Tara Murray
Urgent action is needed to be taken to tackle disadvantage, a new report has found.
The Committee for Economic Development of Australia report, Disrupting Disadvantage, finds that Australia needs to fundamentally change how it supports and identifies people in disadvantage, using data to act earlier to prevent children being locked in a cycle of poverty.
The report said if current trends in child poverty are repeated for children expected to be born over the next decade, this points to a further 280,000 to 550,000 young Australians encountering child poverty in the future.
Brimbank has long been one of most disadvantaged in Melbourne, with high rates of unemployment and homelessness.
During the pandemic, the municipality had high numbers of people accessing JobSeeker and JobKeeper payments.
CEDA chief economist Jarrod Ball said they were still waiting to see the full impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, but there is already evidence the pandemic has further exacerbated the financial, employment and health hardships of Australia’s most vulnerable.
“Unless Australia addresses these issues now, we will be entrenching the next generation of poverty and disadvantage.”
Mr Ball said it was concerning that governments were yet to intermediate targets, milestones, reform actions or reporting frameworks to change course
Currently, 17.7 per cent of Australian children under the age of 15 are living in poverty. Research shows that children who grow up in poverty are three times more likely to experience poverty in adulthood.
“By choosing to do nothing and ignoring the need to change Australia’s piecemeal social support system, we are making a choice as a society to commit too many young Australians into entrenched disadvantage,” says Mr Ball.
The report calls for using shared data across levels of government to address this problem and identify those most at risk, enabling early intervention strategies to break the cycle of disadvantage.
It is also calling for clear and tangible reform commitments by government set out in an overarching national agreement, a consolidated linked national human services data asset by 2025 and new early interventions based on predictive analytics.
