their ongoing efforts to raise awareness and take action to address poverty.

Every country on earth is on a journey to realise economic opportunity for all of its citizens. Through hard work and good policy, Australia is further on that journey than many other nations. But it does not mean that we do not face our own challenges. Australia's prosperity has delivered community wellbeing and social mobility. Yet, the curse of poverty remains real, even here today. Australians possess a deep sense of justice that recognises that people, through circumstances out of their own control, can sometimes fall through the cracks. To be lacking in the resources needed to meet basic needs prevents individuals from reaching their full potential.

A brief snapshot of poverty in Australia reveals the raw nature of the challenge that is before us. ABS data shows that in 2011-2012 11.8 per cent of Australians had a household after-tax income less than half of the median income of all households in Australia. In my own electorate, the seat of Goldstein, the city of Bayside includes an estimated 7,251 people living below this line. That figure includes 1,151 children aged between zero and 14. While poverty is a multidimensional issue and focusing on a single metric like income is problematic, this at least puts into perspective the proportion of society that is at risk of facing some form of hardship. Two point six million Australians, by this income-based measure, experience, or at risk of experiencing, some poverty. This week is about recognising those individuals.

Attention should be drawn to two key underlying causes of poverty—homelessness and unemployment. In Victoria, over 22,000 people were recorded as homeless on Census night in 2011. Almost half of those people were under the age of 25. A lack of affordable housing impacts on an individual's ability to find work and education and training. Over the past two decades house prices have risen steeply while incomes have only grown moderately. The undersupply of affordable housing is a key concern that needs to be addressed in order to ensure future generations are given a fair chance to secure their living arrangements. The best way to avoid risk of poverty, though, is to gain employment. Families with an individual who was employed full-time had only a three per cent poverty rate in 2011-12. This is where economic growth and job creation can have a serious impact on people's lives. Now, more than ever, we must remain firm against the growing anti-globalisation sentiment because protectionism will do little more than entrench poverty in Australia and around the world. The quality and quantity of jobs of the future rely on sustaining and enhancing economic openness and utilising technology.

The report card on youth unemployment is mixed. While there are stubbornly high classes of joblessness across the country, the overall rate is improving. But, at 12.2 per cent, there is a long way to go. Our national youth unemployment figures tell us we have more to do to ensure our young Australians are able to get ahead.

Anti-Poverty Week is also about acknowledging the researchers, community organisations, philanthropic ventures and charities which fight on the frontline for those who are disadvantaged. In particular, I note the hard work of Bentleigh Bayside Community Health, chaired by Marguerite Abbott and led on a daily basis by its CEO, Amanda Murphy. Bentleigh Bayside Community Health runs a program of innovative health services for homeless youth and has an outreach health worker for homeless young people in the cities of Bayside, Kingston, and Glen Eira. I also want to acknowledge the Grace Heart Community Church, located in Highett, as another exemplar of working with disadvantaged people. The church has been led by the Reverend Bruce Corben and works with local people to find stability and opportunity in their life. Institutions like these deliver accessible evidence-informed and innovative services by listening and responding to people in an inclusive and respectful way. We can do our best to help them take control of their lives.

On the world stage, we must also continue to play a role in tackling some of the human development challenges that face us in our region. The Turnbull coalition team is committed to delivering an affordable and effective aid program that reduces poverty and hardship around the world but, importantly, it is done by promoting sustainable economic growth. In 2016-17 the Turnbull coalition team will deliver around $3.8 billion in development assistance, making Australia the 12th-largest donor in the OECD.

Our commitment to reducing poverty and hardship is advanced by promoting human development to overcome some of the immediate challenges faced by people in the Asia-Pacific region, and by promoting sustainable economic development to promote economic opportunities for those who seek it to be able to get ahead. That is the Liberal way, and that is why we are proud to stand up and to fight poverty in Anti-Poverty Week. (Time expired)

Maria Vamvakinou (Calwell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Do I have a seconder for the motion?

Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion.

Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Next week is Anti-Poverty Week, a week in which all Australians come together and are encouraged to organise or take part in activities to highlight and overcome poverty in Australia and overseas. By international standards, Australia is certainly one of the best nations in the world in which to live and, in terms of quality of life, last year the United Nations ranked Australia second only to Norway.

