Editorial: The poverty line

Sydney
23 March 2003

Helping the world’s kids to a new start

One in five kids living in poverty

ACU model for rest to follow: Beattie

Transsexual ‘marriage’

Refugees ‘destitute’

Curtain falls on Woomera

Expo peek aids hospital

Call for inquiry into needs of low-paid staff

Catholic Weekly takes a holiday over Easter

Pope’s 25 years in stamps

New mysteries on pocket cards

CD to help East Timorese kids

New Vinnies head wants to ensure best deal for needy

Conference celebrates the faith

Medicare principles ‘must be safeguarded’

Bougainville - after the war is over

Fast and feast in lent

Editorial: The poverty line

Letters: Tabernacle

Conversation: Dr Henry Pang, GP and aid volunteer - Dead people all around ‘changes your life’

Voice of Youth: ‘O’ - what a feeling! We’re Catholics

Plea from the bush: Come and see us

Waverley’s 100 years of ‘bright stars’

Young train as catechists

Lay ministry great, says jubilee priest

Editorial: The poverty line

One of the best measures of how civilised a country is, is how it treats its weakest members. By this measure Australia has become a whole lot less civilised in the last decade.

It now allows one in five of its children to live in poverty. In addition, one in six of all Australian families - 300,000 families - has no income other than welfare payments.

And those battler kids who come from families who have jobs are poor because their parents have low-paid, low-skilled, casual, part-time jobs. Ask any parent what effect such uncertainty has when it comes to caring for children.

These are two of the worrying findings contained in A Fair Society? Common Wealth for the Common Good: Ten Years On. This report from the Australian Catholic Social Justice Council looks at the economic state of Australia a decade on from its Common Wealth for the Common Good report, which found Australia in the midst of a severe economic recession, with high unemployment and resulting poverty.

Ten years on, many Australians are much better off. Unemployment has halved with wages rising significantly as a result. But this new prosperity is not enjoyed by all. The richest members of the population have benefited the most.

We are also facing a new danger: the creation of a new poor generation, as the children of the poor grow up severely disadvantaged compared with their richer peers. This is made worse by something else new; their plight is hidden.

Regions and suburbs are now increasingly divided by wealth. Sliced up by income segment, poorer people now live increasingly farther away from those with money. Out of sight and out of mind.

Some of the more telling charity advertisements give an idea of how this new cycle of poverty works. They talk about how hard it is to go to school when your parents can’t afford to buy proper school clothes or shoes, or provide the ingredients to make the cookery class cake, let alone shell-out for the all-too-frequent school outings.

When some families live in permanently straitened circumstances, while others enjoy relative wealth, it is all too easy for poor kids to be labelled ‘smellies’ and find they are the kids who are left out of everything and invited nowhere.

How long can a child keep going to school when every day brings new social trials? And what chance then of a good job later on? Not much, I would think.

Jesus said: “Suffer the little children to come unto me…for of such is the kingdom of God (made).”

We seem to have strayed a long way from creating such a kingdom; the children are definitely suffering as a result.