John Hogg (Queensland, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have received a letter from the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, Senator Chris Evans, and Senators Bartlett and Siewert proposing that a definite matter of public importance be submitted to the Senate for discussion, namely:

On International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, the urgent need for action to address the plight facing the hundreds of thousands of Australians still living in poverty.

I call upon those senators who approve of the proposed discussion to rise in their places.

More than the number of senators required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

I understand that informal arrangements have been made to allocate specific times to each of the speakers in today’s debate. With the concurrence of the Senate, I shall ask the clerks to set the clock accordingly.

Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you to colleagues for their support for this matter of public importance, which was slightly overwhelming. I have pleasure in bringing forward this matter of public importance today and in being joined by a Greens and a Democrat senator. It was designed to allow the government to support the motion as well. I hope they will when they speak. Unfortunately, we were not able to get a government senator to co-sponsor the matter. It was designed to be an expression of the will of the whole Senate.

In a society like ours, where most people enjoy prosperity and opportunity, it can be easy to forget that not everyone has it so good. There is a lot of focus these days on property prices and share market trading and very little focus on those who are doing it tough. Around the world hundreds of millions of people struggle to survive without the basic requirements for a decent life. For most Australians the harsh reality of daily life for so many people is a world away from the comfort and prosperity of Australian life.

International Day for the Eradication of Poverty provides us with an opportunity to reflect on the presence of poverty and disadvantage and to focus on what can be done to tackle it. I would like to focus close to home, on poverty and disadvantage in our community. Despite our prosperity and the opportunities most of us take for granted, poverty, disadvantage and social exclusion in our community are very real. We need to open our eyes to the life experiences of those Australians who struggle to make ends meet, who lack access to services and opportunities and are excluded from the social and economic mainstream. In focusing on disadvantage in our community, we have a duty to also focus on solutions—what we can do to ensure that Australia’s prosperity and opportunity is open to all Australians. Above all, we need to be positive. We are a wealthy country. We can and we must work to ensure a decent chance for every Australian. Labor believes that we need a long-term, national plan to meet a renewed national commitment to tackling poverty in our community.

Depending on how you define it, hundreds of thousands if not millions of Australians are currently living in poverty. ACOSS estimates that two million Australians—10 per cent of us—live in poverty, based on a poverty line of 50 per cent of average disposable income. Even by the most conservative estimate put forward by the Centre for Independent Studies, poverty affects around one million Australians. The people most at risk in Australia include Indigenous Australians, people with a disability, the unemployed, single parents, people living in lone-parent households, renters, homeless people, and people living in rural, regional and remote areas.

Living in poverty means constantly struggling to make ends meet. According to Anglicare’s State of the Family Report 2006, there are hundreds of thousands of Australians who routinely struggle to meet basic costs like food, rent, electricity and gas bills. According to Anglicare’s report, more and more Australians are relying on emergency relief from welfare organisations to meet these basic expenses.

But poverty is about more than just income; it is also about social exclusion—being disconnected from the community. People may not be able to afford the cost of transport to visit friends or be able to afford to make phone calls to family. I have had to help a number of men who have been unable to afford rental accommodation in our suburb any longer because of the rising cost of that rental accommodation. They have been forced to suburbs which they have no connection to, because they cannot afford to live in the area where they have lived most of their lives. In many disadvantaged areas, there is a lack of community facilities, basics such as parks, which allow children to interact and parents to meet other members of the community. Social exclusion can also be the result of problems with self-esteem, trauma, hopelessness, disconnection from the workplace, poor social and interpersonal skills and deeper mental health issues.

Aboriginal Australians are more at risk of falling into poverty than any other group in our community, with ACOSS estimating that 58 per cent of Indigenous people are at risk. This disturbing fact is a result of the extreme social and economic disadvantage that Indigenous people face on every available indicator, be it employment and income, education, Third World health conditions or housing. It is a national disgrace that Indigenous Australians face such extreme levels of disadvantage. I echo the sentiments of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Tom Calma, that it is simply not credible to suggest that a country as rich as ours cannot solve a health crisis affecting around three per cent of our population. We can do it. In the debate around poverty generally and Indigenous disadvantage in particular, we need to confront that pessimism that these problems cannot be solved. These problems are fixable if we have the will and the right strategy. It is up to us to make the decision to tackle and end these problems.

