Our children are 'fifth poorest'

The Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/news/9912/06/text/pageone7.html

Our children are 'fifth poorest'
Date: 06/12/99
By ADELE HORIN

Australia has the fifth highest rate of child poverty in the industrialised world, and compared even with Taiwan, is doing badly by its children, a new report shows.

The study, Child Poverty Across Industrialised Nations, commissioned by UNICEF, also shows that good wages are more important than a generous welfare system in reducing child poverty.

Only Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Italy performed worse than Australia in a league table of 25 nations that for the first time included Taiwan and some Eastern European countries.

But the Australian figure is based on 1994 data and some researchers believe the poverty rates have fallen in the wake of increases in government family payments.

Taiwan's relatively good performance compared with Australia - it was 10th best - took the researchers by surprise.They expected big wage inequalities,and hence child poverty rates, in a newly industrialising country.

The report's co-author, Dr Bruce Bradbury, senior research fellow at the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of NSW, said the study found that good wages, and low wage inequality, were the secrets to increasing poor children's living standards.English-speaking countries, apart from the US, had relatively generous social security systems but still had high rates of child poverty because of low wages.

If the poorest 20 per cent of children were forced to live only on the social security paid to their parents, the Australian child poverty rate, along with that of several other countries, would be lower than Sweden's.

''The higher living standards of the most disadvantaged children in the welfare leaders, particularly the Nordic countries, is due to the higher market income in these families,'' the report says. Dr Bradbury said this did not mean social policies were unimportant as Sweden spent a lot on training and child care.

The study used a measure of relative poverty to compare how far the poorest children have fallen behind the living standards of the average person in a country.

By this calculation, 17 per cent of Australia's children were poor, compared with 6.3 per cent of Taiwan's.

But the study also provides a different measure of poverty, using the US poverty line as a common reference converted into the currencies of each country. It is a measure of poverty showing people's real purchasing power.By this measure, 20 per cent of Australia's children are poor, 4.3 per cent of Taiwan's, 3.7 per cent of Sweden's, 1.6 per cent of Switzerland's and 98 per cent of Russia's.

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