The case for effective poverty-busting policy is a lay down misère – it’s popular, economically astute, and morally compelling.
The ANU has just published its substantial Australian Election Study which tracks long-term public opinion on political issues and the results are encouraging for those concerned about the adequacy of welfare payments.
It found that support for increasing unemployment benefits continues to rise, while those who think the JobSeeker rate should remain the same has decreased.
In fact, support for an increase has almost doubled in the past six years, up to 34 per cent from 18 per cent while those who think it should be less has dropped from 36 per cent to 26 per cent over the same period.
This, combined with Senator David Pocock’s recent win on an objective review of the rate of payments, to be conducted by a new statutory advisory committee of experts in the lead-up to every federal budget will add powerful momentum to ensure those who have lost their jobs are not forced to live in poverty while they try to make ends meet.
According to a recent report by ACOSS and the UNSW, poverty halved under the previous government’s pandemic assistance in 2020, and has been growing since that assistance was withdrawn. On the latest estimates, 3.3 million Australians – including 761,000 children – live in poverty. That means we could populate a city bigger than Brisbane, Canberra and Hobart combined with Australians who live in poverty.
Australia Institute polling in the lead-up to anti-poverty week revealed that an impressive majority of Australians (80 per cent) favour setting income support payments at a level that ensures no Australian lives in poverty. Strong majority support was found across demographics of age, voting intention, income, and education level.
This support for poverty-busting rates of income begs the question: Does the community hold attitudes that might reduce the strength of the call for action?
To begin exploring this question the Australia Institute asked survey respondents two questions about how they understood the effects of poverty.
Ambivalence about poverty
A robust majority (84 per cent) agreed that the experience of poverty was scarring, resulting in poorer health and life expectancy. However, just over half of respondents (53 per cent) thought that the experience of poverty made a positive contribution to the formation of character.
Almost half of Australians (45 per cent) agreed with both propositions, suggesting that they did not consider them to be in conflict.
Perhaps ambivalence about the role of poverty is acting as a brake on political action. It is received wisdom that resilience, a highly desirable trait, arises from the experience of overcoming adversity.
An adaptation of one of Friedrich Nietzsche’s maxims, expressed as: ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ has acquired the status of a proverb. The story arc of the poor but determined protagonist who overcomes the odds to achieved well-deserved success describes the American and to a large extent, the Australian, dream.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has achieved the dream: He was raised in public housing in a poor neighbourhood by a single parent on a disability pension and became the leader of his country.
However, there are good reasons why the Prime Minister’s story should not be read as an advertisement for the benefits of poverty.
First, living on welfare during Mr Albanese’s childhood in the ’60s and ’70s was not equivalent to poverty as it is now experienced by those on income support. The replacement level of payments – their value compared with median household income – has declined significantly.
Access to the higher paying payments – disability support and sole parent pensions – has been restricted. Unemployment benefits are now subject to conditions whose main effects are arguably punitive rather than redemptive. Public housing lags further and further behind growth in households.
Second, the overwhelming evidence from longitudinal studies around the world, is that socio-economic disadvantage experienced in childhood has a long tail.
There is a dose effect from the intensity and duration of chronic stress produced by disadvantage. Its effects are physically embodied, can be observed in bio-markers, and can persist despite upward mobility in adulthood, resulting in the early emergence of chronic health problems, and reduced life expectancy.
First Nations most disadvantaged
This effect is most pronounced in Australia’s poorest, most disadvantaged population, First Nations Australians. If it were true that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, First Nations Australians would be our healthiest, longest-living citizens.
So, does the experience of poverty necessarily mould character and engender resilience? The research shows that it doesn’t.
Resilience develops as children face new challenges in a controlled environment, where the difficulties they face are of a type, intensity, and duration to which they can adapt successfully, either on their own or with a network of support.
Immunisation provides a helpful analogy: Vaccination provides exposure to a pathogen in a sufficiently small dose or attenuated form that will not give rise to full blown disease. This stimulates the immune system so that the body is able to mount an effective response against infection when it does encounter the live pathogen in the community.
Poverty, is not, however, a challenge to which adaption is either possible or desirable: It implies deprivation of essentials and exclusion from full participation in economic and social life. The only appropriate policy response to poverty, is to prevent it and limit it wherever possible.
What about the budgetary implications of poverty busting?
In 2020 the Parliamentary Budget Office estimated that it would cost about $8 billion per annum to increase JobSeeker payments in line with the OECD measure of relative poverty (50 per cent of Australia’s equivalised median household disposable income). That represents less than half the cost of the stage 3 tax cuts in the first year of operation (2024-25) of $17.7 billion.
Investment in harm prevention
On the other hand, poverty-busting can be seen as an investment in harm prevention.
People living in chronic poverty are chronically stressed. Living under constant stress impairs their ability to make rational decisions, particularly those related to family finances, with the risk of further damaging family prospects.
Higher levels of socio-economic disadvantage are among conditions strongly associated with child maltreatment, which has catastrophic implications for individual child welfare, and creates a conundrum around state intervention that is notoriously difficult to resolve.
Preventing household poverty from child conception onwards has a large potential pay-off.
It reduces an important source of childhood adversity, and thus, the accompanying toll on child development and health. It increases the capacity of parents to give responsive care to their children. It reduces the risk of scarring from exposure to toxic stress, and increases both health span and longevity.
There is a strong moral case for keeping Australians out of poverty.
Poverty denies people dignity and undermines their health and wellbeing. Taking poverty-busting action is an important obligation under treaties we have signed. It is an even more important obligation under the unwritten covenant with our fellow Australians.
Dr Robyn Seth-Purdie is a democracy and accountability researcher at the Australia Institute