There is no single way to define or measure poverty. It is a complex problem which calls for complex solutions. I do not want to engage in the sort of definitional argument that the Howard government seems to have been so focused on: the quibbling over how you define poverty. In its submission to the Senate’s inquiry into poverty, the St Vincent de Paul Society, which does tremendous work, said:

Regrettably, the polemical debate over poverty lines has distracted rational discussion on solutions to a known problem.

It was dead right. The Senate committee report included 95 recommendations. Unfortunately, the Howard government rejected every single one of them. Again, its response was to quibble over the definition of poverty rather than to focus on the issues.

Labor is serious about addressing poverty in Australia. We believe that the care we provide for those in need and the opportunity for all to realise their potential are important measures of our society. Tackling poverty not only is a responsibility but offers huge benefits to all Australians by fostering a more inclusive, fairer, more cohesive society where all members of our community have a decent chance to realise their potential. Tackling poverty requires a commitment based on the values of justice, equity, compassion and a fair go for all. A strong economy is a necessity if we are to improve the life chances of Australians in need, but it is also the case that tackling poverty is a task that goes way beyond simplistic assertions that the best form of welfare is a job. Poor people in this country face complex issues that need to be tackled. Just referring them to the need to get a job does not tackle those issues. We need national commitment to getting results and a strategy for doing so.

On previous occasions, I have outlined some of the approaches that a Labor government would take, including developing integrated services; building a national program that engages local communities; providing long-term funding arrangements to facilitate certainty in planning a strategy, because we are plagued at the moment by short-term funding and programs that end; research and data to monitor the impact and effectiveness of programs; and long-term benchmarks and goals to ensure political accountability and keep governments focused on the task. If you do not set goals, then you never reach them. If you do not hold yourself up to be measured against the attainment of set objectives, you will not make progress.

There is no better time than now to recognise and confront the poverty and social exclusion that many in our community experience. It is something that this parliament must play its role in. Part of the challenge is accepting the reality of poverty and disadvantage in our community. We cannot tackle the problem until we acknowledge that it exists. But we do need to question the assumption that poverty will always be with us, and we have to focus on solutions.

One of the energising things about these issues is the number of groups and individuals in the community who work so hard to tackle disadvantage. I would like to acknowledge their hard work and commitment. Recently I met the National Council of Churches, which runs the National Make Indigenous Poverty History campaign. Today I met the Catholic Social Services people, who are having their annual conference in Canberra. They represent all the people who work for services on the ground—helping disadvantaged Australians, visiting prisons, supporting communities and supporting families in crisis.

Yesterday I also met some young people from Cabramatta High School who are engaged in the Micah Challenge and Make Poverty History campaigns. They challenged me and other politicians to make a difference on these issues. They asked very hard questions like ‘Why aren’t we making progress?’ and ‘Why aren’t we able, given our wealth, to end poverty?’

Mitch Fifield (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

But we are.

Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If you do not think there is poverty in our community, Senator Fifield, I am disappointed; you are less informed—

Mitch Fifield (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Things are getting better.

Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Whether they are getting better or not, I was hoping that you would take a much more statesmanlike position in this debate. We sought to get your support for an expression of the parliamentary will, but it seems that you cannot rise above petty politics. But I want to say that I hope— (Time expired)

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This afternoon I want to mention three things briefly: firstly, the difference that the major parties in this place have in dealing with poverty and the challenge of poverty; secondly, the lessons we have learned over the last 20 years in fighting poverty; and, finally, what the government has done to meet that challenge.

