STATEMENTS BY SENATORS

Senator PAYMAN (Western Australia—Australia's Voice Whip) (13:52): Somewhere in Western Australia tonight, a child goes to bed hungry. It's not because their parents don't love them or work hard enough but because the system has let them fall through the cracks. In Hedland, the Youth Involvement Council has spent more than 40 years opening its doors to teenagers who have nowhere else to go.

Kids as young as 15 are navigating homelessness completely on their own in one of the most remote parts of the country. That should never be normal. And yet, for too many young Australians, it is.

Organisations like Centacare, through the End Child Poverty campaign, have spent years telling us the same thing: child poverty in this country isn't rare, and it isn't going away. It's the child who stays quiet about the school camp they can't afford. It's the teenager who moves house again and again and says goodbye to friends each time.

It's the single mum lying awake doing the math on rent and groceries and knowing the numbers just don't work. This isn't only a capital-city problem. The weight of poverty falls heaviest in our regions, where services are stretched thinner and support is harder to reach.

We cannot keep looking away simply because a child's suffering doesn't make the headlines. That's why we need to place children at the centre of how we measure poverty in this country. We should move beyond just counting dollars and instead count the missed meals, the missed milestones, the missed childhoods.

Every child in this country deserves safety, stability and the chance to simply be a kid. To the families doing it tough in our regions, we see you, and this parliament owes you more than silence.