One in five kids living in poverty

Sydney
23 March 2003

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One in five kids living in poverty

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One in five kids living in poverty

By Chris Lindsay

Poverty has become entrenched in sections of the Australian population since the low-poverty days of the 1970s and children are paying the price, with as many as one child in five living in poverty, according to a new publication of the Australian Catholic Social Justice Council.

The consequences of this are likely to be “a cycle of deprivation that is transmitted across generations”, it says.

The book, A Fair Society? Common Wealth for the Common Good: Ten Years On, reports that unemployment is widely recognised as the major cause of income poverty, overtaking old age as the single most important factor inducing poverty.

In an essay in the book, Poverty and Inequality since 1992, Dr Bruce Duncan reports that although national income increased by a third after inflation from the end of the

recession in the 1970s to 2000, the burdens of adjustment fell most heavily on those retrenched - almost 700,000 in the three years to July 1997.

Poverty rates for jobless couples with no children are above 50 per cent, rising to more than 70 per cent for those with children, he writes.

Dr Duncan, a Redemptorist priest who co-ordinates the program in social justice studies at Yarra Theological Union in Melbourne and is a consultant on ethics and economics with Catholic Social Services Victoria, is a member of the Catholic Commission for Justice, Development and Peace of the Archdiocese of Melbourne.

He is an authority on the Church’s social teaching and a regular columnist in The Catholic Weekly.

Dr Duncan cautions about the comparison of unemployment figures between the levels in 1993 (920,000 or almost 13 per cent) and December 2002 (615,300 or 6.1 per cent) since the latest figures do not include many people who have been moved on to disability payments, who are working reduced hours in casual or part-time work and would like more employment, and people discouraged from seeking work.

“Even people working only one hour a week are not counted in the unemployment figures,” he writes.

He argues that poverty took on some disturbing new features during the 1990s.

First, it disproportionately affected children. In 1992 the number of children in homes where no one had a job was 680,000 - 17.7 per cent.

In 1998 poverty affected almost one in five children (19.7 per cent, or 770,000 children, compared with 11 per cent in 1979), dropping only slightly by 2001.

Second, in contrast to earlier periods, unemployment during the 1990s was increasingly concentrated in low-income households, as demonstrated in the contrast between “job-rich” two-income households and “job poor” households where no one is in paid employment.

Dr Duncan notes that average real wages grew 25.4 per cent in Australia during the 1990s, but that well paying jobs were concentrated in upper-income households, often with two people in full-time employment. Many in low-income groups have been increasingly forced to take part-time or casual work, if they can find work at all.

Dr Duncan argues that the growth in the number of jobs alone is a misleading indicator of social well being.

He says that the costs of unemployment are difficult to estimate but are very considerable, affecting government finances and services, as well as lost output.

“The unemployed also pay a punitive personal cost, often resulting in high stress, ill health, loss of skills, social exclusion, pressure on relationships and families, housing problems, racial and gender inequality, criminal behaviour and loss of social values and responsibility,” he says.

Dr Duncan said Church social teaching has long stressed that social equity does not demand absolute equality in wealth.

“But it does recognise that people need a certain minimal income and/or wealth to maintain themselves and their families at a reasonable standard of living that allows them to exercise responsible life choices.”