Addressing Child Poverty and Inequality in Australia: Key Insights from a Keynote Presentation

to begin with i'd like to also acknowledge the lingerie boy wrong people

the traditional custodians of the land where we are today and also pay my respects to

elders past present and emerging of the kulin nation and extend that respect to other

indigenous australians attending here today i'd also like to thank uh dr sharma

stone and her colleagues at apes for inviting me to make this keynote presentation

and to chris schilling for his very warm introduction and i'm very honored to be given this

privilege and very honored as well that the

minister is still here to listen i think you'll find that she made half my presentation already

she talked about um 1.2 million australians living in food

insecurity she talked about high rates of income disadvantage

and income immobility she talked about long-term poverty and disadvantage

and gaps between haves and have-nots and that's really what i'm going to be talking about in my presentation too

so by 1990

no australian child will be living in poverty having made that pledge in 1987

bob hawk went about trying to achieve it he increased targeted family payments in particular

and he didn't as we all know managed to eliminate poverty i don't think he intended to say he was going to do that

um but it did decline after he made that pledge and i'll talk again towards the end

about the importance of making commitments towards these kinds of goals so

in this presentation i really want to make three points my first point is that children and

young people have a right to speak out and policy makers not only have an obligation to listen to them

but they also have an obligation to act on what they hear the second point i want to make is that

children and young people have a right to support and opportunities as the minister said that allow them to develop

to their full potential i'll aim to show that this is particularly important in these

post-covert times that we're living in and my third point is that inequality in society matters for children and young

people's well-being and development the more inequality and associated problems of poverty and

deprivation that exist uh in australian society the harder it is for all children

to and young people to reach their full potential if we want children and young people to

maximize their life chances we need to address overall levels of support for families and levels in the of

inequality in society as a whole policy responses to covet have shown what is possible policy

makers in this new era have an opportunity to be much more imaginative in addressing the challenges

that marginalized young people face one issue i'll touch on will relates to the adequacy of current

education health and community systems we have in place for addressing young people's needs and supporting their

development this has been an issue right through the conference in every presentation i've seen so far

and also it's clear from what people are saying that these services need to do better in addressing the needs that

young people articulate i will also argue though that we need to keep an eye on the big picture

the more inequality poverty and deprivation that there is the harder these systems have to work in

order to ensure that all children and young people can reach their full potential

so why should policymakers listen to young people

i mean certainly because children have a right to speak out and policymakers have an obligation to

listen and it's also because in speaking out young people are giving policy makers

the opportunity to make better policy this is also clear from presentations i've seen at this conference

but this will only happen if policymakers actually listen to what young people tell them

and this point is repeatedly made by the uh commissioners for children the national

and state commissioners for children around the country and other advocates

but more important as well in encouraging young people to speak out and listening to what they have to say

acting on what they say is not only about better

policy design it also gives young people buy-in and in listening to and acting or young

people say policy makers are giving them a stake as citizens in the democratic process

conversely not acting on what they say has the potential to destroy trust that might

develop between policymakers and young people what policymakers need to do moreover

is ensure that they act on what young people who are most marginalized in the australian contact

context have to say about their lives so not just everybody but also the most

marginalized because these are the young people who are targeted as most by the social policies that we're all concerned

with here now uh the minister

mentioned the national framework for protecting australia's children uh it's a really important document

it states that i'm quoting here at the best interests of the child are at the center of the

national framework and the subsequent action plans we're committed to ongoing and

meaningful engagement with children young people parents carers and communities

listening to the voices of children will be the key to our success so

what have children and young people been saying recently well the children's commissioners and

also for example the mission australia's youth surveys have been very active in soliciting young people's views across a

whole range of issues and they've highlighted concerns uh

about discrimination experienced by young people from indigenous and diverse ethnic backgrounds

worries about education concerns about stress anxiety and mental health and many of these concerns have been

accentuated by the coveted pandemic which caused so much disruption the

australian human rights commission on the department of social services uh also published a report late last

year this was led by ann hollands keeping kids safe and well your voices and the purpose of this report was to

inform the implementation of the national framework for protecting australia's children

part of the meaningful engagement that i've just referred to and

for the report children and parents were asked what are the three most important services and supports

that you think could help children and their families to be safe and housing and basic needs

for example food and clothes came high on the list of priorities and among adolescents who were surveyed

and who participated in it over half identified basic needs as one of the three most important