When I first read the wording of the issue we are discussing today, I thought that the three parties of the Left—the Greens, the Democrats and the Labor Party—were concerned about poverty, as they should be, as we all should be. Parties of the Left tend to believe that welfare is the answer to poverty, that individuals need to be rescued from poverty by government, and that more welfare means less poverty. Liberal and conservative parties do not agree with that. We argue that individuals need a hand up, not a hand-out. We believe that what the vast majority of individuals need is opportunity, and that that is far more important than welfare. Welfare of itself will never break the poverty cycle. Sure, welfare can be used in the short term to alleviate poverty, but it is not the answer.

What have we learned over the last generation about the challenge of poverty? Let me give a few examples from the Third World. Sir Bob Geldof and Bono were serenading the poor in Live Aid and Live 8. That was important, and they raised a lot of money to fight poverty. But that is absolutely nothing compared to the transfer of wealth to the Third World that has come about by the freeing of trade with the Third World. All those awful bureaucrats, diplomats and politicians demanding free trade have done more for the Third World than all the aid ever raised by Bob Geldof or Bono—much, much more. They have given access. The Third World countries have access to First World markets and can sell their products. We never hear about that. The Left never thank the government for freeing up trade and allowing developing countries to trade with the First World and therefore opening up our markets so that people living in the Third World have opportunity. It is not aid but trade that is rescuing the Third World. That is a very important message from our side of politics—a message that somehow seems to get lost in all the sanctimonious concern from the Left.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the new Nobel laureate for peace, Professor Muhammad Yunus, spoke about developing microcredit. That system gives a small amount of money to individuals in Bangladesh to open up businesses—for people to become small business men. It is not welfare. Welfare never rescued people in Bangladesh from poverty. What did is giving people money to create their own opportunities. For that reason, Professor Yunus was recently awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. The other day a commentator described microcredit as the single most important development in the Third World in the last 100 years—giving individuals the opportunity to make a living for themselves and their families. It is pretty simple stuff: a mixture of capitalism and social responsibility has done far more to deliver people from poverty than all the aid in the world ever has.

Let me give another example—Indigenous Australians. I can remember 20 years ago being denounced as a racist because I thought that perhaps we should restructure welfare to Indigenous Australians. But Noel Pearson told the truth, didn’t he? He said that sit down money, welfare for no work at all, is a drip that is killing Indigenous Australians—that it is the financial equivalent of petrol sniffing. The drip—drug abuse and welfare without work—is killing Indigenous Australians. Again, we had to readjust policy to make connection with Indigenous Australians and to fight poverty. Noel Pearson got it right. You do not fight poverty among Aboriginal communities by giving welfare. Sit down money destroys communities; it does not build them.

And what have we learned among non-Indigenous Australians? We have learned that a job is the best way to alleviate poverty. As Senator Minchin so eloquently said today during question time, a strong economy and job growth have alleviated more poverty for more people in this country than ever before in its history. He said also that real spending on welfare has gone up by 35 per cent. There has been a great growth in private philanthropy, which has doubled in 10 years.

There are those people on the Left who say, ‘The rich are getting richer.’ That might be right, but just because the rich get richer does not mean the poor get poorer. In the last 10 years, wealth has gone up 22 per cent in low-income households and only 14 per cent in high-income households. Over the last 15 years, Australia has gone from 19th to eighth on GDP per capita—enormous growth in the Australian economy over the last 15 years.

Perhaps the most sophisticated assessment of living standards in the world is what the United Nations calls the Human Development Index. This is an index of national wealth, health, education, welfare and lifestyle. Do you know what the United Nations’s Human Development Index says about Australia, Mr Deputy President? There are 177 nations on earth that are assessed according to the United Nations’s Human Development Index. And guess where Australia falls? It is third in the world out of 177 nations.

The economy in this country has more than doubled over the last eight years. More people have more wealth to spend the way they want than ever in our history. Sure, poverty is a problem; there is no question that poverty is a problem in this country. The difference between our party and the Labor Party, between the government and the opposition, is that we believe the way to tackle poverty—except for those people who really, really cannot look after themselves—is by giving people opportunity, not welfare, and by allowing people to build their own businesses, get jobs and get educated. The last thing we want is a return to the 1970s mentality of government as a bottomless pit to pay poor people off. This patronising attitude that somehow all Australians need government welfare, that we should all be on the teat of the government, is wrong. It is patronising and destroys communities.

