Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to 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)

Steve Hutchins (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I also wish to take note of the government’s response to the report of the Senate Community Affairs References Committee inquiry into poverty and financial hardship in Australia. I want to reiterate that it is nearly two years since the committee brought down this report. I remind senators that there were 250 submissions and 17 days of hearings throughout the country, during which a lot of Australians had an opportunity to put before their elected representatives what they thought some of the difficulties were for men and women and children in this country.

One group that came and gave evidence before us in Sydney—and Senator Humphries may recall this—were the Country Women’s Association. The Country Women’s Association would hardly be full of bolshies or Australian Democrats or Greens. They came and gave us evidence about their views about what was happening in country New South Wales. They told us about the degree of rural poverty and the difficulties that people were having in maintaining a roof over their heads. These were not the types of public service sector people that the government says are out there all the time and tries to lampoon. These were women who were concerned about what they saw as a growing level of poverty in this country.

It is an insult to have this report responded to two years after we brought it down. It is a very cursory and, in ways, childish dismissal of our report. Most of the first part of the government’s response is telling us how good the government is in terms of its economic policies. You would have to look and see whether it is actually referring to the report or to a compilation of government press releases. That is what most of it seems to be.

Nick Sherry (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Banking and Financial Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Who is the minister?

Steve Hutchins (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am not sure who the minister is now. They change. You know, as I do, that they change. But the first part of this government response essentially deals with government press releases. The second part has a few pages dealing with the criticisms of the government in relation to the report. The third part deals with the minority report recommendations, which were clearly written in the minister’s office so that the minority report senators could get up and argue the government’s case. The fourth part of the report is once again government press releases.

I just want to make this clear, and I hope Senator Humphries will respond on this: we knew that there could not be any agreed definition of poverty. We made that comment in the report. But we also said in the report that poverty was not, as the government response says, just about income:

Poverty in Australia is regarded as fundamentally about a lack of access to the opportunities most people take for granted—food, shelter, income, jobs, education, health services, childcare, transport and safe places for living and recreation. However, poverty is a multidimensional concept that goes beyond just material deprivation; it also includes exclusion from social networks and isolation from community life.

If you read the government’s response—two years after we brought down the report—you would have to think that all this is about is income. We clearly knew, from the 17 days of hearings we had and the 250 submissions we received, that poverty was not just about income, and we put that in the report.

We had a long debate about what the definition of poverty would be. The minority senators did not agree with what we saw as the definition of poverty, and we understood that, but we had evidence time and again, from every city and town in this country that we visited, that poverty was growing, that income disparities were occurring and that our citizens were being deprived of the social needs that we take for granted in a wealthy nation like ours. That is what we saw in this country. We never said that there was one view or one definition. But, if you read the government press releases and what the government lackeys say in the minority report, you will see that they believe there is.

We also said, as Senator Bartlett has referred to, that we believed there should be a national strategy to combat poverty, that a body should be established to oversee it and that that body should report to the Prime Minister. If you read the government’s response to our report, you would think that it was our idea. Well, let me just tell you, these are the mobs that were in favour of that report: such ‘bolshies’ as the St Vincent de Paul, ACOSS, Catholic Welfare Australia, Mission Australia, UnitingCare, the Brotherhood of St Lawrence and, indeed, state Labor governments—and why wouldn’t they? And where did the idea come from for a national poverty strategy and to have some streamlined involvement of the national government? It came from Ireland—another hotbed of red bolshevism!

That is where I see parts of the government’s response to our report. I could go through page after page, and I hope that at some point Senator Moore, who was as involved and distressed by the growing levels of inequality in this country as I was, will have an opportunity like me to go through, chapter and verse, a number of the things in the government’s reply that need to be addressed. I would also like to report on the government’s reply. Remember, we are talking about a report that was given to this Senate in March 2004. Bear that in mind, Mr Deputy President. A number of initiatives by this government have occurred, which we may not agree with, after March 2004. As I said, we do not necessarily agree with them, but it seems to me that an opportunity has been grasped by the government, by their definition of life, to address these issues of poverty. There has been the Welfare to Work program, announced in the 2005-06 budget. There are the family relationship centres and the family law system changes announced in July 2004. There has been a $33 billion package for government and non-government schools. There has been ‘Building on success’, the CDEP futures direction paper released in April 2005, and subsequent things occurring. There has also been the part A initiative, announced as part of the 2004-05 budget for the FBT. These things occurred after the poverty report came down in this Senate.