However, Australia is becoming more unequal and poverty is, unfortunately, on the increase. This is not a phenomenon that is unique to Australia. Despite the fact that progress has been made throughout the world, the number of people living in extreme poverty globally remains unacceptably high. According to the most recent estimates of 2013, 767 million people live on less than $1.90 per day. To do our bit, when Labor was in government Australia's overseas foreign aid budget increased from 28c in every hundred dollars in 2007-08 to 37c in 2013-14. Had Labor been returned at that election, aid was budgeted to rise to 50c in every hundred dollars in 2017-18.

We all know what occurred after the 2013 election—Australia's foreign aid budget was cut dramatically, to record low levels. It was cut in anti-poverty programs and programs aimed at drawing people in developing countries out of poverty. Today, thanks to this coalition government's irresponsible approach, Australia spends just 23c per hundred dollars on overseas aid. There is little doubt that this 'madness of endless aid cuts' as described by the World Vision CEO, Tim Costello, has damaged our reputation as a responsible global citizen and put Australians at risk by cutting public health, education, infrastructure and biodiversity projects.

Domestically, Australia unfortunately is moving backwards when it comes to poverty and inequality. After 20 years of economic growth, our nation is going backwards in the number of people falling into poverty. A report released by ACOSS in 2014 showed that poverty was growing in Australia, with an estimated 2½ million people, or 13.9 per cent of all people, living below the poverty line that is accepted internationally. This included 603,000 children.

Australia is becoming more unequal, as well. The distribution of wealth and income is becoming less, even in Australia, and the World Wealth and Income Database demonstrates that the share of income going to the top one per cent of Australians has nearly doubled since the 1980s to 8.3 per cent. In terms of wealth, the top 10 per cent of wealthy Australians own 50 per cent of the nation's wealth and, of course, inequality is a key determinant of poverty in Australia. This is reflected in the data in the ACOSS report.

The policies of this government have not made the situation much better at all. In fact, they have made it worse. Cutting pensions and cutting family payments does not help people who are struggling to make ends meet. Watering down Medicare and the universality of our healthcare system is not going to be good for cutting poverty in Australia. Attacking penalty rates—the payments that people use to ensure that they have a good quality of life and a liveable wage—is not going to see poverty reduced in Australia. The groups that tend to be at greatest risk of poverty in Australia include women, sole parents, people with a disability and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people—the key groups that have been attacked by this government's budgetary policies over recent years. Our First Australians continue to be massively disadvantaged, with a life expectancy 10 years less than the rest of Australia and an unemployment rate of 48 per cent. We are in danger of losing our claim of being the nation of the fair go.

I would like to thank and acknowledge the organisers and sponsors of Anti-Poverty Week: the Australian Red Cross, the Brotherhood of St Laurence, St Vincent de Paul and the University of New South Wales in the constituency I am fortunate to represent. I urge everyone to get online at antipovertyweek.org.au and take part in organised activities that help highlight and bring together the understanding of this urgent cause. (Time expired)

Jason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is with great honour that I stand here today and support the member for Goldstein's motion on Anti-Poverty Week. Mr Wilson has spent a lifetime trying to improve people's lives, not just in a material sense but in a real sense, in our community. It is appropriate that he has moved this motion today to recognise so many community groups who have been involved in trying to solve the problem of poverty in our nation.

We live in one of the richest countries in the history of humanity. Yet we cannot feed all those people who are hungry, we cannot house all those people who are homeless and we still cannot educate all those people who are illiterate. We have spent hundreds of millions of dollars—billions of dollars—on trying to reduce poverty. The fact is that over our lifetime we have not shifted the needle on this problem in our society. This motion reminds us that poverty is not just a matter of money. Poverty is a matter of much, much more. As Roger Wilkins has said, 'Measuring poverty is a task fraught with controversy.' If we cannot even agree on how to measure the problem, then it is a demonstration of the fact that it is very difficult to agree on how to solve the problem.

We are reminded that poverty is about opportunity. It is about opportunity to access both education and a stable community. A lot of research in the United States has shown that children from poor inner-city households have great difficulty breaking away from the poverty which they are born into because they find it difficult to deal with stress later in life. This is a fact of the communities in which they grow up—the problems that they face with high crime levels and the ability that they have to deal with stress. If we cannot provide stable communities for children, then it is very difficult for them to move out of the poverty to which they have found themselves subjected. Therefore, it is appropriate that we recognise the role of community groups as part of the solution and the progress that can be made into the future.

