Red Rag

The Shadow Minister for Happiness and Hugs has announced that Labor will hold a summit on poverty if elected. It sounds like the first step towards implementing the recommendations of the Senate Community Affairs Committee’s Report on Poverty and Financial Hardship, including the establishment of an independent measure of poverty.

The debate about poverty and financial hardship has essentially been about how it should be measured. Don Arthur — whose blog I have refused to remove from my favourites despite its long and continuing hibernation — cast this as a debate between Good Peter Saunders (of the Social Policy Research Centre) and Evil Peter Saunders (of the Centre for Independent Studies). This paragraph gets to the heart of the matter:

If he’s asked directly Evil Peter Saunders will say that measuring poverty is a good idea and that it probably exists to some extent. But this will tend to be packaged up something like this: “I don’t want to claim that there’s no problem with poverty and deprivation, there obviously is, but it’s important not to exaggerate it…” It’s a safe bet that whatever anybody claims it is, Evil Peter Saunders will say that it’s an overestimate, not really poverty, or not society/the government’s problem.

Good Peter Saunders reckons we need an officially sanctioned measure of poverty because all the bickering about how we should measure it distracts us from solving the problem:

The great advantage of a poverty measure that is officially endorsed by government is that it prevents those in positions of power from criticising the methods used to measure poverty in order to escape the policy implications of rising poverty. As United States poverty expert Robert Haveman has argued, one of the most significant contributions of the 1960s War on Poverty in the United States was the establishment of an official national poverty line. Despite the many problems with the United States poverty line, its use in countless poverty studies has focused attention on trends in poverty and their policy implications. The United States poor have in general been well served by their poverty line — if not always by the policies designed to assist them!

There is an urgent need to develop a consensus on the concept and measurement of poverty that is relevant to the conditions prevailing in contemporary Australia.

(The Ends and Means of Welfare, p144.)

We’re never going to get everyone to agree on a universal measure of financial hardship, but if the government can broker and endorse a compromise position (heck, they could usefully endorse several different poverty measures), the debate can move on to something more important — how to solve the problem.