Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

No, we do not, but we need to give credit where credit is due, Senator Sherry. That was not the approach that was taken by a majority of members on this inquiry. You might think it is quite satisfactory for so much public money, so much effort and so much work on the part of individual submitters and senators and their staff to be ploughed into an exercise where so little was there at the end of the day to show for it. I for one did not feel that was the case. I regretted greatly that the bipartisanship which that particular committee has achieved on so many other issues was not possible on that question. It was obvious to anybody taking part in the inquiry that that was in fact the case.

Senator Bartlett, I think, acknowledged the political aspects of the report and said that perhaps they should have been less. Indeed, I would agree. There was an opportunity there to build a consensus on what was happening in Australia with respect to poverty, to work out what steps might be taken actively to change that reality and to address it in the context of government policies which were and are succeeding in reducing poverty in Australia. That opportunity was missed by this inquiry, and it need not have been missed. There was nothing inevitable about that factor in this debate. There was nothing inevitable about us being in a position today where we have retreated to our respective sides of the ideological debate and the Labor Party uses the report to attack the government and the government uses the report to attack the Labor Party. It is a sad state of affairs but one which, I would argue, was made inevitable from the very outset of this inquiry by the approach that so many took, an approach which could have been reversed by a different mindset but was not.

We have a great deal to be thankful for in this country. We have a great deal of work yet to be done in addressing poverty among those who have not experienced the benefits of growth and rising living standards in the last 10 years or so. That task remains notwithstanding the fact that there is profound disagreement between members of the Senate and its committees about how poverty might be tackled. But I believe that it is fundamental to any approach to tackling poverty that we see this as occurring in the context of a broader debate about management of our economy. We cannot eliminate poverty by selectively targeting those who are poor and only addressing the issue of how to alleviate or address in some way individual cases of poverty. We cannot make that equation work.

We have a chance of making that approach work if it is part of a strategy to lift Australian living standards across the board. That sometimes results in the phenomenon of the gap between rich and poor actually widening. This is one of the fundamental issues that divide the committee. There was a view, a mindset, by many in the committee that if that was occurring it demonstrated that Australia was sinking deeper into poverty and that there was a major social problem. Others did give evidence that in fact the widening of the gap indicated a growth in opportunity and a growth in productivity as long as those at the bottom of that gap were not sinking further behind what might be considered an acceptable standard of living for Australians. That was the clear evidence before the committee: the most poor in our community were benefiting from government policies that saw their standard of living rise.

Again I say that this task remains ahead of us. It can yet be tackled; it should yet be tackled. The government has a program to tackle poverty and that program is clearly working. Every indication of the wealth of Australians and the benefits to Australians of the economic miracle points to that fact being real. We are getting more benefits to Australians but the task of targeting those who are not benefiting from these changes lies ahead of us.