Finally, poverty, both nationally and globally, is a huge issue—we all acknowledge that. I know other speakers today do not take this issue lightly. Senator Evans is right to say that there are still pockets of shocking poverty in this country, and we should never look beyond that. But the great achievement of this government, of the Howard government, is that more people have been pulled from disadvantage than ever before in history. More people have been pulled out of poverty by freer trade over the last 10 years than ever in the course of human history. Two hundred million Chinese have been pulled out of poverty in the last 10 years by freer trade. Not by welfare, not by government action, but by freer trade. This is the greatest movement of people out of poverty in the history of mankind. Why? Because of freer trade, and that is what separates Liberal conservatives from the Left.

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

As one of the sponsors of this motion, I obviously support it. This week is Anti-Poverty Week and today is International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, and I join the Australian Labor Party and the Democrats in calling for the need for urgent attention to address the plight facing the hundreds of thousands of Australians still living in poverty.

ACOSS estimates that there are about two million people living poverty today—that is one in 10 Australians. There are 100,000 homeless people, and nearly half of all Aboriginal children live in poverty. Perhaps what we should be doing as a nation is looking at how best we invest our good fortune in helping those most disadvantaged in our society. I believe we would be better off investing the tax cuts that were given out so widely during the last budget in addressing special issues and addressing the major issues that affect those most disadvantaged in our community—for example, providing the billions of dollars that are needed to address Aboriginal housing and providing the hundreds of millions of dollars that are needed to address Aboriginal health.

This week is also National Carers Week, so I would first like to look at how carers are managing in our affluent society—affluent for some. If you look at NATSEM’s report on the cost of caring in Australia from 2002 to 2005, titled Who cares?, it says:

One-third of people providing primary care for elderly or disabled people live in households whose income places them in the poorest fifth of households in Australia.

It estimates:

… that if a single person on average weekly earnings in December 2005 of $1,030 per week—

before tax—

were to leave his or her employment to care and receive only the carers’ income support payment, their weekly income would drop to $294.

In a further blow to carers, those on low incomes or government pensions are likely to be receiving little or no superannuation—which could present significant problems when it comes to funding their own retirement or future care needs.

The situation becomes even worse for Australian women who provide the majority of care to the young, old and people living with a disability in Australia. The report says:

… women already, on average, have lower net worth and less superannuation than men—

when it comes to retiring. Therefore, they are in an even worse situation. This is an example of how poverty is impacting on our community. These are real figures published just a couple of months ago.

The Carers Australia submission to the recent Senate inquiry into the Commonwealth State Territory Disability Agreement said:

… carers are over-represented in the lower household income quintiles and under-represented in the top income quintiles …

It also pointed out:

… the mean gross income per week of a primary carer was $237.00.

That is from 2005 ABS data. You can see that carers are suffering at the lower end of the income scale. They also have other issues they need to deal with on top of that, which are a result of their caring. They end up with poorer health. They sometimes end up being injured while doing their caring. Two-thirds of carers feel that their mental and emotional health has also been affected by providing care.

This picture is no better for single parents. The National Council for Single Mothers and their Children have highlighted some of the significant issues facing single mothers, and ABS data continues to show that single parents with primary care of dependent children are at the highest risk of poverty of all family types. Income and housing research has identified that 46 per cent of all sole parents with dependent children live on very low incomes. According to the ABS 2001 census data, an estimated 28 per cent live in public rental, 34 per cent in private rental and 32 per cent are homeowners or purchasers. This is compared to 67 per cent of the general population who are homeowners or purchasers. With the changes that have been made in child support combined with Welfare to Work, which has been debated at length in this place, where many single parents end up having their income further reduced, we are potentially making this situation worse.

