One in seven Australians poverty-stricken, report says
35 years after an Australian prime minister predicted that no Australian child would live in poverty, one in six children do.
That’s according to a new report released by the Australian Council of Social Services and the University of NSW to kick off Poverty Week.
The report found that 3.7 million people, or 14.2 per cent of the population, or one in seven Australians, will live in poverty between 2022-23. This includes 757,000, or one in every six children.
Dr. from UNSW Social Policy Research Centre. “This is unacceptable in one of the richest countries in the world,” Yuvisthi Naidoo said.
The report shows poverty has increased since the COVID-19 pandemic, when the JobSeeker rate temporarily doubled.
Nearly one in eight Australians, or 12.4 per cent of the population, struggled with poverty in 2020-21.
But steep rent increases have disproportionately affected Australia’s most vulnerable.
Across 2021-23, the average advertised rent for apartments increased by 40 per cent in Sydney, 34 per cent in Melbourne and 41 per cent in Brisbane.
And while the poor get poorer, the rich get richer.
According to the Australian Financial Review’s annual report Rich ListThere has been a 7 per cent increase in the number of Australian billionaires in the last 12 months.
Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, has a fortune of $38.11 billion.
ACOSS CEO Dr Cassandra Goldie AO said the federal government needed to take urgent action.
“While the Albanian government has taken some steps to reduce poverty, such as supporting minimum wage increases and small increases in income support, it needs to do much more to reverse this trend,” he said.
“The government must fix woefully inadequate income support payments, set targets, increase social housing and commit to full employment.
“It should also adopt time-bound targets for poverty reduction to hold us all accountable.”
Anti-Poverty Week co-chair Simon Schrapel said it was time for Australia to adopt a standard measure of poverty and get serious about reducing it.
“We call on the federal government to immediately adopt a dual measure of poverty that includes income thresholds as well as measures that address other dimensions of basic living costs such as housing, health, education, electricity and food,” he said.
The report was based on data provided by the Household, Income and Labor Dynamics survey in Australia, funded by the Department of Social Services.
A longitudinal study of Australian households publishes its findings annually.
It defined the poverty line, based on 50 percent of the average household’s after-tax income, as $584 a week for a single adult and $1,226 a week for a couple with two children.
People living in households below the poverty line had an average household income of $390 per week below that line, while families with children in poverty had an average income of $464 per week below the poverty line.
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