Introduction
- Acknowledgment of traditional custodians of the land.
- Gratitude expressed to Dr. Sharma Stone and colleagues for the invitation.
- Recognition of the Minister's prior remarks on food insecurity and income disadvantage.
Key Points of the Presentation
-
Right to Speak and Be Heard
- Children and young people have a right to express their views.
- Policymakers must listen and act on their feedback.
-
Need for Support and Opportunities
- Young people require support to reach their full potential, especially post-COVID.
- Inequality impacts well-being and development, making it harder for all children to thrive.
-
Importance of Addressing Inequality
- High levels of inequality correlate with increased poverty and deprivation.
- Policy responses to COVID-19 demonstrate the potential for imaginative solutions to support marginalized youth.
The Role of Policymakers
- Policymakers must engage meaningfully with children and young people.
- Listening to marginalized voices is crucial for effective policy design.
- The National Framework for Protecting Australia’s Children emphasizes the importance of child-centered approaches.
Insights from Recent Research
- Surveys reveal concerns among young people about discrimination, education, and mental health.
- Basic needs, such as food and housing, are top priorities for families.
- Material deprivation is linked to experiences of exclusion and negative school outcomes.
Structural Inequality and Policy Action
- The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for structural responses to inequality.
- Government spending during the pandemic showed the potential for significant policy reform.
- Countries with higher public social expenditure have lower child poverty rates.
Conclusion
- Listening to young people and acting on their needs is essential for effective policymaking.
- Addressing poverty and inequality will enhance the effectiveness of support services.
- Australia should consider adopting comprehensive poverty reduction targets similar to those in Canada and New Zealand.
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]
Heads up!
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