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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2022-10-20 Daily Xml
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Anti-Poverty Week

The Hon. A. PICCOLO (Light) (15:32): This week is Anti-Poverty Week. The week is about highlighting the plight and experience of people living in poverty in our community. It is very important during this week to tackle the problem of poverty and its impact on both adults and children. Part of the week is to make sure that we understand what we can do, as a government, community or society to tackle poverty in this country.

The impact of poverty on children is well known, but I think it is important to restate it, particularly the impact of poverty on the development of children—their physical, emotional, intellectual and cognitive development—and on their ongoing education, health and wellbeing. We know that early education and early intervention for children is very important for their long-term wellbeing. We know that children have to have access to education and a whole range of things to develop and function in our community and society and to achieve great things.

While we know that, we still accept—and by 'accept' I mean we still tolerate—that in our community thousands of children continue to live in poverty. The health of children living in poverty has been well researched. They obviously have very poor physical health, and they also experience very poor mental health, and the constant stress on those families in poverty is well known and documented. Poverty also prevents children from achieving their emotional development.

Young children living in poverty are often the ones who do not exceed in their schooling. They do not participate in sport, they do not participate in music and they do not participate in a whole range of different community events and activities because their poverty prevents them from doing so. That gets me to the point of the impact of poverty on children, which is twofold.

First of all, the child does not reach their full potential, and I think every human being has the right to reach their full potential. We are all different, we all have different skills and experiences, but we all have a right to reach our full potential; in other words, we all need a fair go to become the human being we can be. Young children living in poverty do not experience that. They face a number of barriers and cannot achieve all they can.

That leads me to my second point, that as a society we are robbed of the contribution that child could make to our community. If we have children living in poverty, they are not only not achieving for themselves but what they could achieve for their community and society is also lower, and therefore we are all robbed of that child's contribution. If for no other reason, we should make a huge effort to make sure that children do not live in poverty from both the child's perspective and a society-wide perspective.

For adults, poverty impacts on their health. People living in poverty often have very poor health in a very visible way. You often see that people living in poverty have very poor dental health, and that is a very visible sign of people living in poverty. At the extreme end of this poverty are rough sleepers, poor housing and poor employment. Mr Speaker, you try to get a job if you have poor dental hygiene, poor clothing and presentation and poor mental health. So, rather than blaming people living in poverty for their lack of employment, let's create opportunities where they can actually compete in the employment market. People living in poverty cannot fully participate in community and cannot achieve what they could.

Why do we have poverty? Sadly, the dominant narrative in our society is that people choose to live in poverty and therefore deserve what they are. I completely reject that philosophy. People are living in poverty because we have enormous wealth inequality and income inequality in this nation and right across the world. If we can afford $244 billion in tax cuts for people living on incomes of $200,000, as proposed by the previous Prime Minister, we can put more money to ensure that children do not live in poverty.

Healthy societies are those that are compassionate and support those who are most vulnerable. In this national poverty week, we should tackle this problem seriously.

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