(Transcript from SBS World News Radio)
With one in seven Australians said to be living below the poverty line, welfare groups are marking Anti-Poverty week with a call for a national plan to help the poor.
They say tackling problems that contribute to poverty in isolation is ineffective and a more co-ordinated strategy is needed.
They say a national plan needs to pay special attention to people born overseas, as they're more likely to be finding it hard to make ends meet.
Greg Dyett reports.
(Click on the audio tab above to hear the full report)
In launching Anti-Poverty Week, the Governor General Peter Cosgrove challenged Australia to find solutions.
"Poverty is insidious and all encompassing, because, at its core, poverty deprives people of choice, deprives them of their freedom and assaults their dignity. As a nation, we can't allow it to continue."
Welfare groups say the federal government should reconsider some of its budget measures - and create a national anti-poverty plan.
The migrant settlement service, AMES, endorses this kind of thinking.
Its acting CEO Belinda McLennan says new arrivals to Australia face numerous challenges which make them more likely to be among the poor.
But she says that doesn't mean that welfare measures alone are the best response.
"We don't necessarily think that just putting in place a welfare arrangement is the answer because they want to do it for themselves. However, there's always some, particularly some that have had fairly nasty torture and trauma experiences, they need a lot of support to be able to get to the point where they're even ready to start looking for a job and I certainly think that a strategy across the country is a good thing because we tend often to think about these things in separate divisions. So we think about employment or we think about housing or we think about language and literacy as separate issues whereas in fact they're all interlinked in terms of the success of a refugee or a migrant coming in to the country."
The Federation of Ethnic Communities' Councils of Australia or FECCA supports the call for a national plan but its honorary president, Pino Migliorino, says it would have to include some targeted strategies.
"While it's important to have one plan it's also important that this plan can articulate what the central principles need to be but also what the articulated strategies would be for individual groups. People in rural areas, Aboriginal people, people with disabilities, obviously people from non-English speaking background."
Mr Migliorino says policy makers tackling poverty in Australia have to recognise the relative disadvantages of many people born overseas.
"They are women, they are people with overseas qualifications who don't have those recognised in Australia, they are refugees and ultimately asylum seekers now who aren't allowed to work and by definition are poor. So there are a number of specific areas which then focuses the discussion in terms of what you would do for ethnic communities. So you'd say okay, if it is about the whole area of employment and discrimination employment and skills then you focus very much on how you remediate that, what are the support structures we need to put in place to make sure that overseas qualifications are recognised, what are the employment pathways that need to be developed so people get local experience, so they are more employable? There are a range of really specific principles."
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