We live in a modern and dynamic society. Our solutions to this problem need to be modern and dynamic. We cannot simply rely on increased government funding to resolve poverty. Government spending on the welfare bill will increase to $4.8 trillion over our lifetimes. Spending must be about improving lives, not just spending. The most critical part of the reforms recently announced by Minister Porter was the Try, Test and Learn Fund of $96 million. The language that he used was very similar to that which Franklin Roosevelt used when he was seeking election in 1932, when he said that the one philosophy that would drive his administration would be bold experimentation.

The Try, Test and Learn Fund will be more about trying to divert people from ending up in the tyranny of continuing poverty throughout their lifetimes, diverting people away from programs that ensure that they will be entrenched in the poverty to which they have been born. It is important that we continue as a government to invest in these sorts of programs, because the answer is not one size fits all. The answer must be to continue to experiment and to find different ways that we can resolve this problem. Over our generation, we have massively increased the amount of money that we have spent on social spending, yet, as the previous speaker pointed out, income inequality has increased. It must be that spending is not the only answer to reducing poverty and income inequality but, most importantly, opportunity in our society. I commend this motion and congratulate the mover.

Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I support the motion and am pleased to be addressing this chamber on such an important issue in advance of Anti-Poverty Week. I will focus my remarks on Australia although we could, of course, spend much time talking more broadly about the global poverty issues.

The motion is fine as far as it goes, but it seriously understates the issue. The member for Goldstein is not known nationally for his modesty or understatement or indeed his care for inequality—not that I have heard in many of his public remarks—so in that sense the motion is progress, or an achievement. It is true that Australia is prosperous and has a high standard of living, but to say that poverty remains an issue for some people seriously understates the problem. I am going to allow myself a brief Mayor Quimby moment—one of my favourite characters from The Simpsonsand quote myself. In my first speech I said,

I worry that the language of social justice has become too soft, that we must speak more clearly about poverty and stark, indefensible and growing inequality.

  …   …   …

Despite 25 years of continuous economic growth, inequality in Australia is at a 75-year high, and … More than 2.5 million of our fellow Australians live below the poverty line

Two point five million Australians is more than just 'some people'. I heard you quote the 2012 report, and I had a look also at the 2014 report by ACOSS, which regrettably showed that, in fact, the percentage of Australians living in income poverty—at less than half the median income—had increased from 11.8 per cent to 13.9 per cent. It understates the issue globally to say we have low levels of poverty by international standards. If you have a look at the 2013 chart of 35 OECD countries, you will see that Australia is, in fact, 26th highest at 14 per cent, well above the OECD average of 11.2 per cent. In my view, the OECD comparators are far more appropriate for a country like Australia than looking at a long list of developing countries around the world. As the member for Kingsford Smith observed, there is disturbing evidence that child poverty mirrors broader poverty levels in Australia. The 2014 UNICEF report into child wellbeing found 13 per cent of Australian children live in poverty—these are just numbers, but behind them there are kids going hungry every night in Australia, without the basics to be well and to succeed.

As has been said, you cannot really talk of poverty without talking about inequality, because poverty is one end of the spectrum, albeit an arbitrary line. Growing inequality is one of the most important macro issues in the world at present. These are not just fuzzy notions of equality or fairness; it is an economic issue because economic exclusion fuels social disharmony and alienation can lead to anger. This is recognised as a priority economic issue by those left wing radicals at the World Bank, The Davos forum, the IMF and the OECD. Consensus is growing that inequality has a significant negative impact on growth and, conversely, that reducing inequality can enhance growth.

The motion does not acknowledge the impact that this government's policies are having on poverty and inequality. You can search this government's election platform on the web and there is no mention of poverty—you hear the Prime Minister talking about it in response to a few transcripts. There is no mention of inequality that I can find. We have heard about housing affordability, which I agree is a primary driving cause of poverty. There are so many families in Australia effectively living in poverty due to housing stress. Unfortunately, the government has nothing to say on this: no minister, no plan and no certainty for the National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness, whose funding expires next year—it is limping along from year to year, cut after cut. If I had to pick one of the cruellest cuts that I have seen from the Abbott-Turnbull government, it would be those to benevolent societies. I understand and can buy into, to some degree, a view that welfare does not solve poverty. You have to get people into employment. I accept that, but, if you were to pick the cruellest cuts, they would have to be those which were made in the 2014 budget to benevolent societies: the $100,000 that the Springvale Benevolent Society or the Dandenong District Benevolent Society got to feed the poorest in our community, people who had literally nothing—no blankets, no saucepans. The government absented the field.

