[Australia] Reduce child poverty levels, says Labor

From National Nine News

Federal Labor has demanded urgent national action to counter child poverty following research showing too many Australia children are still living in poverty and dying in infancy.

Eighteen years after former Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke famously vowed that no Australian child would live in poverty by 1990, a report by the Brotherhood of St Laurence found that more than one in 10 children are still living in relative poverty.

The brotherhood's social welfare "barometer" said while most children were doing well, those born into poor social groups had a far higher chance of having a low birth weight, showing poor physical growth, not coping in early years of school and developing physical and mental health problems.

The study's authors describe it is a "a scandal that casts serious doubt on our future as a nation of the fair go".

"Despite all of the advances we have made, the social group into which a child is born is still a major determinant of his or her life chances," the report says.

The report found the infant mortality rate for children born into poorer homes was 78 per cent higher than those in wealthier homes for boys, and 62 per cent higher for girls.

Children from disadvantaged areas were also more likely to die from avoidable causes, had substantially higher death rates from accidents and injury, and were more likely to suffer abuse and neglect, according to the study by social economists Rosanna Scutella and Paul Smyth.

They said the infant mortality rates compare to "those of the Australian population in the 1970s".

"This is a truly shocking revelation that the difference of a child living or dying could be so much between the poorest and the richest households," Labor's health spokeswoman Julia Gillard told reporters.

"It shows that this nation needs an action agenda on children's health.

"The statistics are showing us now that we might well be reaching a stage where the current generation of Australian children have reduced life expectancies."

The study said government programs were too small-scale and it was clear that not enough was being done to ensure Australia's children develop and flourish.

The Brotherhood of St Laurence has called for an urgent and comprehensive community campaign to prevent the unequal chances of children today from producing a divided society in the future.

But the government said the study reinforced the need to get more parents back into the workforce, and break generational unemployment, through its Welfare to Work package.

Workforce Participation Minister Peter Dutton pointed to figures in the study showing one in seven children was growing up in a household where no-one had a job.

"This is the very reason the government has introduced the $3.6 billion Welfare to Work package," he said in a statement.

"This is an investment in providing more opportunities and services to help more parents off welfare and into a job."

Mr Dutton said the government had reduced the number of children growing up in jobless families by 71,000 since 1996 when Labor was last in government.

The barometer was released ahead of a Brotherhood of St Laurence child poverty conference starting in Melbourne on Wednesday.