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

It is disappointing that, once again, as in previous years when we have come to mark International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, we have descended into a partisan approach towards the issue of poverty in Australia. It is disappointing because I believe that, if we were to erect a bipartisan or multipartisan platform in this country on which to talk about poverty and the ways in which government and the community might work to eradicate remaining areas of poverty, we would create great opportunity and we would make very great inroads in those remaining areas where we would have to say that our record is not up to the mark that we would expect. But that platform is, unfortunately, lacking and that is disappointing.

We on this side of the chamber were accused this afternoon of not being statesmanlike with respect to this issue. It needs to be recorded that the debate about poverty did not start today with this matter of public importance. It did not even start with the Senate Community Affairs References Committee 2004 inquiry into and report on poverty in Australia. It has gone on for some time, and it has remained an issue which has been the subject of intensely political and partisan debates in this place. Although I accept a number of the points made in the course of this debate by those on the other side of this chamber, we need to reconstruct the way in which we approach this issue.

First of all, let me say what it is that we in this place agree on. Australians at the present time bask in historically unprecedented levels of wealth. We are by any measure—international comparisons, historical comparisons or whatever—tremendously wealthy as a nation. We have wealth today that would stun our ancestors if they could see us. But it remains true also that there are Australians—large numbers of Australians; too many Australians—who face serious disadvantage and hardship. That is tragic and unnecessary in the face of the wealth that our community overall enjoys.

It is also true to say that poverty is often not the fault of the poor. For example, from the Senate Select Committee on Mental Health—which examined over the last year or so the question of mental illness in Australia—we know that very often there is a strong connection between mental illness and poverty. Strong economic conditions will not of themselves always catch those who do not have the means to take advantage of those stronger economic conditions. We need to build mechanisms that will still address the needs of those people who cannot take advantage of those circumstances.

But there are, unfortunately, many things that I suspect we do not agree on. I, for example, would argue that the evidence points unquestionably to poverty having eased, and eased dramatically, in Australia over the last decade. Why do I say that? There are clearly many more Australians in employment. Employment—a job—is a passport out of poverty. Over 1.9 million jobs have been created in Australia in the last 10 years. We have the lowest unemployment rate, more or less, of the last 30 years, at 4.8 per cent. There has been an unprecedented transfer of people into work, people who can now provide for themselves and their families. What is more, to address the issue that is sometimes raised of people becoming working poor—people in employment who do not have the means to generate the wealth that they would like—we have much higher real wages. Real wages have increased by 16.4 per cent in the course of the last decade.

On top of that, we can also point to the fact that the social safety net in Australia has had its capacity to deliver benefits to those who are the poorest Australians very significantly increased. Real spending on social security and welfare has risen by 35 per cent since the present Howard government came to office, despite being relatively steady as a proportion of GDP. Research by NATSEM has found that, before any intervention by government, the private earnings of the top income quintile are, as Senator Minchin told the Senate today in question time, 43 times higher than that of the lowest quintile. But once you factor in taxes and benefits and the way in which those things have been structured differently in the last decade, that ratio falls to three to one. In other words, although it is true to say, I suppose, that the rich are getting richer in this Australia, the poor have also had advantages from those arrangements. They have also had their conditions lifted—although obviously not in every case.

Obviously, there are some people who have not been advantaged under those arrangements whose condition individually is worse than it might have been at some point in the past. But that will always be true. No system of alleviation of poverty, no system of taxation or welfare distribution will ever prevent that from occurring. We therefore have to focus on what it is that we can do to increase the extent to which our social safety net captures those people. ABS data shows that between 1995-96 and 2003-04 the real income of low-income households increased by 22 per cent and there has been no significant change in income inequality since the mid 1990s. That is a very significant set of circumstances.

Obviously, there is a great deal more to be done. We have pockets of poverty in Australia which are simply intolerable, given the wealth that we enjoy as a community. But it is true to say that we cannot hope to have an effective community debate about how we attack those remaining areas of poverty without some better explanation by Australia’s leaders to the community of how far we have come and how far we need to go. In this debate, Senator Moore applauded the initiatives which the government has taken, and I acknowledge that comment. But I have to say that I do not always get that message from the Australian Labor Party when I hear it talking about issues associated with poverty. In fact, it sends a message that is often stated in the community, which is that poverty is getting worse, and that simply is not true. The problem with that message is that it disempowers so many in the community who think that that repeats the message that poverty will always be with us. We need to say to the community: ‘Actually, poverty is a summit that we can scale, and we can scale that summit because we are already more than halfway up that slope.’ That is the message that we need to get out to Australians today, and I believe that we can and we should be imparting that message to all Australians.