Article by Peter Monaghan & Ron Johnson as published by The Canberra Times
ENDING the scourge of poverty, especially child poverty needs to become the number one priority for our nation.
Members of Catholic Social Services Australia (CSSA), together with other faith-based and charitable providers, deliver social services that make an enormous contribution towards the wellbeing and cohesion of our society.
CSSA members daily battle on the front line to lessen the impacts of poverty and hardship. They work to meet the needs of disadvantaged and vulnerable people and to heal the effects of trauma.
Catholic social service providers help families in myriad ways. They provide counselling, serve hundreds of thousands of meals each year, keep children in schools and provide quality early childhood education and care, build homes for the homeless- including on Church-owned land, care for people experiencing disability and for those seeking asylum.
Our members rescue women and children from family and domestic violence and hold perpetrators to account through behaviour change programs. They passionately support First Australians, care for youth and the elderly, fight slavery, assist people returning to the community after prison, and help the unemployed to find meaningful work. The list goes on. These are the people holding our society together.
Despite the heroic efforts of staff, volunteers and carers, the number of people and families needing help, and the acuity of their needs, continues to rise.
According to research by ACOSS and the University of NSW, more than 3 million Australians, including one-sixth (more than 760,000) of our children, are now living in poverty. We have not seen a serious attempt at ending child poverty since the days of Bob Hawke’s Prime Ministership.
To resolve poverty and the ongoing living standards crisis, the Australian people firstly need a period of intensive care, via major increases to public investment in social services and the welfare safety net, including JobSeeker and equivalent payments.
Like all wise investments, this will create efficiencies and savings over time. To make this investment work, government must ensure that community needs are accurately assessed.
Social services workers must be brought in from the periphery of the labour market and paid wages sufficient to afford to buy a home and raise a family.
Grants must cover the full cost of providing social services, including for appropriate staffing and skill mix, better wages for workers, better workplace safety, rent, energy, training, IT, and insurance costs.
Secondly, we need a bold approach to fiscal reform. Government fiscal policy options sit like magnificent orchestra instruments, largely left idle. Meanwhile, the Reserve Bank is left to play solo monetary policy percussion, raising interest rates to counter inflation. A continuation of this narrow approach will compound unnecessary economic hardship and social damage- especially for mortgagors, renters, and their children.
Whilst acknowledging the major economic disruption caused by COVID, the living standards crisis is borne of a much longer-term failure by successive governments to address the steadily worsening imbalance in access to economic opportunities. In turn, this has skewed the distribution of wages and community-generated wealth towards a privileged minority- which makes for an inefficient economy.
The unaffordability of housing, driven by unacceptably high land prices, interest rate rises, and the increased cost of materials, stands out as the dominant burden for most Australians. The increased cost of food, electricity, gas, fuel, childcare, and insurance are also exacting a major toll on the community, especially the younger generations.
The high price of land is arguably doing more harm to the living standards of working people, and those on low incomes, than any other single factor.
Land price kills opportunity, retards enterprise and shackles people to lifelong debt. Any government serious about tackling inflation and boosting productivity must commission an inquiry into the causes and impacts of, and remedies for, the high price of land in Australia.
It is a remarkable paradox that the benefits of improved public services and social safety nets have the effect of further increasing locational land values. It makes good moral and economic sense for this value to be returned to the community.
It also makes good sense for workers to keep more of the fruits of their labour.
One way to make fiscal policy more progressive is to gradually increase the collection of unimproved land values for public revenue, whilst proportionately reducing taxes on labour and productive investment.
This needs to be seriously examined as a potential way to sustainably fund the social services sector, whilst simultaneously moderating land prices.
Peter Monaghan, Chair of Catholic Social Services Australia & CEO, Marist 180
Ron Johnson, Acting Executive Director, Catholic Social Services Australia