October 12-18 was Anti-Poverty Week, aiming to encourage all Australians “…to organise or take part in an activity aiming to highlight or overcome issues of poverty and hardship here in Australia or overseas.” Anti-Poverty Week often provokes new offensives in the poverty wars, which usually ensures a few entertaining op-eds, but does nothing to alleviate genuine poverty.
In recent times Anti-Poverty Week has been kicked off with the release of the Australian Council of Social Services’ (ACOSS) Poverty in Australia report. According to this year’s report, 2.55 million Australians (13.9%) were living below the poverty line.
Poverty, as defined in the report, includes anyone in a household with an income less than half of the median household income (after adjustments for differences in household composition and housing costs).
By defining poverty in these terms, the focus is shifted away from living standards towards income inequality so that poverty can only be eradicated through an extreme policy of income redistribution that leaves all households with the same (equivalised) disposable income.
This focus on relative poverty as a metric for measuring the effectiveness of Australian social policy conflates income inequality with the material deprivation that most Australians associate with ‘living in poverty’.
The other consequence of the income inequality/anti-poverty rhetoric of the left is to shift the focus away from those who are living in genuine poverty to the incomes of those they deem to be “the rich”. Redistribution of income alone tells us nothing about the effectiveness of programs that aim to improve the lives of the disadvantaged.
The effectiveness of programs targeted at the less fortunate is far more important. If these programs are not working, the costs imposed on society are not being offset by any increase in overall social welfare. As we learned earlier in the week it is possible to spend $120 million on an employment program that manages to provide only 277 jobseekers with a job that lasts more than six months at a cost of $433,000 per placement.
Alleviating poverty should focus on ways to change people’s lives for the better. While this will require some income redistribution, redistribution should never be an end in itself.
Matthew Taylor is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.
Home > Commentary > Opinion > Combating (genuine) poverty need not punish ‘the rich’
Combating (genuine) poverty need not punish ‘the rich’
October 12-18 was Anti-Poverty Week, aiming to encourage all Australians “…to organise or take part in an activity aiming to highlight or overcome issues of poverty and hardship here in Australia or overseas.” Anti-Poverty Week often provokes new offensives in the poverty wars, which usually ensures a few entertaining op-eds, but does nothing to alleviate genuine poverty.
In recent times Anti-Poverty Week has been kicked off with the release of the Australian Council of Social Services’ (ACOSS) Poverty in Australia report. According to this year’s report, 2.55 million Australians (13.9%) were living below the poverty line.
Poverty, as defined in the report, includes anyone in a household with an income less than half of the median household income (after adjustments for differences in household composition and housing costs).
By defining poverty in these terms, the focus is shifted away from living standards towards income inequality so that poverty can only be eradicated through an extreme policy of income redistribution that leaves all households with the same (equivalised) disposable income.
This focus on relative poverty as a metric for measuring the effectiveness of Australian social policy conflates income inequality with the material deprivation that most Australians associate with ‘living in poverty’.
The other consequence of the income inequality/anti-poverty rhetoric of the left is to shift the focus away from those who are living in genuine poverty to the incomes of those they deem to be “the rich”. Redistribution of income alone tells us nothing about the effectiveness of programs that aim to improve the lives of the disadvantaged.
The effectiveness of programs targeted at the less fortunate is far more important. If these programs are not working, the costs imposed on society are not being offset by any increase in overall social welfare. As we learned earlier in the week it is possible to spend $120 million on an employment program that manages to provide only 277 jobseekers with a job that lasts more than six months at a cost of $433,000 per placement.
Alleviating poverty should focus on ways to change people’s lives for the better. While this will require some income redistribution, redistribution should never be an end in itself.
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