Poverty Report damns Howard Government neglect
John Gardener Predictably, the Howard government has attacked the long-awaited Senate Report on Poverty and Financial Hardship, released earlier this month. The report, which has been called "the most wide-ranging inquiry into poverty in Australia since the 1975 Henderson Report", was two years in the making. More than 250 separate submissions were made during the investigation. These submissions came from as diverse a range of sources as the ACTU, St Vincent de Paul, Mission Australia, the Aboriginal Cultural Centre, Anglicare, Lifeline, the National Tertiary Education Union, the Salvation Army, the Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union, the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission, the Brotherhood of St Laurence, Disability Action and the Australian Federation of Deaf Societies. Howard dismissed one of its central recommendations, the establishment of a national taskforce into poverty, almost immediately after it was released. This key measure was supported by the ALP, the Greens and almost all trade union, religious and welfare organisations that took part in the Senate inquiry. Kay Patterson, the Family and Community Services Minister, dismissed the need for a National Taskforce as well, saying that poverty summits were useless. One of the two Liberal Party Senators involved in the inquiry, Senator Sue Knowles, also slammed the report, saying the ALP had merely used it as a political tool to attack the Government. Senator Knowles later published her own dissenting views, questioning most, if not all, of the report's recommendations. She effectively ignored all of the major findings of the inquiry, claiming that "there was no hard evidence that poverty had increased over the last decade". The report has certainly been damning for the Howard Government. Amongst its findings were: * Poverty affects 4.1 million Australians * There has been a massive increase in the so-called "working poor". The report states that 1,000,000 Australians are now in poverty despite living in a household that has one or more regular incomes. This contrasts with the Henderson Report on Poverty that found only two percent of households with an adult in full employment could be classified as poor * The drive to casualisation and the weakening of the industrial relations system have been the major causes of the increase of the "working poor" * There are now 700,000 children living in homes where no adult is working * 21 percent of households — 3.6 million people — live on less than $400 a week * The disposable income of the lowest paid 20 percent of Australians has decreased by 12.6 percent over the last 20 years * There are an estimated 100,000 homeless people on any given night in Australia * 22 percent of the homeless were couples or families * There is a national shortage of 150,000 units of affordable housing * In most States, there is a waiting list of four to five years for public housing * The increase in poverty has pushed many welfare agencies almost to breaking point, where they are unable to meet demand for their services.