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Liberals need to deliver tough love policy on welfare reform as Australians grapple with recent rise in food insecurity
There are two primary methods for estimating the extent of poverty in Australia.
The first step is to apply a statistical formula to a dry dataset measuring disposable household income.
The second is to see for yourself, as I did, when I joined the volunteers at the Community Cafe on the outskirts of Western Sydney on Tuesday evening.
Anyone prepared to sit outside in five degrees for the chance of a free feed and some company is almost certainly living below the poverty line.
On Tuesday evening, I counted 130 such people, men, women, and children waiting in line to be served a nourishing hot meal on a paper plate.
The eldest I person I spoke to was in the 80s.
The youngest was a baby just a few months old.
It would be crass to make judgements about ethnicity at a cafe that runs on the admirable principle that every human being deserves equal respect.
Suffice it to say Tuesday's gathering passed the diversity test, since poverty is indiscriminate.
Kirsty Parkes, the founder of the Community Café charity, says the attendance of families is relatively recent and illustrates the rising level of food insecurity.
Bob Hawke lived to regret the moment he went off-script at Labor's 1987 campaign launch and declared that no Australian child would live in poverty by 1990.
It is a mathematically impossible goal if we insist on pegging poverty to median incomes.
In any case, poverty is not merely an absence of money, as the Centre for Social Justice recognised in its groundbreaking 2007 report 'Breakthrough Britain'.
It concludes that poverty cannot be cured by dolling out money.
Instead, policymakers should focus on the pathways to poverty, of which the report highlights six: family breakdown, educational failure, worklessness, addictions, problem debt and insecure housing.
Judging from my conversations at the Community Cafe, we should add a seventh: loneliness.
Community Cafe ensures that on Tuesday nights, at least no one in the neighbourhood is obliged to eat alone.
Hawke at least deserves credit for recognising that the goal of welfare policy should be to reduce poverty, not merely to service it by handing out cash.
The noble causes espoused by welfare organisations are prone to corruption through rent-seeking.
The iron law of government programs is the first and sometimes only beneficiaries are the people who administer them.
The true measure of a fair society is not how much money is distributed but whether it is effective.
The instinct for generosity must be balanced against the perverse economic incentives welfare payments create.
Mark Latham was one the few Labor leaders to acknowledge that the best form of welfare is a job.
During his 2004 campaign speech, he spoke about the curse of intergenerational welfare.
"We need to confront the problem of 800,000 Australian children growing up in jobless households," he said. "We know what this leads to: poverty, poor health, increased crime rates and, worst of all, lack of hope."
Latham understood the challenges of life in postcode 2168 better than most.
He was born there in the suburb of Ashcroft, served on Liverpool Council and represented the federal seat of Werriwa, in which 2168 falls.
In a 2001 speech, he expressed his despair at the political ideology and point-scoring that were getting in the way of genuine solutions.
"It's the equivalent of play-acting, as each side makes its set-piece criticism of the other."
The play acting has grown worse.
Labor frames any initiative by the Coalition to ensure that welfare spending is effective as a means to achieve its goals.
The Liberals are inclined to characterise Labor as a spendthrift.
The cashless welfare card experiment, aimed at breaking the curse of addiction, was abolished by the incoming Albanese government in 2022.
Labor framed it as a punishment rather than a tool to break the cycle of poverty.
Coalition attempts to add work obligations have often been framed as a breach of rights by Labor.
They refuse to recognise, as Latham did, that there can be no end to the poverty circle without effort and responsibility.
That rule applies to communities as much as to individuals.
The Centre for Social Justice highlights how disadvantaged communities develop a poverty culture in which aspiration and mobility seem out of reach.
Children who grow up in workless homes are likely to perform poorly at school and have a strong chance of becoming workless adults themselves. Community expectations shift.
Educational underachievement becomes normalised, crime is legitimised, middle-class residents leave, and postcodes become stigmatised.
The challenges of life in postcode 2168 are hardly unique.
It is among the top two per cent of postcodes on the ABS index of socio-economic disadvantage, alongside remote areas of Aboriginal settlement and suburbs such as Elizabeth in South Australia and Broadmeadows in Victoria.
The pointers to poverty are dispiritingly dissimilar: high unemployment, low education achievement, high rates of single parenthood, jobless households, and high numbers of people living in social housing. There are high rates of crime, drug addiction and family violence.
This should prompt us to reconsider the assumptions underlying the challenges of closing the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous socio-economic outcomes.
The challenges faced by Aboriginal Australians stem from poverty, not race.
Mr Albanese's slogan, "no one left behind", will remain empty of meaning unless he is prepared to tackle the complex and politically challenging task of reforming the welfare system as Latham wanted to do.
Conservatives are tempted to stay out of this policy area altogether, fearful of the dangers of being framed as the nasty party.
Yet reducing social disadvantage is at the core of the liberal philosophy on which the party was founded.
Robert Menzies saw no contradiction between prosperity and fairness.
The duty of the Liberal Party was to recognise that every citizen is of equal worth and was committed to the principle of economic opportunity.
Some of the most important welfare reform this century began on the centre right.
The Centre for Social Justice was established by a former Conservative leader, Iain Duncan Smith, during the party's long-term opposition between 1997 and 2010.
Conservatives were also at the forefront of welfare reform in New Zealand under the leadership of John Keys and Bill English.
They didn't shrink from the harsh love measures required to break the cycle, such as encouraging single mothers to find work, knowing that single motherhood can become an apprenticeship to a life of joblessness without the right incentives in place.
We can visualise Sussan Ley flinching at the mention of these kinds of measures.
Yet the Liberal Party will never return to government if the trauma of this year's election makes it permanently risk-averse.
Its priority is to set its aim beyond the politically expedient and invest its time in Opposition to a blueprint for national reform.
It must focus on government efficiency, acknowledging that the current level of public spending is unsustainable and that challenges in welfare, education, and health can be overcome by allocating a smaller budget more wisely.
The second task is to learn the art of politics, of which Menzies was a master.
It is the art of persuasion backed by the conviction that the goal of their noble profession is not to win votes but to improve lives.
Nick Cater is a senior fellow of the Menzies Research Centre.