The final point I would make is: just recently the Minister for Social Services announced plans to force some young jobseekers into poverty, to force them to wait four weeks to be eligible for Newstart. This is disgraceful. Poverty is not a personal choice. For most people, unemployment is not their preference. For most people, unemployment is a failure of the market or governments, not the individual. Labor does not support making life harder for those who are struggling. Living in poverty is not a crime or a sickness. Listening to some people on the right of politics—not the rhetoric we have heard today—and their relentless quasi-religious focus on economic efficiency and letting the market rip, I cannot help getting the feeling that they would seriously consider ploughing poor people into the fields for fertiliser if it were a more economically efficient use of their carbon, not that many of them believe in carbon. But I commend the motion. It is a platform on which to have a discussion.

Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I feel as though I should make some response to that comment but I think it was just so disgraceful that I am going to let it go. But I would like to mention some of the matters that the member for Kingsford Smith raised. He talked about wanting to spend more money on foreign aid. That is very nice, but where is this money going to come from? If Labor has these wonderful plans and these wonderful ideas to spend more money on foreign aid, where is the money going to come from? What programs are you going to cut, what schools are going to go with less, what hospitals will go with less, what aged-care centres will go with less so we can afford more money for foreign aid? The money has to come from somewhere. Or is the alternative plan simply to borrow more money? Is the plan to borrow more money from overseas to loan it back overseas in the form of foreign aid? If we are going to come into this parliament and be fair dinkum, if we are going to complain about cuts to budgets and things, we must say where the money is coming from.

When it comes to foreign aid, there is a quote from a guy called Bono that sings in some band called U2. His quote is—I think this is worth members of the Labor Party noting—'Commerce, entrepreneurial capitalism, takes more people out of poverty than aid.' That is not a comment from the member for Goldstein or a comment from me; that is a quote from Bono, the lead singer of U2. We see it time and time again—the best antidote to poverty is free markets, free trade and capitalism. That is what history shows to us. During the last 20 years we have seen one billion people lifted out of poverty across the world not through foreign aid but through capitalism and free markets, and we should say that unashamedly.

But we do have areas of poverty in this country. We need to all work together to try and raise people out of poverty, and the best way to do that is to increase wealth, to create wealth in our society, because before you can distribute wealth you have to create it. Sadly, what we see from so many policies on the Labor side and on the Green side is that they destroy wealth. If you destroy wealth, you have less to distribute, and the people that are harmed the most are those that we wish to help the most.

One area where we see this is in South Australia. South Australia, perhaps coincidentally with the highest renewable energy target in the country, has the highest electricity prices in the country. What does that lead to? It also has the highest proportion of customers that have had their electricity cut off. If you want to put people in poverty, I cannot think of anything worse than a family having their electricity cut off—to have it disconnected so you cannot cook your dinner on the stove at night, you cannot turn the heater on when it is cold in winter, you cannot have a hot shower in the morning and, yet we have policies from Labor governments that are increasing their costs of electricity in this country, pushing people into energy poverty, and we are seeing people having their electricity cut.

This is unacceptable. And, what do we see from the Labor Party? Instead of learning from the disaster that is the South Australian economy, instead of learning from where we see a record number of Australians having their electricity cut off—South Australia, the highest number electricity disconnections—instead of learning from that, what do we see? We see the Labor Party, not only wanting to copy South Australia's renewable energy target, but increasing it. Renewable energy is important but it cannot be done at the expense of the poor and those less well off in our society that will pay the ultimate thing when they have their electricity cut off. I thank the member for Goldstein for this motion. Poverty is a serious issue which we should take seriously in this country. (Time expired)

Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Goldstein for bringing this motion and other members for participating in the debate. While Australia is, broadly speaking, peaceful and prosperous, we cannot forget that many Australians live a very different kind of life and that poverty levels here are relatively high by OECD standards. What is more, the proportion of people living in poverty is growing as inequality grows and, of course, our region comprises of some of the poorest and least developed nations.

It was two years ago that the Australian Council of Social Service launched a report titled Poverty in Australia, which showed that one in seven people were living on less than 50 per cent of median income, a third of all sole parent households exist in poverty and the rate of poverty is one and a half times greater for Indigenous Australians and more than double for people with disability. Let us remember that the maximum rate for Newstart allowance, Youth allowance and the single parenting payment are below the poverty line.

