Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

I seek leave to take note of the government response to the Community Affairs References Committee report on poverty and financial hardship entitled Renewing the fight against poverty.

Leave granted.

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

I know these documents get spilled over onto the Notice Paper for Thursday afternoons or late Tuesdays and Wednesdays but I think it is appropriate on this occasion, given the significance of the topic, to take note of this document when it is formally presented to the Senate. It is particularly appropriate to note that this government response, which was produced last week out of sitting, actually took just over two years. It took over two years to respond to this very comprehensive report that looked at the issue of poverty and financial hardship in Australia.

I will not go through every aspect of the government response now. There were a lot of recommendations in that report. I therefore acknowledge that perhaps it might have been a bit harder to respond in the usual three months that is supposed to be required in responding to committee reports. But let us not forget that this government has an appalling record of responding to committee reports across the board within that time frame. Virtually no report is responded to within that three-month period. To wait two years is simply inexcusable, particularly on a topic as fundamental as poverty within Australia and particularly given that the government’s interest in the matter was so negligible that it dismissed every single recommendation contained in that report.

I do not dispute that there were some politics and politicking involved in that inquiry, but to simply say that the entire thing was a politically motivated exercise set out to embarrass the government and can therefore be entirely dismissed, which is the essence of the government’s response, is a joke. If they were going to take that response, they could have taken one day to respond to the committee recommendations and just said: ‘We’re not interested. This is politically motivated. We won’t engage.’ To take two years is not just an insult to the Senate, the Senate committee and the secretariat who did that work but, much more fundamentally, it is also a massive insult and a slap in the face to the many Australians who took the trouble to provide evidence to that committee, whether it was through written submissions or through presenting evidence at public hearings into that inquiry. It reflects very badly on the Senate as a whole. It reflects badly on the government, and I hope it does, because they deserve it. Unfortunately, it has a flow-on consequence of reflecting badly on the Senate and the Senate committee system through no fault of the Senate.

People may recall that the Sydney Morning Herald published a series of articles towards the end of last year looking at the government’s poor record in responding to parliamentary reports, including House of Representatives committee reports that are dominated by the government. The government’s poor record on responding to reports also had the inevitable consequence of portraying the Senate and the Senate committee system in a bad light. Given how widely recognised that committee system is as being one of the crucial mechanisms to enable public input, to educate the senators and to enable information to be provided to the wider community—to parliamentarians, to our advisers and to people with an interest in the topic—I think it is a tragedy that that process is being reflected in a bad light because of the contempt of the government.

This inquiry was used in those articles as an example of a comprehensive inquiry that went to cities all around Australia and took evidence from a whole lot of people—people who are working at the coalface and usually working so flat out trying to deal with the impacts of poverty that they do not usually have time to put together submissions and present evidence to committee hearings. Despite this, they thought that this issue was so important and so significant that they would take time out from their enormous workloads of dealing with the reality of poverty to let the Senate and the senators know, because they seemed to be interested in doing something about it. The Senate is still interested in doing something about it. Senate committees are still interested in doing something about it. I am still interested in doing something about it. This response shows that the government is not interested in doing something about it. I think that is a disgrace.

I think we are probably all trying to take the chance to score political points off the visiting Prime Minister Mr Blair, but one thing he has made clear and has had the courage to do in the UK is not just talk about making poverty history with respect to Africa but actually setting some targets in the UK about tackling poverty in his own country. That means political risk, because it means you set targets that you might fall short of and then your opposition can point the finger. At least he has had the guts to take responsibility for it and set some targets to say, ‘This is a problem we will try and tackle, because it impacts on our entire society, not just the people living in poverty themselves.’ Obviously, they feel it most directly and immediately, but our society as a whole is dragged down and held back by having poverty—and I mean poverty of opportunity, not just poverty in the financial sense—being inflicted on so many in our community.

To me, that is the core failure of the government in responding to this. They were not just dismissing various specific recommendations; they totally refused to even consider the prospect of having a national strategy to deal with poverty. The simple reason is that the government do not want to be seen to be having to take responsibility and put that burden on their shoulders and say: ‘We’re the national government. There is poverty in Australia. We will establish a national strategy to deal with that and we will take responsibility for it.’ They do not have the courage, and Australia is the loser for it. It is a common pattern we have seen. Similarly, this government will not adopt a national strategy to deal with housing affordability. That is another problem for which responsibility falls on state governments, but it is a national problem that needs a national solution working in cooperation with the states. I am not saying that the federal government is doing nothing about that, although I probably would if I was going to talk about that topic now. What I am saying is that adopting a national strategy about issues like that which relate to economic disadvantage is something this government do not want to do. We have even seen it with the motion that I have had on the books here for some time and which I will move sometime this week about adopting a national approach to tackling the problem of child sexual assault. It is a motion that was supported by the Australian Local Government Association. The government do not want to set up a national strategy for anything that is a social problem that they are not confident they can fix, because they do not want to be seen to be accepting that it is a responsibility that they have to do something about. I think that is a failure of leadership. It is a failure of political courage, and our nation is the loser.

I am not saying that the government should have accepted every single one of the recommendations; I am saying that it is simply beyond belief that not one of those recommendations was deemed worthy of adopting, particularly the straightforward and simple one of recognising the need to take a national, holistic approach to dealing with poverty. The only reason for not wanting to do that has to be because the government do not want to acknowledge that poverty exists in a clear-cut and undeniable way. They want to break it down into bits and pieces here and there and dilute the whole issue so that the comprehensive reality of it is not given the recognition it deserves. Again, I do not say that just to say, ‘The government are failing on it and all of us over here have the solutions.’ None of us have the solutions. State governments have to bear some significant responsibilities for the failure. All of us in the political arena have to. All of us recognise the old adage that the poor will always be with us in one form or another. We can all have the arguments about where the poverty line should be and how you define poverty, but all of that should not be used as a smokescreen to divert attention from the reality that there is a significant group of Australians throughout various parts of our country who are in clear-cut situations of undeniable financial and social poverty and poverty of opportunity.

The real problem is that, the more that situation remains, the more difficult it is for people to catch up. As the prosperity that is there within significant parts of our community does develop, those people who are not able to get on the bandwagon—or the merry-go-round or the ladder of opportunity or whatever you want to call it—are left further and further behind and it is harder and harder for them to get on.

The gap between those with wealth and those without is growing. Again, there are different ways that people like to use statistics to dispute that, and there are different statistics about whether or not there are growing gaps in income, but there is undeniably a growing gap in levels of wealth and in the levels of opportunity that go with it.

I do not dispute that there were political aspects to the inquiry—and I am one who has repeatedly said we could do with less of that in Senate committees, and that is an approach I try to take when I can—but that should not be used as an excuse to ignore the reality that was undeniably put forward. Some of the senators may engage in political game playing or political point scoring, but the people that presented evidence time after time, with a common theme throughout it all, were not politically motivated. (Time expired)