In Anti-Poverty Week here are 5 big ideas for Australia to halve child poverty by 2030
This year, Anti-Poverty Week @AntiPovertyWeek (16-22 October 2022) is calling on Australia to legislate a plan to halve child poverty by 2030 to meet our commitments to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Here, Life Course Centre @lifecourseAust researchers present 5 big ideas to help make this happen.
Shockingly, in 2022, more than 1 in 6 Australian children live below the poverty line. That’s 774,000 Australian children.
Poverty for Australian children and families means not being able to cover the basics or not having a secure roof over their head. It is also associated with many negative life course outcomes including poorer school attendance, academic outcomes, and school completion rates; poorer mental, dental and physical health; and higher social exclusion at school.
Worryingly, poverty rates in Australia have barely shifted over the last 20 years and for children, they’re increasing. We need to do something about this.
It’s time for big ideas and bold reforms
Anti-Poverty Week is calling for a legislated plan to halve child poverty in Australia by 2030. The Life Course Centre is a proud supporter of Anti-Poverty Week and this call to action. In 2018, New Zealand introduced legislation that set targets on poverty that have already started to work.
Our recent national research retreat brought together more than 100 Life Course Centre researchers across the country from multiple research disciplines and asked them to put forward big ideas to reimagine our institutions. The focus was on bold institutional reforms rather than ‘tweaking’ around the edges.
Here, we present 5 big ideas to reimagine our public institutions to reduce poverty and increase opportunities by better supporting Australian children and families. We know what works, from research evidence and international experience. Some of the solutions are obvious but they need political will, bringing people together in consensus, and legislated targets to drive action.
1. Free high-quality childcare for all
Childcare is more than just ‘babysitting’. It is early childhood education. High-quality childcare for all, for free, would be a great ‘leveller’ to set all children up for the best start in life.
All developed economies recognise a child’s right to education, but in practice, this right only kicks in at age five when formal schooling commences. Yet the place where we can make most difference to children’s life chances and parents’ ability to escape poverty is in the first five years.
The first five years shape a child's experiences, including brain development, affecting behaviour and learning potential. These are when the balancing of financial and emotional care for families are most conflicted. At this time parents, typically women, lose income and career prospects.
Current Australian reforms to improve childcare access and affordability are important in enabling parent workforce participation and increasing family income. But quality matters. The evidence is clear – early education and care is the single-most successful intervention to improve children’s educational outcomes and health and wellbeing into adulthood, but only if quality is high.
Scandinavian countries provide childcare for all, alongside one year of paid parental leave. By doing this, they have not only achieved the strongest educational attainments when compared with others, they have also achieved very high levels of women’s workforce participation and lowered poverty levels.
Beyond childcare access for all, we need to see Australia invest in high-quality care and education as a right for all children.
2. Extended parental leave with a focus on fathers
Australia has made great strides toward improving women’s access to the labour market over the last few decades. For example, paid parental leave for all is helping women to stay connected to their employer and the labour force. But the latest World Economic Forum on gender inequality ranks Australia as 50th compared to 15th in the world in 2006, so overall, we’re not keeping pace.
One key area for improvement, as demonstrated by evidence from Scandinavian countries, is to support men to take on a greater share of unpaid care and domestic work. Australia currently provides fathers with only two weeks of paid paternity leave, a figure that falls far short of international standards.
There is considerable evidence that enabling men to spend time at home with newborns strengthens father-child bonds, encourages men to remain involved as children grow older, supports the economy by enabling women to return to paid work, and improves family health and wellbeing.
Providing increased access to longer periods of paid paternity leave and encouraging men to take it up through ‘use it or lose it’ policies is one way to reverse the trend toward increasing gender inequality and, at the same time, strengthen family bonds and improve wellbeing for all.
3. Affordable and secure housing for all
Homelessness has severe impacts on people's lives, including their health, education, employment, capacity to care for family, safety, and even their ability to live with dignity. Having a roof over our heads is the basis of addressing poverty. So housing is where we should start.