supports now as part of the australian child wellbeing project i've been involved in

research that sought out children's views on the good life and the challenges they faced in living

a good life together with colleagues at the university of new south wales and the

australian council for educational research we engaged in in-depth discussions with

young people who are mostly marginalized in the australian context that is they came from diverse ethnic backgrounds

or identified as indigenous or a material disadvantage or lived in out of home care or disabled

for example and these marginalized groups were identified in consultation with the commonwealth

department of education we use these young people's perspectives to design survey items that allowed us

to examine well-being in context of both affluence and disadvantage and we wanted to design the survey so

that young marginalized people could see themselves

in it and that's not necessarily the case with all national surveys which often aim

more for the the average person our aim was to develop a nationally representative survey that

the concerns of marginalized young people in survey design as the minister pointed out you need the

statistics if you're going to act so we rolled out the survey uh about 180 schools about 5400 young

people responding and it's worth noting that over a quarter of

the respondents to this survey were identified as belonging in one of these marginalized groups i just referred to

so it's a big group marginalization is not a small issue it's a it's quite a large issue in australian society

and when we talked with young people in developing the survey we asked them to nominate material items that they

thought were important uh for them to lead a good life and feel included and items they nominated

include for example a mobile phone which most children have these days the right clothes to fit in

pocket money and being able to go on school camp which most again most children manage to go on school camp

and the chart shows here the percentage of young people who reported being deprived on none of these items

on the left and then on one two or three or more items towards the right

and that's the deprivation score on the horizontal axis and then the percentages are shown for different marginalized

groups including young people with disability in blue young carers in red indigenous young

people in green and young people from non-english speaking backgrounds

in yellow and young people who weren't in any of these groups in gray there

and the chart shows that young people who are not in any of these groups have much lower deprivation scores and young

people who are in any of the marginalized groups and on the other hand

young people in all four marginalized groups on the right there are considerably more likely

uh to be deprived on three or more items than young people who are not in any of these groups

so material deprivation and uh other forms of marginalization very often go hand in hand

and young people's perspectives show that material deprivation is not only a matter of going without it's also

strongly associated with experiences of exclusion including bullying and victimization

not getting adequate support from teachers and low levels of school engagement

and this figure from a recently published paper using the same data shows the relationship between uh these

same deprivation measures that we're just talking about and

three schooling related outcomes so a scale that captures the experience of bullying

uh a scale that measures young people's perception of the support they get from teachers and a scale that measures their

overall satisfaction with school and again the figure shows that those who are

deprived on three or more items and those of the dark gray bars there experience significantly more bullying

than other students and see particularly significantly more than

students who report no deprivation and those are the bars the yellow bars there and

students with high levels of deprivation also report significantly less teacher

support and lower satisfaction of the school compared with students who report no deprivation

now these findings mirror other studies that uh

also show a strong relationship for example between socio-economic status and school outcomes including academic

outcomes and we argue in this paper that these issues such as

bullying are often treated as matters that require

individual interventions but we need to step back from that and think about the structural factors

that marginalized that result in marginalized people experiencing these kinds of negative

school relationships and it's we argued as these structural factors that are holding back

many young people from reaching their full potential so the minister mentioned hunger

and we asked young people as well about how often they went to school about hungary

and again young people with disability young carers indigenous young people young people from diverse ethnic

backgrounds we're significantly more likely to report going hungry than young people

who are not in any of these groups and again our analysis suggests that

marginalization is in large part a structural issue that demands structural response

so we talk to a lot of young people and when we talk to them the issue of food often comes up

i'll let you read this quote from this quote from this young girl we talked to it captures to my mind the sorts of

challenges that families face in keeping the lights and heating on and feeding everybody

another story we commonly heard was about money running out a couple of days before payday

which meant that young people often had to go to school with no lunch or not going at all parents often kept

us their kids at home if they couldn't give them any food which is you know quite understandable

it's also reluctant to us it's also apparent to us that young people were often reluctant

to talk about not having enough food and going hungry our sense was that sometimes young

people were protecting themselves and their families from outside interventions

that revelations about hunger might trigger some form of intervention that they and

their family might not welcome so they're trying to protect their family from these kinds of interventions

and the issue of trying to avoid interventions is something that i've seen as well come up in other

presentations here in this conference so here children are playing an active role

in protecting their families but there's also an issue then about how interventions actually or how

services actually approach these children and their families so what i've tried to show so far using

