Last week,a profile of Harris inTheNew York Timesdescribed her as believing in “step-by-step change that can add up to durable transformation”. She is “focused on granular impacts over broad society shifts”. This sounds a lot like Albanese,who has repeatedly argued for embedding changes over the long term rather than making sudden moves.
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Interestingly,though,Harris’ first campaign ad included the line:“We choose a future where no child lives in poverty.” And there’s policy to match. During the pandemic,America – like Australia – dramatically raised government payments to poorer people. Overnight,thenumber of children living in poverty halved. Harris is now pledging to restore that payment and more (as is the Republican vice-presidential candidate).
In Australia,meanwhile,longstanding child poverty advocate Toni Wren is damning:“The government is ignoring child poverty.” They don’t even say the words,she tells me. “If we don’t name it,we don’t act on it. Maybe they don’t want to do anything about it so they don’t name it.” I say to Wren that she sounds more frustrated than previously. She agrees:“They’ve had two more years.”
Arecent report commissioned by the Valuing Children Initiative found the number of children living in poverty rose by 102,000 between 2021 and 2022. The authors say that number has risen further still due to inflation,with the poorest renters seeing some of the highest rent rises.
The importance of assets to a sense of security is one reason I was surprised by the largely positive spin that attended a recentProductivity Commission report. Most attention went to Australia’s generally impressive income mobility. But the more detailed picture was more grim,with poorer people more likely to stay poor. Especially when wealth was included:“Looking at wealth mobility in isolation,around half of the people in the top or bottom two wealth deciles remained there over two decades later.”
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Labor has taken some limited actions:raising JobSeeker,expanding eligibility for payments,providing services to poorer areas. The precise impact is hard to measure.
Last week,Oxford professor Sabina Alkire visited Australia,meeting with MPs and putting forward the case for a multidimensional poverty index that takes into account factors – such as mental health or low work experience – missed by a purely financial measure. But the embarrassing fact is that Australia does not even have an official financial definition of poverty. The importance of measurement,Alkire said in a speech last week,is that it makes “poverty visible”.
This has a similarity with Wren’s formulation. Together,they suggest you have to name the problem,and give it specificity,to get action. This,in turn,is a fair description of what Hawke did. He didn’t fix the problem,but giving voice to it went a long way.
Hawke’s regret about his promise hurt Freudenberg. But the speechwriter could live with that,he wrote,when he thought of the families whose lives improved – and of the line’s “pivotal role in the famous Labor victory of 1987”.
Whether such sentiments can still excite Australians,and whether exciting voters is something politicians are still interested in,is unclear.
Sean Kelly is a regular columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.
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