Thirty years on, prime minister Bob Hawke's infamous pledge that no Australian child would live in poverty is shaping up to be an achievement rather than an embarrassment, a new analysis shows.
To be launched by the Australian Council of Social Service in Sydney at the start of anti-poverty week, the study finds the measures announced by Hawke in 1987 would have immediately cut the number of children in poverty by between 33 and 36 per cent.
Over a longer timeframe, between 1984 and 1994 child poverty appears to have fallen 50 per cent among non-working single parents and 80 per cent among non-working couples with children.
In recent years Mr Hawke has dismissed the pledge as "a silly shorthand thing," saying he should have stuck to the printed words of the speech he delivered at Labor's campaign launch.
Instead of reading: "we set ourselves this first goal: by 1990 no Australian child need live in poverty", he said the goal was that "by 1990 no Australian child will be living in poverty".
Australian National University incomes expert Peter Whiteford, whose report will be launched by Bob Hawke's former deputy Brian Howe and Professor Bettina Cass, who led Hawke's social security review, says among Hawke's measures was a family allowance supplement linked to wage growth, uniform rent assistance for social security recipients with children, a new child disability allowance and the child support agency, which for the first time used the tax system to collect child support payments from non-custodial parents.
In the three years after Hawke's speech, government spending per child in low-income families jumped 61 per cent in real terms for children aged 0 to 12 years and 124 per cent for children aged 13 to 15 years.
In order to ensure the benefits were actually taken up, the Hawke government pioneered data matching and launched a public advertising campaign.
Before the pledge in 1986, only 16 per cent of the family income supplement payments due were actually paid. By 1990 it was 58 per cent. The take-up rate grew to 80 per cent by 1999.
"By ensuring low-income families were more likely to actually receive their entitlements, governments enhanced the success of the program in reducing child poverty," Whiteford reports.
In recent years outcomes have slipped. ACOSS believes there are 3 million Australians in poverty, 731,000 of them children. The number of children in poverty has climbed 2 per cent in the past 10 years.
In 2009, the Rudd government clipped the higher rate of Family Tax Benefit for families at risk of poverty by indexing it to prices rather than wages. In 2013, the Gillard government moved 80,000 single parents onto Newstart, cutting their income by $85 per week. In its 2017 budget, the Turnbull government froze Family Tax Benefits for two years.
Legislation at present before the parliament would cut payments to single parents undertaking study or training and extend the waiting period for families needing to claim income support.
