The Greens want to establish a new antipoverty commission that would set a national poverty line.
Senator Janet Rice will introduce a bill before lunchtime Thursday that would, if passed, create the new commission.
“This bill is a constructive step towards ending poverty in Australia,” Rice will say in her second reading speech.
Rice’s office said while there are different benchmarks used to measure poverty in Australia, there is no nationally legislated income below which a person can be considered living in poverty.
“For far too long, governments have used the lack of an accepted measure of poverty as an excuse to keep people living on inadequate payments,” Rice will say in her speech.
“We need a national definition of poverty, one that takes into account different needs and contexts, and one that government can be held accountable to.”
In the absence of a national poverty line, the Greens have so far used a measurement known as the Henderson poverty line, which was suggested as part of a poverty inquiry in the 1970s.
The most recent calculations from the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research define the Henderson poverty line at $1146.88 per week for a household of two adults, one of whom is working, plus two dependent children.
Rice says her proposed commission would go further than Labor’s interim Labor Economic Inclusion Committee, which was established to advise government budget planning as part of a deal with independent Senator David Pocock last year.
One of the grand hypocrisies of neo-liberalism is that a pool of around 5% unemployment is considered the sweet zone for economic growth and is sought on purpose – but they also want to retain the right to flog the unemployed for show.
Welfare has to be above poverty level, for the sake of humanity. If humanity’s sake doesn’t cut any slack with the neo-libs, then they should consider above poverty-level welfare the price of keeping the economy in top health.
But they can’t have it both ways.
If humanity’s sake doesn’t cut any slack with the neo-libs, we can consider them to be outside humanity. Like vermin requiring extermination.
And since Howard, the statistic is not just 5% of the workforce as a target, it is 5% of only those employed and those actively seeking work! Still the policy over the last decade has been successful in keeping wages down, yay to the conservatives!
Why not also have an ‘obscenity line’ measuring unnecessary and excessive wealth?
Both measurements could then be used to assess the extent of inequitable economic policies that betray the ‘fair go’ doctrine – supported by the vast majority of Australian citizens.
Well the name of the country is the Commonwealth of Australia. So many politicians and their backers (namely those who can afford access to a politician) have forgotten worse corrupted this and it as since become a Collectingwealth
A magnificent notion. I say we trim off the excess with guillotines.
Good to see someone trying to lift up the carpet to reveal the amount of inconvenient garbage lurking there.
Cant go all woke on poor people when we’ve got all these submarine manufacturing facilities to build for the UK and the USA. Money doesnt grow on trees you know.
Albo crowed about the 30,000 jobs building subs would create. John Quiggin wrote elsewhere that each one of those jobs will cost $18 million.
You are correct. Money doesn’t grow on trees, but the government can always create Australian dollars when it wants to fight a war or purchase the latest toys available from the military-industrial complex.
Well not since they replaced paper notes with plastic notes!