But statistics can be numbing, so let us also consider some of the things whose absence defines deprivation and social exclusion: warm clothes and bedding, medical treatment when needed, a substantial meal at least once a day, a decent and secure home, the ability of children to participate in school activities and outings, a yearly dental check-up for kids and a separate bed for each child. It is not hard really to imagine how much anxiety, alienation and suffering is involved when you cannot depend on those things or provide them for your kids.

Absolute or extreme poverty is rare but not unknown in this country. Extreme poverty has been described by Robert McNamara, the former president of the World Bank as 'a condition so limited by malnutrition, illiteracy, disease, squalid surroundings, high infant mortality and low life expectancy as to be beneath any reasonable definition of human decency'. It is very difficult to accept that such conditions exist in a country like Australia but they do. The Closing the Gap report from earlier this year shows we are off-track in relation to life expectancy, with Indigenous men and women dying on average 10 years younger than non-Indigenous Australians. The cancer mortality rate is rising for Indigenous people and the rate of diabetes is three times the non-Indigenous rate.

Across our region, extreme poverty is not uncommon. Only two Pacific Island nations managed to achieve their poverty targets under the Millennium Development Goals, yet across the Asia Pacific we have seen aid cuts of 40 per cent to many country programs. Meanwhile, in Timor Leste, our close neighbour, fully half of all children suffer from stunting and the impairment of brain development as a result of malnutrition, yet under this government our aid budget has been savaged. In 2015-16, despite being told that our aid policy would be more about Jakarta than Geneva, we spent $200 million less in the Asia Pacific to reduce aching disadvantage than in the final year of the previous Labor government.

As the motion states, it is very important that we stop and recognise what poverty means, and Anti-Poverty Week provides that opportunity. But we will get nowhere if this year and next year and the year after that we merely pause and reflect on poverty in Australia, show our sympathy, say a few serious things and a few not so serious things about Bono and other views, storms in South Australia, and move on. There are things that can and should be done.

I am glad that Labor's first priority in approaching the government's omnibus bill was to preserve the supplement payments for a range of welfare recipients. I think it is ridiculous that funding is being cut to community legal centres next year when those services function to pull people back from the brink. I think it is essential that we remove the funding uncertainty for the National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness beyond next June. When there is no clarity in relation to funding as at October 2016, damage is already being done. Organisations cannot plan for the future, staff members begin to look for other work and lose morale, and the fragile but essential bonds of trust and knowledge are put under stress or broken altogether.

Last week I visited a crisis housing service in my electorate, called The Sisters' Place, which operates under the auspices of the St Patrick's Community Care Centre to provide women with a safe place to spend the night. St Patrick's is one of hundreds of community organisations in the dark about funding next year. I call on the government to pull out all the stops and deliver funding clarity and continuity to these services.

Inequality is not just a social ill but a symptom of wider economic malaise, and reducing poverty should be the first measure by which we judge our progress towards a fair and inclusive Australia.

Bert Van Manen (Forde, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to thank the member for Goldstein for putting this motion to the House. It is important that we use this opportunity to reflect on the wealth that we have as a nation. We should be very proud of the fact that, over the past several hundred years, our country has worked extraordinarily hard to achieve that wealth and prosperity, that high standard of living, and that we have low levels of poverty by international standards. Yet—as many have observed in this debate—there are those in our society who still find life difficult every single day and struggle below the poverty line. It remains an issue for many Australians.

It is interesting to note—and I think this is where this motion has much relevance—that there are many organisations in our community that do a tremendous amount of work in this space. It is an opportunity for me today to reflect on some of the wonderful work that some of those organisations do in the electorate of Forde. They do these things out of a genuine love for the people in our community. They want to see them lifted up and see them be able to achieve the opportunities that most other Australians have achieved. They want to see these people lifted up from a place where they are just subsisting from day to day; sometimes they struggle to even get through a day.

There are consequences of poverty. There is much research which shows that people in dire economic circumstances have issues around drugs, poor health and poor educational outcomes for their children. If we can deal with the issue of poverty and lift these people up from the situation that they are in, we are going to see enormous benefits to their kids, to their family in the longer term and also to the broader community. All of these people have tremendous skills, talents and abilities. Getting them out of their situation of poverty and allowing them to utilise those skills, talents and abilities for the betterment of our communities is of enormous value and enormous importance.

