As the nation has spent the past 24 hours with our gaze fixed squarely on Rome, and the canonisation of a woman who dedicated her life to fighting poverty, it’s worth considering some painful truths closer to home.
Here are some pertinent numbers from new research just released by the Salvation Army in a report entitled Perceptions of Poverty:
- 2 million Australians now live in poverty — 1 in 10 of us
- 70% of poor children in Australia live in jobless families
- Australia now has one of the highest levels of joblessness among families with children in an OECD country
- 12% of all children aged 0 to 17 live in ‘relative poverty’
- At least 80,000 Australians needed the Salvation Army’s help for the first time last year
- 57% of single parent families interviewed said they could not pay utility bills in the past 12 months and 12% went without meals.
Welcome to a new emerging group of people getting bigger — the working poor.
Time to ask ourselves some hard questions about the aftermath of the economic downturn and the people who’ve fallen through the cracks.
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Guy Rundle has landed. In the US, that is. In today’s edition of Crikey our roving correspondent kicks off his coverage of the US 2010 midterms — from Newark, New Jersey. And how times have changed. Less than two years into the Obama era, and the President and his party are facing a massacre. Hang on tight as Rundle covers all the gory details right up until November 2.
Without wishing to make light of poverty, I would rather be raised in strained circumstances in Australia than in any other place on the planet.
No problem asking ourselves the hard questions, it’s the answers that are the problem.
The labour market was deregulated to make us all wealthier. It hasn’t. The people who have got wealthier are those who run things, those who were already rich and people who work for capital intensive industries such as mining and power, where labour costs are a relatively small proportion of business costs and where powerful unions can still wield the big stick.
Labour market deregulation has done exactly what the economists and their rich cheer squad wanted. It made anyone with low skills a commodity. Overlay this with immigration that favours rich and smart foreigners coming in on planes, not boats and we are in an employers deregulated Nirvana. We are told there is a labour shortage but labour costs are not rising, so much for the market.
The answer is to bring back a decent minimum wage, and legislate to make companies accountable to all of their stakeholders, not just the rich institutional share holders they wine and dine on a regular basis along with the politicians that they buy off for cheap favours.
If all of those people who spent thousands on air fairs and accomodation to go to Rome to watch a geriatric priest cannonise a woman who lived 0ver one hundred years ago stayed home and donated that money to St Vinney’s, (irony here), the poor and homeless would be a lot better off. I am sure Mary McKillop would have have wanted this rather than the circus that she was pothumously awarded. (Here another irony.)