young people's perspectives is that belonging in one or more marginalized groups is associated with

poverty deprivation and hunger and that young people in poverty are not reaching their full potential

now as i suggested i want to argue that this is driven by structural inequality in society and i also want to argue that

the coveted pandemic sets a precedent for radical policy action in this space so our research across a number of

projects has shown that policy is failing in many young people

and living in a highly unequal society they are not getting the support they need in order to reach their full

potential now this point is made by michelle jackson in her book manifesto for a

dream which focuses on structural inequality and policy in the us but the problems of inequality that

jackson discusses are recognizable in the australian context these problems have been laid bare by

the covert crisis for example the extent to which economies have relied on low paid workers

to keep health care and food deliveries going and the unequal impacts of lockdown on

people in terms of material well-being health and educational outcomes however as several other commentators

have noted the coveted crisis also revealed the deep pockets that governments have to tackle policy

problems when they're faced with a crisis situation to give an example the australian

government spent 89 billion dollars on the job keeper scheme or about 113 000 dollars for every job saved

this was arguably more than just a payment to keep employees from falling into unemployment and poverty this is an

act of poverty policy to maintain relationships between employers and employees

in addition more money was spent temporarily increasing the job seeker allowance and upgrading free healthcare

services this kind of money opens up possibilities for radical

reform to tackle structural inequalities that are evident in australian society first however in order to develop a

sense of policy action that needs to be taken it's worth outlining how jackson characterizes the ways in which

inequalities between families are exacerbated by inequities and complications in service provision

michelle jackson she talks about chloe on the left there who comes from an affluent family

where publicly provided services are perceived to be of low quality chloe's parents can buy quality services

for her and we see this in the australian context for example with

parents often sending their children to private or non-government schools or purchasing health insurance

or private other private support services jackson argues that higher quality

services tend to be better coordinated and as annette laro shows in her classic

book on equal childhoods affluent and articulate parents are well positioned to advocate for their

children and demand high quality services and coordination between services

moreover affluent parents tend not to be concerned about their children being sent down what you might describe as the

carceral pipeline that runs from child protection to criminal justice

services therefore are often seen as more benign contact that serves is not so much a

source of worry in terms of where it might end up as we've seen with other children that we've talked in relation

to hunger and then we've got kayla there on the right

young people and other members of low income marginalized families like kayla are quite likely to come into contact

with a lot of services a lot more than chloe would come into contact with not just education and health care services

but also income support services disability and other community services as well as perhaps child protection and

law enforcement or criminal justice it's worth noting that a study by john lynch at the university of adelaide

shows that by the age of 10 around a quarter of south australian children will have contact with child protection

michelle jackson points out that there is often very little coordination between services that disadvantaged

young people come into contact with and again this has been an issue that's come up again and again in the presentations

i've seen at this conference and moreover young people who are marginalized and often live in

disadvantaged communities or suburbs may only have access to services where resources are stretched

so that the quality of services is impacted and this is brought out clearly

uh by the recent report dropping off the edge which identifies the most disadvantaged

suburbs in australia and shows the persistence of disadvantage in these communities

the vast majority of those suburbs that were identified as disadvantaged in 2021 were also disadvantaged the last time

they did the survey in 2015 and the report quotes people living in these disadvantaged stubborn suburbs as

highlighting the lack of a policy strategy for supporting them

also i noted a minute ago in the context of talking about hunger young people worry that some of the services that

they and their families come into contact with could make their lives worse rather than better through

surveillance and risk management and essentially essentially often what they see as punitive approaches

so it's not just that the services may not be

coordinated it's also that young people themselves may not have a positive view of what these services are supposed to

be doing so how to turn this around some of you may be familiar with hillary

cotton's book radical help which is published in 2018 and it looks at the organization of welfare support

services in the uk like michelle jackson she characterizes the welfare estate as a bit of an uncoordinated catastrophe

where families who are in contact with lots of services are cons are concerned

this is shown in evaluations of support services in australia too for example in child protection cases

where services are often not well coordinated either columns analysis is supported by other

research which suggests that towards the late 20th century the welfare estate in many oecd countries progressed gradually

from a paternalistic approach to clients towards a more transactional low trust approach

in keeping with the principles of new public management where service providers compete on

market terms for contracts to provide services and clients are characterized as agents

who respond to economic incentives cotton points out that the role of the welfare state

is to provide support in the context of a social contract which emphasizes control containment and