As has been highlighted during this debate, there is, of course, the poverty that faces many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in our community. I articulated just last week in this place the poor health outcomes for Aboriginal Australians that are, I believe, directly associated with poverty. The UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing spoke just a couple of months ago of the hidden national crisis that faces Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, highlighting the terrible conditions he had seen in Indigenous communities and describing this as ‘a humanitarian tragedy’. Poor housing and a lack of basic services combine with poverty and the high cost of food in remote communities to produce, as many people have described, Third World health outcomes. This is shameful in a so-called affluent community.

ACOSS has called for fairness impact statements to look at the impact on fairness and social inclusion of government decision making and policy initiatives—to ask the question: what impact does or would this policy have on fairness in our community and the right to a fair go for all? Poverty impact statements are a way to highlight some of the social impacts that policies can have on life expectancy, health conditions, child care and access to education. All should be looked at in terms of what impacts policy decisions have there.

I was very disappointed that the Anti-Poverty Week motion that I put to the Senate was not supported by all parties, because I thought it was very sensible. It highlighted the poverty issues that face our community and made some sensible approaches. It did not call for increases in welfare; it called for poverty impact statements so that we can highlight impacts of government decision making and ensure the reporting on these. It also asked for Australia’s strong economy to be used to improve the living standards and life chances of all Australians. I would have thought that would have been something that every senator in this place could have supported. I urge that we consider what poverty means in our community in the year 2006. We are supposed to be living in the strongest economy ever, yet we are not taking all Australians with us.

Claire Moore (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This afternoon, on International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, we have an opportunity in this place to come together to make a statement that we accept there are people in Australia who are not sharing as they ought in the general welfare and wonder of the economy that is operating in our country at the moment. I hope that through this discussion, short as it is, we will be able to agree on some simple statements and come together with movement forward rather than degenerating into some kind of debate about whose policies are bigger. It would be really useful if we could just extract from the statement that is before us that there are people in Australia who are living in poverty and there is a need for urgent action. That does not say that action is not currently being taken. I am sure there will be a litany of things brought forward about things that are being done through various systems in Australia to address poverty—and we applaud that. We think that what we can gain from this afternoon is actually just accepting that perhaps we can listen to each other and, more importantly, listen to those people who are living the experience to look at how we can improve what we are doing.

Some of us have been privileged to attend a range of Senate inquiries over the last few years. I have only been here a few years, but already through the community affairs process I have been part of an inquiry on poverty in Australia. I think we should remember the title of that inquiry report: A hand up not a hand out. It was not a demand for greater welfare. Whilst it took months and months to get a government response and there were significant differences about figures that were being used and about motivations, I thought we had agreed as participants that there were people in Australia who needed assistance.

I will just quote from a couple of the people who came before us. There were over 500 submissions to that inquiry from people who are living the experience in Australia. This came from St Vincent de Paul—and no group has more knowledge of what is going on in our communities than they do. One of the witnesses said:

I want to stress in relation to this delegation that we are not policy experts but we are experts on the lived experience—the lived experience of these people who have suffered the pain and heartache of poverty in the city of Sydney.

In that case it was in the city of Sydney. That experience came across throughout the country. It did not matter whether we were meeting in the Northern Territory, in Sydney, in Queensland, in Western Australia or wherever—the people who were working most closely in the community were telling us of their lives and the lives of the people they were serving. It is our job—the job of everyone in this chamber—to listen to those voices, to see what we can learn and not to judge. One of the major messages is that it is not our job to judge. It is our job to look at reality, to look at experience and to see how we can best build the opportunity that Senator Mason was talking about, because there is a great deal of common ground here. I just think sometimes we forget it—we are so busy hearing our own voices that we forget that perhaps there is something we can do to pull this together.

Out of that Senate inquiry, there were a wide range of recommendations, most of which did not actually come forward in a way that people could agree about. But one was the overwhelming interest of people across the country in working together to find a solution. I think we can still hold on to that. On a day like today, we can actually take those steps forward. We can say that, yes, we can do things better. It does not matter how many statistics are rolled off about whether the percentage increase over the last 10 years has been greater than that of the 10 years before and how in every person’s pocket there are X more dollars. We can argue about that until we are all very old. But there is the reality of the experience that came before us not just in that Senate inquiry but in the one we did on mental health, the one we did on child support and the one we did on people in institutional care. What they had in common was that there are people who are not sharing in the wealth of this country.

