Page 4955 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 28 November 2018
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As we know, Canberra has a high average income but unfortunately a substantial number of Canberrans struggle financially. In 2017 the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling found that around 37,000 Canberrans were living in low income households. My motion is about fairness for people in this situation. The motion proposes a range of measures targeted at helping people at the point of crisis where they move from being financially stretched to being in financial hardship.
I start by highlighting three groups in our community who can be under that sort of pressure. First, of course, are people who rely on federal government assistance payments. Members will be aware that the Greens are deeply concerned about the level of some of these payments. Newstart in particular is far too low to live on for any period of time. This is not a fringe leftist view. An article in the Sydney Morning Herald of 9 May stated:
Former Prime Minister John Howard has joined leading business figures in calling for Newstart payments to be increased.
The second group is the working poor. Their financial struggles are often a combination of a low hourly wage rate and low or unreliable work hours. The minimum wage is currently $18.93 an hour before tax. If you are working, say, 30 hours a week in a minimum wage job, you would be earning just over $560 per week or $29,000 per year. It is very hard to pay for housing and transport from that. You will not have any spare, particularly if you have dependants, and that is increasingly so for single mothers.
The third group are people on fixed income pensions, often superannuation pensions. It is easy to assume that these people are well off. Of course, if you did 40 years in the public service and ended up at a senior level you probably are very well off. But there are many people who work for years and never rise far through the ranks—as is the case for many women of my generation—and their pension can be small.
Women of my age quite often stopped work to have kids. They had the kids and were off for many years. No super. They then got divorced. Their partner got all the super—in those days you could not split it up—so the amount of superannuation is very small. My office was recently contacted by someone who had a superannuation pension of around $40,000 per year, which might be possible to live on except for the fact they also have two dependent children.
Not everyone in Canberra is well off; a lot of people who have worked and are still working hard are not well off. The ACT government provides many services that are good supports for people in these sorts of situations, including general services such as the public health system and public transport. For the most desperate there are targeted services and concessions like public housing, utilities and rates concessions and free financial counselling. However, there are significant gaps and more can be done.
The calls in this motion deal particularly with the gaps at the point of crisis where people move from being financially stretched to financial hardship. A major trigger of
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