Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The eradication of poverty should be the highest moral imperative of all of us in this place. When people go hungry, when kids have no place to sleep at night, when folks are trapped under systems and processes which place them in danger, in fear, they should be able to look to this place and know that, while the lights are on in this building, there are people working to help. And yet, for 24 long years, on the issue of Newstart, the very opposite has been the case.

We have wasted decade after decade in this place ignoring the voices of folks living in poverty and ignoring the experts that work in the social policy space. In that time, we have allowed a great crisis to develop in Australia's communities: the crisis of entrenched intergenerational poverty, with folks trapped in a daily struggle that nobody in this place can picture or even imagine. It has been within our power all of these years to do something about it, and yet we have failed.

I want to talk a little bit tonight about what sits at the heart of that failure, because it's something that disabled people experience really acutely. What sits at the heart of this failure is a belief that, if you live in poverty, it is because of your own moral failing—that poverty is a result of your own failure to be a good person, your failure to 'have a go and get a go', as that sentient bag of flour in the other place so eruditely puts it. This ideology, this vicious belief that poverty is the result of a personal failing, is something which we disabled people suffer acutely. There are 200,000 of us that are living on Newstart right now, and we are first to suffer at the hands of this idea that says, 'Oh, you're just making it up.' We must be. We're faking a bad back, we're putting it on with a walking-stick, we're faking our mental ill-health because we want to be on social welfare! We want to be on the DSP! We want to be on Newstart! If only somebody took the rod out of the cupboard and were willing to give us a hard-enough kick, we'd be able to find ourselves a job somewhere! The result of that thought process is that 50 per cent of disabled people in Australia live below the poverty line. We live below the poverty line.

It is a national disgrace that inaction in the face of poverty has become government policy in this country. It is given moral and ethical sanction every day in this place by the repetition of those tired and empty slogans that we hear from the government in this place every single day. There will come a day when this chamber finally moves to act on this issue and at that moment we collectively will owe an apology to all those who we failed during these last 24 years and who suffered as a result. We must now take this opportunity to move on this issue, to do the right thing and to ensure that no Australian is trapped within a system that is letting them down and driving them further into destitution and poverty. I thank the chamber for its time.