That is the challenge for us, because that is fact. It does not matter how many graphs or statistics you put forward; the people themselves are suffering. They are telling us that their kids are not able to go on school excursions because they cannot afford the extra time. Parents cannot look their kids in the face and explain to them why they cannot get the same activities or entertainments that the other kids can get. That is fact. We have people who do not have enough food at home on a weekly basis. They cannot get nutrition because they cannot afford it. We had the horror stories of people who turned the lights off in their home and did not use electricity because they could not afford the utilities bill.

These are not just horror stories. They are not coming out of some movie or some claim for extraordinary support. They are the real-life stories of people who are living, the same as we are, in our community at the moment. They are experiencing poverty.

Other speakers this afternoon have talked about the activities in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. Everyone in this place has had personal experience of working with people from those communities and understanding the special plight that is facing people in remote locations without health care, without education opportunities and also without that spark, about which we talk here sometimes, of hope. The message for us—and I think the challenge for us—is how we turn rhetoric, the policies and the pages of statistics into a message of hope and how we remove ourselves from the political rhetoric, from saying, ‘Our policies are much better than their policies because ...’ and come back to the hub of the matter, which is how we make the policies work and how we ensure that the people in our communities share the advantages that most of us have as a matter of course.

When we do that, we have responded to the challenge that has been put before us by this motion and, as I know speakers have talked about, by the youth representations in this place today and at other times. I think there is an expectation by many young people in our community that we do our job and that we respond to those challenges, because they are not caught up in the rhetoric of political promises. What they see is the need in the community. While we are focusing here today on Australia, and I think that is an important thing, on this international day we also look across our international community.

It is not a debate between welfare and work. What we are saying is that a caring, economically sound government acknowledges its responsibility to citizens who need support. There will always be a need for some welfare system. There needs to be encouragement towards effective education and employment. That is a given. But, if you ask questions about the current government’s policy, they immediately take that as an attack and then throw across the chamber that people on this side—allegedly ‘the Left’—do not understand, are drowning in an outdated methodology and are focusing exclusively on welfare.

That is just not true. It is running away from the truth; it is running away from the real-life experiences of the people who want to tell us their stories. But one day they will stop telling us their stories because they are tired of telling us about how it is and not being listened to and not being understood. Rather than being part of the solution, once again they will be dismissed, marginalised and labelled as somehow having failed because they have not been able to share the successes that other people have. We must move beyond that. We have the opportunity to do that. We have the opportunity this afternoon as a parliament to come together and say, ‘There is poverty in our community; there is an urgent need to do something about it, and we will.’ That does not seem to me to be such a big ask. We can do that.

We can then go into the political discussions about how we actually implement that, but surely we can agree that the data indicates that there are people who are suffering poverty in this country. Their stories tell us that they are suffering poverty in this country. The amazing work of the various agencies which support our community tells us that they are working with this. I applaud Senator Minchin this afternoon talking about the greater philanthropy that is happening in this country. But the greater philanthropy is responding to a need that we should also work towards a solution for. We can do it. It is a bit of a challenge to move beyond the political argy-bargy, but I think we have a job to do and we can achieve that.

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

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

I welcome the fact that the Senate is marking the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty by turning its mind to the importance of this task and the need to focus on how best to address the fact that hundreds of thousands of Australians currently live in poverty. It is important, I believe, to try to address the issue in as balanced a way as possible and to recognise facts and reality rather than just pick ideological assertions that might suit our preconceived prejudices. In that respect, looking for opportunities to conduct debates like this in a multipartisan way is important.

I would suggest there has been somewhat of a failure by some on what is usually called the Left of politics. I think labels like ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are sometimes fairly limited if not grossly misleading in their value—although, having said that, I will use them myself nonetheless. People who normally would be labelled as being on the Left often do not adequately recognise the importance of a well-functioning economy in generating wealth and employment opportunities. That is something where there have been areas of progress in Australia. More importantly, I think we need to recognise that part of the way to alleviate existing poverty is to continue to look for ways to generate that wealth in a sustainable way, ecologically as well as economically.

