Gillard's war on poverty

from The Age

Tony Wright

DEPUTY Prime Minister Julia Gillard is on an ambitious crusade to harness the authority of all Labor Government ministers in a war on poverty.

She also plans to tackle loneliness in Australian cities' fast-growing outer suburbs.

Ms Gillard said yesterday she wanted to use her ministry of "social inclusion" — part of her super-portfolio that includes education, employment and workplace relations — to help lift the most disadvantaged communities out of their seemingly endless cycles of joblessness, welfare dependency, crime and child neglect.

She said it would require a "whole-of-government" approach, with ministers ensuring that each major government decision had a "social inclusion" element.

Ms Gillard said she was also determined to draw on the resources and know-how of corporate Australia, where she says she has found a determination to tackle poverty and social disability.

"I spent a lot of 2007 in corporate boardrooms where I would be talking about our industrial relations policies and plans, but there people wanted to talk to me about our social inclusion agenda … they want to work with disadvantaged communities."

Ms Gillard's other major target is to introduce services and programs to reduce social isolation in sprawling new housing developments on the rims of big cities and in regional areas.

She said the social inclusion unit being set up in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet would co-ordinate efforts to ensure the entire Government was involved in battling disadvantage.

She said federal governments ran employment services, health programs, family and community programs and many other services that could make a difference at community level.

However, these needed to be co-ordinated and shaped for specific groups, and there had to be follow-through to ensure maximum impact.

She said social researcher Professor Tony Vinson's simple analysis of postcodes revealed a number of communities across Australia that continued to be left behind despite the nation's years of economic growth. Certain postcodes came up time after time, revealing a pattern of joblessness, low educational attainment, welfare dependency, high levels of crime and high levels of child neglect.

"The analysis would lead you to believe that if economic growth alone was going to fix the problems of those communities, it would be fixing them by now," Ms Gillard said. "The truth is economic growth alone is not fixing the problems of those communities and they're getting left behind.

"We want to see those communities included in the Australian mainstream; in the mainstream of economic life and all things that follow from getting good access to prosperity.

"It is much more likely that if people have got access to work, families are going to succeed, families are going to be able to be strong, kids are going to get to school, kids are going to have a genuine opportunity to achieve."

Ms Gillard said new and growing housing estates on the fringes of big cities and in growing regional areas often hid a large number of women who stayed at home with children, isolated from any real sense of community.

"When everything is new and everyone is new, the sort of structures that we identify with community life — the sporting clubs, the Rotaries, the volunteer organisations, the mums' groups — those sort of things don't tend to exist.

"We say that those communities too need special attention to make sure they don't fall behind in the sense of not getting fair access to services or fall behind in the sense that those people don't have those community inter-connections that are so important to human life."

Ms Gillard confirmed yesterday that Labor would dump the Howard government's approach to teaching Australian history in schools.

She said Labor would not limit history teaching to 150 hours of compulsory Australian history over years 9 and 10, as set down by the former government. Instead, Labor would take a broader approach and history would be taught in all years of schooling, and would not be limited to Australian history.