MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE
Senator ALLMAN-PAYNE (Queensland) (17:13): ACOSS's latest report shows that it's no longer one in eight Australians living in poverty; it's now one in seven. One in seven people in one of the wealthiest countries on earth are struggling to meet their most basic needs. That is unacceptable, and it's the direct responsibility of this government.
It's expensive to be poor. Rents are unaffordable. Of more than 51,000 rental listings across Australia, just 0.7 per cent were affordable for someone on the minimum wage.
Only three rentals in the entire country were affordable for someone on JobSeeker, and not a single one was affordable for a person on youth allowance. So people skip nutritious meals to pay the rent. They turn off the heating, they get sick more often and they face impossible choices between seeing a GP, eating three meals a day or keeping a roof over their head.
It's expensive for people to be poor. But what we don't talk about enough is how expensive it is for the government to keep people poor. What we are living through is not simply a cost-of-living crisis; it's a cost-of-inequality crisis, and it's one that this government could fix tomorrow if it chose to.
Right now, we spend around $4 billion a year forcing people on income support to comply with so-called mutual obligations—obligations that are anything but mutual. These systems are punitive, bureaucratic, demeaning and, in many instances, unlawful. Yet we know that even modest increases in income support deliver huge fiscal and social returns, saving the government money in health, housing, and emergency services, improving people's wellbeing and strengthening local economies.
It is literally more expensive for the government to maintain poverty than it is to end it. So the question has to be asked—if it's cheaper to lift people out of poverty, then why isn't this Labor government doing it? It's certainly not fiscally irresponsible, so what is it?
Is it because punishing people who rely on welfare is actually the point? Labor went to two elections promising not to leave anyone behind, and yet we've gone from one in eight to one in seven people living in poverty. Yes, we can all agree that poverty is bad, but the excuses for inaction no longer stand.
It's not too expensive to raise the rate; it's too expensive not to. Poverty is not inevitable. Poverty is a political choice, and this government has the power right now to choose differently, to choose fairness, dignity and equality, to choose to end poverty in this country once and for all.