I look at terrific organisations such as Lighthouse Care at Loganholme, who provide trolleys of groceries worth $25 for families and, more generally, discounted groceries in their store. The number of people going through there each week whom they provide these trolleys of groceries worth $25 to is growing by the day. Not only do they do that in our local community, but they do it in a large area of South-East Queensland. Interestingly, not all of these people are from areas that you would view as low-socioeconomic areas. There are people who live in what would be considered wealthier areas who are also struggling financially. There are organisations, such as NightLight, who go out into the streets of our community to feed and care for the homeless. Not only do they feed and care for the homeless but they will go into a street, get the neighbours out of their houses and into the street, have a cup of coffee and serve them some hot food and actually get people talking to their neighbours.

That is one of the things that I think we can all recognise in this place: we lead such busy lives that sometimes we do not spend the time to get to know our neighbours and we do not have those community bonds and relationships. They have told me stories about people in those streets who did not know of the struggles that their neighbours were going through, but as a result of getting to know their neighbours, through the work that NightLight does, people have been able to reach out and help their neighbours get through some very difficult circumstances.

It is these organisations—which not only are reflected in my communities but also, I have no doubt, are reflected in the communities of all of the members in this House and the senators as well—that do this basic grassroots work that make our communities so much better. I thank the member for Goldstein for bringing this motion to the House.

David Feeney (Batman, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Justice) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Goldstein for putting forward this motion recognising Anti-Poverty Week and its aims. We are fortunate in Australia; in many ways we live up to our name of the Lucky Country. We have levels of prosperity that many other nations desire and we have a welfare system which acts as a safety net to catch those who are doing it tough. However, these things do not disguise the fact that poverty remains a stark reality for millions of Australians and that inequality is higher than it has been in many decades.

The last poverty report by the Australian Council of Social Service revealed that there are over 2.5 million Australians living below the poverty line. Over 600,000 of these Australians are children; this means that over 17 per cent of all children in Australia are living in households that are below the poverty line—a staggering statistic. At the same time, inequality has reached a 75-year high, with hundreds of thousands of Australians unemployed, over one million underemployed and many more facing the challenges of insecure work. For perhaps the first time in our history, we cannot be confident that the next generation will be better off than we are.

Our most vulnerable are most affected by poverty—women, children, seniors, sole parents, the unemployed, adults born overseas and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The consequences of poverty for individuals are heartbreaking, but poverty and inequality also have broader social consequences: they reduce social cohesion and undermine economic participation. Poverty costs the individual, the community, the economy and the nation.

We all have a responsibility to care about this issue and to do what we can to help those in need. However, I believe the greatest responsibility by far belongs to us, the parliament. We have a responsibility to put tackling inequality, inclusive growth and social investment at the heart of the agenda for government. At the very least, this means not increasing the burden on those who are already disproportionately vulnerable to poverty, as those opposite have sought to do. You cannot seriously speak about addressing poverty while at the same time attacking pensions, increasing the cost of health care, attacking pay and conditions and increasing the burden on Newstart recipients.

There is no doubt that budget repair is important, but it must be fair. I believe it must be used as an opportunity to increase systemic fairness, not to foster even greater inequality. Instead, we must put jobs first. We must invest in education that fosters opportunity. We must improve universal access to healthcare and build stronger, more resilient communities so that we can tackle social exclusion. This goes to the heart of Labor values and our mission as a political movement.

In closing, I would like to acknowledge the organisations in my own electorate, Batman, who dedicate their time, energy and passion to addressing the causes and consequences of poverty in our local community every single day. We are fortunate to have over half-a-dozen neighbourhood and community houses in Batman. These hubs bring us together and build community capacity through training, early education and support for a very diverse range of local groups and needs. Many of them also provide much needed food parcels, fuel vouchers, crisis support and hygiene packs. We are also home to some great philanthropic organisations such as the Inner North Community Foundation, which works with local organisations to create programs that help move people into employment and to build philanthropy across our community.

There are far too many organisations such as these to mention them all by name. But the fact that there are so many food banks and the fact that this work is being undertaken by such a diverse miscellany of groups speaks to the fact that these issues of inequality and poverty are growing, not receding, both in my community and more broadly. While the work of these organisations is something our community can be, and is, immensely proud of, it speaks to the incredible and increasing need for these services.

Finally, I thank all of those locals who have given so generously to my Anti-Poverty Week non-perishable food drive that I undertook in conjunction with the Salvation Army.

Maria Vamvakinou (Calwell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The time allotted for this debate has expired. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.