auditing of resources and these things are clearly important and we see that through lots of royal

commissions where services have failed and point is made repeatedly about the need for

accountability um but

she argues as well though that the result is that the welfare state is not doing the job of enabling people which

should be its principal uh aim and she argues that a welfare state fit

for the 21st century needs to be more positive and more proactive so it shouldn't be focusing on fixing

problems and managing needs but on growing and developing people to their full potential

and more than anything else cotton emphasizes the importance of moving away from a transactional culture

to one that focuses more on relationships and

this to my mind is the most important message from her analysis of the welfare state and this

point has been again an overarching feature of presentations i've seen at this conference

the issue of trust has come up several times how can governments and service providers

establish trusting relationships between communities and young people and this conference has highlighted

numerous examples both of where trust has been established for example through listening and acting

on what young people say and also through co-design however as this issue has been well

covered in other sessions i want to return to where i've started so relationships matter and the quality

of services matter but so the resources and fulfilling basic needs so this chart here

shows the relationship between public social expenditure on families and child poverty in oecd countries

the vertical access represents the percentage of children in poverty

defined as living in a household with less than half median income for the country although i take the minister's

point we don't really want to get into an argument about how exactly poverty should be defined

the horizontal axis shows public social expenditure on families as a percentage of gdp including family and

child allowances and credits for example family tax benefit in the australian context child care support income

support during maternity parental leave and sold parent payments so the graph shows that there's a

negative relationship between the size of public expenditure on families and the percentage of children in poverty

you can see that from the regression line that runs from

the top left to the bottom right so countries below the regression line do better than expected to the extent

that their poverty rate is lower than perhaps would be expected given the level of public expenditure on families

and most notable here are denmark and finland which have high levels of public explanatory families and child poverty

rates of about five percent or less on the other hand on the

other extreme we've got the us which has uh public expenditure and families of

about 0.6 of gdp and a child poverty rate of over 20 percent and australia sits in the middle just

above the uh regression line with a child poverty rate of about 13

and public expenditure on families at just over two percent of gdp so it's a constant message of

organizations such as unicef and also acos here in australia that increasing public

social expenditure can result in lower child poverty and lower inequalities between children

and here i'm showing the trend in public expenditure on families and child poverty in australia in recent years

the blue line shows the that public expenditure on families stayed roughly constant in real terms

between 2009 and about 2015 before declining

quite steeply until 2017-18 and beginning to increase again in 2019. in 2019-20 public expenditure families

amounted to 38 billion dollars child poverty over this period which you can see from the red line above there

remained fairly constant it certainly didn't decrease indeed it hasn't really changed much in

australia since the early 2000s and this slide which is taken from the acos report on poverty in australia

during the kovic pandemic shows the effect that the introduction of job keeper wage subsidies and

temporary increases in jobseeker allowance had on overall poverty in australia in 2020

thanks to these payments being introduced poverty in the country actually went

down at the initial phases of the covert pandemic so we can see that

um the estimated poverty rate without these uh measures

would have been around 22.7 this is overall poverty not child poverty but it actually went down to about to

less than 10 percent as a result of these covert related measures so this shows to my mind what

governments can do when they decide that something is important enough and it's worth bearing in mind too

that the australian government uh what the australian government spent on job keeper in 2021

was more than twice what they spent on family supports in 2019 so just to finish up

a couple of things to focus on firstly

listening to children and young people and acting on what they say matters policymakers are committed to supporting

every young person's right to development to their full potential this is in the national framework for

protecting australia's children it's in the alice springs declaration on the aims of education

it's there in policy it needs to be acted on how policy addresses service needs and

how it can deliver better relationship-based services that young people value needs further

development and lots of people are discussing that issue at this conference and it

certainly needs attention but the task of supporting all young people including marginalized young

people to reach their full potential and provide quality support to particular

needs of young people this will be much easier if policy also addresses the fundamental

problems of poverty and inequality in society the less poverty there is

the less hard the other services have to work in order to do their jobs so bob hawk set himself an ambitious

goal in 1987. more recently canada has introduced a comprehensive poverty reduction target

new zealand now has a child poverty reduction target to reduce poverty child poverty

from 16.5 percent to 10 percent between 2017 and 2023 and it's worth noting that sustainable

development number 1.2 which australia signed up to states by 2030

uh to reduce by at least half the proportion of men women and children of

all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions

so i would like to think that it's time for australia to follow up on this

commitment thank you [Applause]