POVERTY
CHILDREN
IN
About Poverty
Poverty can be categorised as absolute and relative poverty. The most widely held and understood definition of absolute poverty measures poverty strictly in economic terms (Briggs 2012). However, the World Bank (2017) defines poverty is much more than that. Generally speaking, absolute poverty is the lack of sufficient resources to meet basic living needs such as food, water and shelter. Relative poverty further expands the definition of poverty as the inability to afford the minimal standard of living in the context of social participation and national identities such as health, education and safety (Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 1996).
"Poverty is hunger"
"Poverty is lack of shelter"
"Poverty is being sick and not being able to see a doctor"
"Poverty is not having access to school and not knowing how to read"
"Poverty is fear for the future"
"Poverty if lack of representation and freedom"
Video: Australian Children Living in Poverty: Research Released in 2016 (Gal 2017)
Prevalence in Australia
Ages distribution in Poverty
Figure 1: Poverty Rate: Australia v OECD avge (2016) (Jericho 2019)
Figure 2: Breakdown of population in Australia and those in poverty by age (Jericho 2019)
Key Findings:
-
The overall poverty rate in Australian is higher than in European Countries. In particular, elder people are the dominator of the poverty population.
-
The poverty rate of young children is nearly the same as those in European Countries, with a percentage of around 13% in 2016.
-
Although the percentage of children under 15 years old is 18.8% of all Australians, the rate of children living in poverty is almost 1/4 (24.2%) among the poverty population.
(Jericho 2019)
Poverty Line
The poverty line in all the tables is computed based on disposable household income, the same approach as the OECD Income Distribution Database (OECD 2016), and used 50% and 60% of median income as benchmarks of the poverty level.
After including the housing costs, approximately one out of eight (13.2%) people live below the 50% threshold poverty line. To be more specific, the percentage of children living below the poverty line is much higher, more than one out of six (17.3%) children. In general, there are around 3.05 million people live below the poverty line and 739,000 of them are children. Importantly, the poverty gap is 38% of the poverty line. That is, the income of people living below the poverty line is approximately $135 lower than the 50% poverty line (ACOSS 2018, p. 22).
Table 1: Number of percentages of people below the poverty lines in 2015-16 (ACOSS 2018)
The table (ACOSS 2018) shows the poverty rate of children living in different groups. in particular, children who live in couple households (60.5%) and sole parents households (37.5%) have high risks of poverty.
