Can the Greens be expected to acknowledge this?

Child hardship is easing albeit slowly.

Material hardship is assessed by what people are doing without. The more items forgone, the worse the hardship. The EU method is used to provide comparability across countries. From a companion report to the incomes report released yesterday:

Table G.3

Material hardship rates (%) and numbers for children

HES year	EU ‘standard’ threshold		EU ‘severe’ threshold
	rate (%)	numbers	rate (%)	numbers
2007	14	145,000	6	65,000
2009	16	170,000	9	95,000
2010	20	210,000	9	90,000
2011	21	220,000	10	105,000
2012	17	180,000	9	90,000
2013	15	165,000	9	100,000
2014	14	145,000	8	80,000

The graphs in Figure G.1 below use the 9-item DEP-COMMON to create a time series from 2006/07 to 2013/14. There are two particular features of the trends that stand out:

·         for the less stringent threshold (top lines), the clear rise of hardship rates through the GFC and the strong fall in the recovery phase

·         for the more stringent threshold (bottom lines),

o    for the population as a whole - neither the rise nor the fall is very strong

o    for children the rise and fall are clearer

o    though in both cases rates in 2013-14 are the same as in 2008-09 as the GFC began to impact.

Without a doubt there are children in this country who are doing it very tough. But every social policy attempt to address the problem has fish hooks. More welfare - the Green's favoured approach - is extremely risky. The available evidence should convince against it.

The report makes some notable observations:

·         Whatever else poverty is understood to be, it is in its essence an unacceptable state-of-affairs – it carries with it the implication that something should be done about it. How best to address poverty, especially child poverty, is a vigorously contested area where empirical evidence, social norms, personal values, views on inter-generational equity, political philosophy and pragmatic compromise all play legitimate parts. Different judgements on these matters lead to different “solutions”.
 ·         Yet, just as with the question of where to set low-income or material hardship thresholds, there is in practice a fairly limited range of options for governments when it comes to seeking to reduce child poverty. All MEDCs have adopted a multi-pronged approach, reflecting the range of causes of poverty. The difference from one government to another and one state to another reflects to a large degree the different understandings of the relative size of the impact of different causes, decisions on trade-offs with other priorities, and the consequent different weightings given to the different interventions.

The current govt's approach is a mix of welfare reform, education reform, targeted cash assistance, support for private initiatives, etc but with the long-term view foremost. That matters.