Senator LIGHTFOOT (3:50 PM) —I am not one who has experienced the poverty of the last 50 years. I have been juxtaposed to it because I have lived in the bush for most of my life. It is not something that I would define as poverty—I would probably feel more comfortable defining it as ‘hardship’. Hardship itself, like poverty, can have many faces. I do know that what this government has done over the past few years has manifestly demonstrated its concern with poverty and its concern with hardship, as I prefer to call it. That concern has been by way of establishing a minimum wage, which is slightly in excess of $450 per week for a person aged 21 years and over. But it is relative hardship that is very difficult to define. If you see someone earning $450 as a minimum wage you often do not know whether that person has children—one, two, four or more—or keeps an invalid mother or relative in that house on that $450 of gross salary. If that is the case then that person is suffering a considerable hardship.

I commend the Labor Party now on their introduction of the universal health system that we have here in Australia. We have certainly built on it, and it has not been diminished. It is a very difficult portfolio to handle, because no matter what we do there are always going to be accusations that people are living in hardship or in fact living in poverty, but poverty is not something I accept as a term that I am familiar with, except of course in places like Bangladesh, Mongolia, sections of China, India or South America. I have seen the appalling poverty in all of those countries that I have just mentioned. Poverty in those countries is something that we would never experience here in Australia. Perhaps we have experienced it in Australia, but it is not something we experience in Australia today.

I can see Australia going towards the condition where I would perhaps describe hardship as poverty. I believe there would be poverty if we failed to recognise the shortage of water in Australia that can be confined by artificial means. That would be poverty. That would be poverty if we had the means to grow and to expand our agricultural areas as we have recognised in Western Australia with Kununurra-Lake Argyle part 2, where we are going to explore and exploit the water that is artificially retained there—one of the biggest, if not the biggest, artificial lakes in the world.

It would be poverty in my view if we were to pay very expensive prices for electricity in Australia or if we knowingly had electricity that was produced by pollutants that caused children to be ill. It is one thing not to have enough clothes—to be embarrassed about clothes—as a child, and I think I was in that category. It is another thing to be an ill child and to be ill clothed. To me that is approaching poverty as well. If we do not allow the production of electricity—if we allow the Australian Greens, for instance, to frighten us off a nuclear power station—if it was feasible to establish a nuclear power station in terms of kilowatts per hour to the consumer then that would be something about which the promoters of that ban could well be accused of putting people in poverty in Australia.

It would be a kind of poverty if we reduced our farmers again to some kind of penury because groups like PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, were allowed to succeed with their appalling demonstrations against farmers who have had a traditional way of life in this country for sometimes five, six or more generations. That would be something that we could not forgive.

But overall this is a country that I think we all know is the best in the world. It may not be classified under Henderson’s system of trying to work out where a child lives in poverty in which country, but we know this is the best country in the world. We know that our wages system here is one of the best in the world. We know that our aggregation of wages, whilst not as high as those in the United States of America and perhaps not even as high as those of Saudi Arabia or some of the Low Countries in Europe, is among the highest in the world.

The OECD recognises that, of the nearly 40 countries in the OECD, Australia is measure for measure one of the best countries in the world. But there are pockets of hardship, and I acknowledge that. The government does its best to try to define these pockets, which seems to be very difficult to do. I am not going to read what I call the Henderson poverty line, because the one I have is somewhat out of date. It says for a working partner with a non-working spouse and two children that $434 in 1995-96 was barely adequate but nonetheless could not be defined as poverty. Today you could add 15 per cent onto that 1995-96 salary and you would probably get something like another $60 or $65 a week, which is getting close to $500 a week. If people with two children and a non-working spouse are bringing home less than $500 a week, Henderson, who is some authority on this, says that that would be barely adequate for those people to live on. But because we have a high and rising living standard in Australia—and it is rising; there is no question about that—we are less likely than other countries to have problems that are endemic.

I am of this view because I have been to the places I have mentioned, particularly Mongolia, which has a very intelligent race of people. It somewhat disconcerts me when I see those people there and look at this wonderful life that we have in Australia that we could say that there are significant numbers of people living in poverty in Australia. I find it a little difficult to accept that there are significant numbers of people living here in poverty—hardship, yes, and that goes on from time to time. That goes on in the wheat belt in my home state of Western Australia, which is often—not always, but more often than not—the biggest producer of wheat in the nation. With 10 per cent of the population, we often produce more than 50 per cent of the wheat. And yet, during times of drought—they come as surely as the rain comes—there are farmers who are rich in terms of assets but are living in hardship because they do not have enough money to buy sufficient clothing, to educate their children or to seek additional jobs off the farm because they live too far away from areas of work. Tragically, when there is drought in those wheat-belt areas of Western Australia, it affects the smaller towns dramatically as well, so there is often no employment there either. That is a hardship, and it is one of those things that I have not heard talk of here today.

I think there is more than one type of poverty in Australia, and often we should face that. There is a poverty sometimes of innovation. We do not seem to want to invent or perfect things in Australia like we have in years gone by. Necessity is the mother of invention; perhaps the necessity is not there today. There is often a poverty of forgiveness. This house is one example of that—there is a poverty of forgiveness here. There is a poverty of charity sometimes. There is a poverty of change. And there is a poverty of acumen—

Senator Hutchins —I was on the Privileges Committee when you got forgiven.

Senator LIGHTFOOT —I was only forgiven because there was no other course to be found. More infamously, I suppose, there is a poverty of leadership and an intellectual poverty, and this place is not immune from either. Senator Siewert and Senator Moore both mentioned that sickness can and does cause poverty. In my view it causes hardship. That is largely dealt with by the wonderful system, and I acknowledge this, of Medicare that we have today. (Time expired)