Page 503 - Week 02 - Thursday, 11 February 2021
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Ms Lee, for raising this issue. The substantive issue before the Assembly is action, and active support to address poverty. Mr Assistant Speaker, if you want to lift people out of poverty, you need to create suitable and secure job opportunities and you need to lift their incomes. Households that have a job are much less likely to be living in poverty. Equally, households that receive adequate social security payments are also much less likely to fall into poverty.
One of the simplest and most effective ways of keeping hundreds of thousands of Australians, and tens of thousands of Canberrans above the poverty line is for the federal government to permanently raise the rate of JobSeeker and not plunge it back to pre-COVID Newstart rates.
The ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods has conducted significant analysis on this question and examined the impacts of poverty and housing stress under current and alternative economic and policy scenarios. The key findings of this ANU research from last year are that the federal government’s response to increased social security payments—surprise, surprise—reduced poverty and housing stress. Raise people’s incomes and you reduce poverty and housing stress.
How much has this reduced poverty and housing stress? The poverty gap has been lowered by 39 per cent, and the number of people living in poverty has been lowered by a third. That was when the COVID supplement to JobSeeker was at its maximum rate. As it has been tapered down, more people have returned to poverty.
When they looked into all of the recipients of social security benefits, they found the increase in social security payments had the greatest impact in lifting people out of poverty for those who are on Newstart or who were Youth Allowance recipients. They were estimated to have received the largest reduction in poverty. Their poverty rate dropped from around 67 per cent. So two-thirds of people in Canberra who were on Newstart or on Youth Allowance were living in poverty. With the increase in those allowances, that poverty rate dropped from 67 per cent to seven per cent.
The Prime Minister, if you believe today’s Australian newspaper, is currently considering what the permanent rate of those social security benefits will be. As I have said before, and I will say again here today, I urge the federal government to raise the rate. I invite all members in this place to join in that call to demonstrate an actual, practical commitment and an understanding across all parties in this place that those low levels of social security payments are the major cause of poverty for unemployed people and people on Youth Allowance, not just in this city but in this country.
As has just been raised, we look to those who are on the minimum wage. Those people have been at the forefront of seven years of economic policy objective from the federal government to suppress wage growth. It was a stated policy goal of finance minister Cormann that wage growth would be supressed. Well, they certainly achieved that—wage growth in Australia is anaemic. The Reserve Bank is putting interest rates at 0.01 per cent in order to try and drive some strength in the labour market, to see some uplift in wage pressure in the economy.
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