But there is also a failure of those who would normally be seen as being on the Right to recognise that alleviating poverty is about more than this. It is about more than just generating jobs and keeping interest rates low and all those sorts of things, important as they are. Something that I do not think gets enough recognition in addressing poverty is not so much the issue of income redistribution—of taking more money away from people who have lots of it and giving it to people who have less of it, though there is some value in doing that up to a point—but rather that we need to recognise the importance of providing opportunities for people to generate their own wealth to get themselves out of poverty, whether that is financial or other forms of poverty. In my view, in many cases the heart of poverty is a lack of opportunity to alleviate not just financial need but other need. Wealthy people are people who have the opportunity to alleviate their needs, whether it is the need to reskill and retrain, to develop their education, to access health services, including mental health services, or to access the underrecognised but essential component of secure, appropriate and affordable housing. They are areas where we do not do as well we should.

We also are not recognising that, whilst there is statistically some basis for what Senator Humphries said about there not being an increase in income inequality, there has undoubtedly been a statistical increase in wealth inequality. There is a much greater and continually growing gap between those who have wealth and those who do not. That is particularly driven by our inequitable and very inefficient housing market. One area where we have failed to address a growing area of poverty is that whole area of housing affordability or the lack thereof. A growing number of Australians are having to spend greater and greater proportions of their income simply to keep a roof over their heads, let alone a roof over their heads in an area where they might be able to access employment, health and educational opportunities.

These are the areas where we need more national leadership. That is why I think debates like this are important, because it is another area where for some reason poverty is seen as a politically loaded word—that by acknowledging the fact that we have failed to deal with poverty properly we are somehow saying that our society has failed or we are condemning our economic system. I think there is ample evidence to show that our economic system with all its flaws does better at getting people out of poverty than plenty of other systems. But it is a simple fact that to really address or eradicate poverty—as the ultimate goal should be, however unachievable it might seem—you must have a strong set of goals to achieve it. You cannot just have a fuzzy notion of: ‘We’d like to get rid of it.’ You need to actually make a strategy out of it and take it on as a national agenda.

Where this government has failed is that it refuses to set forward a national strategy to tackle poverty and it will not take on a national strategy or national leadership to deal with housing affordability problems. In any of these areas it prefers to step back and say, ‘That’s a matter for the states,’ or, ‘It’s just a matter of economic management.’ It is not just a matter of economic management. That is important and necessary, but it is not sufficient. Until we actually get enough courage in our political system in general and national governments take national leadership and national responsibility for the hard stuff as well as the easy stuff, we are never going to get as far as we need to.

The most obvious example of that is demonstrated by the situation that many Indigenous Australians still find themselves in. It is impossible to talk about success as a nation in removing inequality and alleviating poverty until we get major advancement in the situation faced by Indigenous Australians. That is not just about ensuring there is more money available. In fact, in many cases, that is the least of the problems. When we have a group in our community whose average life expectancy is at least 17 years less than that of the rest of us—so one quarter of their life is taken away before they start—that is what poverty is really about and that is what we have to tackle.

I would take this opportunity to reinforce the Democrats’ strong belief that all of us across the political spectrum and in the wider community must give greater priority to removing that inequality faced by Indigenous Australians and the poverty that they are facing. We have all failed collectively in that regard from across the political spectrum. Until we give more priority to it, we will continue to fail.

I would also like to say in closing that we should also not forget other countries in our region. For all the difficulties our region faces with poverty and other challenges, we are much better off on average than most other people who live in our region and elsewhere on the globe. We need to make sure that we try to do more to alleviate the absolute poverty that many of those people still live in today.

