Valuing Children Initiative warns Australian children are bearing the brunt of cost-of-living crisis

Nearly 40 years after Bob Hawke promised no child would live in poverty, campaigners have warned the Federal Government that children are bearing the brunt of the cost of living crisis.

The campaigners want the Government to legislate for an end to child poverty, with a definition of what that means and regular data collected to track progress.

More than 823,000 children were living below the poverty line in 2022, and this is estimated to have risen to nearly 1 million in the two years since.

Sarah Quinton from WA-based Valuing Children Initiative said poverty had a pervasive and scarring effect on children that followed them for their entire lives, yet they were overlooked by politicians and bureaucrats.

“Children can’t pay taxes. They don’t care about inflation rates, and they don’t have mortgages and they don’t vote,” she told The West Australian from Canberra, where she has been lobbying ministers.

“Currently in Australia, we actually don’t know how many children, accurately, in real numbers and in real-time, are experiencing poverty. So if we don’t know something, how can we address it?

“We need to have a conversation that’s very separate and specific for children in the systems that they go into, so education, health and housing.”

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has been driving an examination of national wellbeing through his department’s Measuring What Matters work in a bid to get better and faster data beyond traditional economic indicators, but Ms Quinton said there was a “huge hole” in this when it came to children.

There’s not enough rental properties so landlords can charge what they like.

Bankwest Curtin Economic Centre senior industry fellow Chris Twomey said legislating the child poverty goal would also make sure there was accountability for government actions.

He pointed to the COVID stimulus and a corresponding drop in child poverty as proof that action would work, but said, disappointingly, poverty rates had rocketed back up once the measures ended.

Rent rises were one of the biggest factors in that increase.

“There’s not enough rental properties so landlords can charge what they like,” he said.

“The flipside of that is, if you’re actually living in a place which is toxic and unhealthy, where you’ve got black mould that’s permanently impacting your children’s development, creating chronic health problems that will be with them for life, you don’t dare go and complain to your landlord, because they can kick you out pretty easily.”