As I said, we may not necessarily agree with the direction of those initiatives, but something has definitely occurred in the government as a result of our report on the inquiry in March 2004. You would have to conclude that the government and the minority senators saw something going wrong and that the ministers’ offices were reading the reports and coming to some conclusion that there was something out there that needed to be addressed. I think we can claim some sort of victory—that we widened their scope and opened their eyes to what has been going on in this country under their stewardship. One of the things that I find disturbing, despite the fact that if you read this document you see that the government is addressing poverty, is that it seems to me that it suggests that in a way it is their own fault that the poor are poor—not that they have not had the opportunity to advantages of life that others have—or they have not got off their bums. It seems that that is the way the government approaches it sometimes.

Let me read you a letter to last week’s Age, from a Melanie Raymond from Youth Projects, in which, as I said, it seems that under this government poverty has been eliminated:

Over the past year, our agency has seen a sharp rise in poverty and hunger among disadvantaged and homeless youth. They are sometimes too weak to fully participate in the training that the Government requires them to attend to receive benefits. Add to these problems their poor mental health, generational unemployment, substance abuse, physical and sexual abuse and homelessness, and the picture is bleak. The hundreds we see daily are an accurate human indicator of poverty. They are nobody’s political tool.

This is what this government said this report was: a political tool. Not according to Ms Raymond.

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

I am very happy, as one of the ‘lackeys’ to whom Senator Hutchins referred, to rise in this debate and make some points. Let me say very categorically at the outset that this government does not deny and has never denied that there is poverty in Australia, that the extent of poverty in Australia remains unacceptable and that as a community we have an obligation to identify and to assist those Australians who have not shared in the benefits that a lucky country has brought to so many people. Inequality, in a sense, is inevitable in a free society, where people are free to make choices and to reap the benefits of their initiative and labour. But it is equally important that society set limits on the extent of inequality, to the extent that those who are seriously unable to provide for the essential basics of life should be provided for and assisted to ensure that they enjoy that essential standard of living that Australians would regard as everyone’s entitlement.

The Senate Community Affairs References Committee agreed on the fact that poverty in Australia demanded further action. It disagreed on many other aspects of this particular debate. It disagreed on whether poverty was becoming more serious or less serious. It disagreed on the measures that might be taken to address poverty in Australia. It was the government’s view, in presenting to this committee, and it was the view as well of the minority members of this report of this committee, that the most important way that any government can address poverty in a nation like Australia is to act to lift the general economic standards and economic performance of the country so as to create the wealth that will benefit those Australians not yet experiencing the phenomenon of greater national wealth and productivity.

We felt that by ensuring that the workforce continued to grow there was a greater likelihood that a person leaving school and going into the workforce would have a job there. We felt that was the most important way of tackling poverty in this country. We felt that freeing up the labour market so that businesses, particularly small businesses, were not discouraged and inhibited from taking on new staff was a substantive and clear benefit for those who sought to enter the workforce and who could not previously do so. We wanted to make sure that economic growth was nationwide and occurred in regions as well as in cities, in all states and territories of the country. We wanted to broaden the economic miracle that Australia has enjoyed in the last decade, to make sure that as many Australians as possible could benefit from that.

But consistently throughout this debate those who took part on the majority side in the committee failed to make that acknowledgment. They persisted in seeing the glass as half-full when a better analogy may have been that the glass was in fact three-quarters full and there was benefit in the approach the government had taken in generating employment, in creating jobs and in lifting real wages. Members should consult the figures that were relied on for that in the minority report. That was the evidence that was in front of us but that was the evidence that was consistently ignored by the majority in this inquiry. It is to the majority’s discredit that they continued to see this inquiry as an opportunity to bag out the Howard coalition government. That is what so much of this inquiry was about; that is what so many days of evidence were all about. How can we give this government a hard time over its performance in this area?

How little time was spent acknowledging progress that had been made. How little credit was given to the government for having created jobs, for having reduced unemployment to five per cent, for having lifted real wages of Australians over the last eight or nine years by something in the order of 14 per cent when in the previous 13 years of Labor government the net increase was in the order of about 1.5 per cent. None of that received any lip service in this inquiry at all.

There were witnesses before the inquiry—not the Bolsheviks that Senator Hutchins referred to, although there were witnesses certainly who persisted in that line as well—who wanted to make this inquiry about why the government was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Nick Sherry (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Banking and Financial Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You want them to say the government is right all the time?

Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to 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.

Grant Chapman (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The time for debate has expired.

Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.