Mitch Fifield (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The authorship of this motion is worth noting. It is interesting that it is a collaborative effort of Labor, the Democrats and the Greens. This is interesting at a time when the ALP is endeavouring to convince the community that they have joined the economic mainstream. There is no point pretending that the policy responses to the issue of poverty are something that we agree upon; we do not. I merely note this because the authorship of this motion indicates a world view—a philosophical outlook which Labor, the Democrats and the Greens share—and that leads to particular policy proposals. I do not think that we should pretend that we actually agree on what those policy proposals are.

None of us likes poverty. All of us are in the business of public service, I think, because we want to raise the living standards of Australians and to do whatever we can to achieve that outcome. All of us want to reduce poverty. All of us want to ameliorate the causes and consequences of poverty, but the two sides of this chamber do not, as I have said, agree on how to get there.

I think we should remember Bob Hawke’s declaration that by 1990 no Australian child need live in poverty. Poverty is not something that you can will away; it is not something that you can legislate away. I well recall the debate at that time about the original text of Mr Hawke’s speech. The text originally supposedly said that no child need live in poverty. I think that original text was right—that such is the social welfare system in Australia that no-one should or need be hungry, homeless or lack the medical care and attention that they need.

I would like to say something that I know might not be fashionable or popular: there will always be income inequality in Australia. Some people will always be relatively better off than others will. For a variety of reasons, there will always be people who are at the margins of society. Some of these people will be in difficulties because of circumstances entirely beyond their control—domestic violence, family break-up, mental illness or just plain bad luck. There will always be people in those particular circumstances. We can, we should and we do look after people who are in those particular circumstances.

There will also always be people who are in difficult circumstances that are partly of their own making—it might be through drug abuse. We can, we should and we do look after those people as well. There will also always be people who are in difficult circumstances entirely as a direct result of decisions and choices that they themselves have made in their lives. It is unfashionable and not popular to say that, but that is the case.

Again, as a community we can, we will and we should do what we can to help those people. We can and we should do what we can to help all those three categories of people to reduce the incidence, the number, of people in those circumstances and to help them once they are in those circumstances. That is something that I think we agree upon around the chamber.

But I am troubled by the premise of this motion. It presumes that poverty can be eradicated. As noble as that goal may be, I do not think it can be. The second premise that I think is false is that the government has not done all that it can to address poverty. I think that is implied in the motion. On this side of the chamber, our approach—and it has been partly ridiculed today—is that the best poverty buster is a strong economy because a strong economy leads to lower unemployment. The best way to lift a household’s income is to give the members of that household a job.

I believe that many of those opposite do not understand that economic and social policy are not mutually exclusive; each is necessary to the other. You need a good and strong economy to afford a good social policy. Many other countries in our region would love a good social policy; they would love to reduce poverty. It is not that they are against doing that; it is that their economy does not give them the financial capacity to do so—to ameliorate the effects of poverty. A good economy, a growing economy, creates jobs, lowers unemployment and lifts people’s individual incomes as well as their household incomes.

But a strong economy does something else. It allows a government and a community to fund a social safety net for those who, for a range of reasons, are left behind. We all acknowledge that there are people who are left behind. Sadly, it is those opposite who have routinely opposed every measure that this government has designed to create the foundations for a good and strong economy—whether it has been through balanced budgets, of which every single measure designed to bring the budget back into balance has been opposed by those opposite, whether it has been through tax reform or whether it has been through industrial relations reform.

Those collective policies have achieved a fantastic result for the Australian people. Under the coalition, real wages have increased by 16.4 per cent; under 13 years of Labor, they actually decreased by 0.2 per cent. There have been 1.9 million new jobs created. Unemployment is now at 4.8 per cent; when Labor left office, it was 8.2 per cent and it peaked under them at 10.9 per cent. Under Labor, household wealth increased in net terms by only 2.9 per cent per annum; under this government, household wealth has actually doubled since 1996 and the spending power of Australians has increased as well. It has been a good result for the Australian people. We all want to do more to help those who are poor. But I have to say that, if I had to pick any country in the world in which to experience hard times, I would pick Australia—and, if I had to pick a government under which to experience hard times, I would pick a Liberal government.

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

Order! The time for the discussion has concluded.