How do we do this? Australia’s housing market causes homelessness. There are too few affordable homes for all Australians to live in. The first thing that we need to do, immediately, is massively increase the supply of social housing.
More social housing will mean people can escape homelessness and future generations will be protected from homelessness. Housing is the solution to homelessness. At the country level, Finland is near eradicating homelessness through huge societal investments in social housing.
In Australia, there are lots of examples where we end homelessness for people with successful housing and support pilot programs and one-off initiatives. These include Street to Home programs, Melbourne’s Journey to Social Inclusion, and Brisbane’s Common Ground. These examples demonstrate that homelessness is a policy problem, and we can choose different policies.
4. Raising income support to a liveable level
Despite a recent increase, the current rate of JobSeeker allowance is still extremely low at $334.20 or $608.70 per week for a single person or couple, respectively. Single parents receive $25.10 extra.
Renting is out of reach for many on JobSeeker allowance.
This payment rate is clearly insufficient to live on without experiencing severe financial stress, especially for people depending on this payment long-term. Research shows that many non-employed, separated women end up in poverty, because they have to depend on income support such as the JobSeeker allowance.
For decades, working-age payments have increased with inflation only, instead of increasing with wages like old-age payments, thus lagging further and further behind other households’ incomes as wages have tended to increase with more than inflation in most years. This creates a clear shortfall between the costs of basic necessities and the JobSeeker payment rate.
For many, JobSeeker payments were almost doubled (up $275 per week) during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Results from this ‘natural experiment’ showed the higher JobSeeker payments led to less financial stress, and as a result less mental distress. This impact was evident in the weeks when the supplement was $275 or $125 per week but not when the supplement decreased to $75 per week and was known to be phased out.
5. Educational opportunity from birth to university
Educational inequalities are endemic and persistent in Australia. As a country, we are currently in the bottom third most unequal educational systems among OECD countries. Students from low socio-economic status families not only perform poorer on standardised test scores, they also show lower levels of engagement with learning and have poorer school attendance.
Young people from disadvantaged families are also less likely to aspire to go to university, and consequently have lower university participation and completion rates, and poorer labour market outcomes after graduating from university.
This is a pressing policy problem because the economic returns to educational attainment are the highest among children from low socio-economic status families, impacting their educational attainment, earnings, welfare dependency, and health outcomes over the life course.
There are concrete measures that we can take to help to close the socio-economic gaps. It all starts with moving beyond the narrow focus on academic performance measured through standardised testing. In addition to solid academic foundations, encouraging the development of socio-emotional regulation and personality traits such as perseverance, and building strong growth mindset and aspirations, are key to boosting the potential of all children and reducing educational inequalities.
Furthermore, investing in training more teachers, quality teaching training, and strong career guidance can boost students’ engagement, and in turn improve their academic outcomes, while enabling them to make informed choices about their future so that they can realise their full potential, regardless of their background.
Where to start?
In Australia, we can start by setting targets, as we know that legislating targets can drive action.
In Anti-Poverty Week, join the call to pass legislation to halve child poverty in Australia by 2030, with measurable targets and actions. Support the Anti-Poverty Week pledge here.
The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course (Life Course Centre) is a national research centre investigating the critical factors underlying deep and persistent disadvantage to provide new knowledge and life-changing solutions for policy, service providers and communities.
Contributing authors: Dr Tepi Mclaughlin (Telethon Kids Institute, the University of Western Australia); Professor Karen Thorpe, Professor Cameron Parsell, Professor Janeen Baxter, Associate Professor Wojtek Tomaszewski (The University of Queensland); Associate Professor Marian Vidal-Fernandez (University of Sydney); Professor Guyonne Kalb, Dr Barbara Broadway (University of Melbourne).
This post is part of the Women's Policy Action Tank initiative to analyse government policy using a gendered lens. View our other policy analysis pieces here.
Posted by @LifeCourseAust