Firstly, thank you to ACOSS for organizing this summit on one of the most important issues in this election campaign – creating a fairer Australia. I am attending today to bring a message from Kevin Rudd about Labor’s determination to create a fairer Australia.

As the ANZ’s Saul Eslake and the Business Council of Australia’s Michael Chaney have recently told us: reducing disadvantage is now a both a moral and economic imperative for Australia.

Labor strongly agrees. Unlike the Howard Government, we believe that fairness and prosperity are utterly inseparable. And that turning our backs on the disadvantaged will come at a serious cost to our economic future. Too many individuals and communities remain caught in a spiral of low school attainment, high unemployment and under-employment, poor health, high imprisonment rates and child abuse. Too many Australians are socially excluded.

But if we are going to solve the problem of social exclusion we have to develop a new agenda that can bring social and economic policy together to complement each other. That’s what Labor intends to do. In my view, such an agenda must have two guiding principles:

• it must tackle the social exclusion of individuals and communities; and
• it must invest in the human capital of all our people, especially the most disadvantaged.

The welfare sector has put these issues on the board. And I want to congratulate you for that great work. But the job’s far from done. Should we win Saturday’s election, I want you to join the new Labor Government in becoming part of a long-term solution to the problem of social disadvantage.

Labor’s Social Inclusion Agenda
Bringing economic and social policy together to reduce disadvantage is going to take a massive effort of cooperation between the Commonwealth, the States and the not for profit sector.

But with a sense of realism, we can make huge inroads into disadvantage. New advisory and policy coordination bodies will be needed to guide it. If elected a Rudd Labor Government will be the first government to ever have a Minister for Social Inclusion. And today I will be launching Labor’s social inclusion policy with the Premier Mike Rann.

To get things moving, Labor in government will establish a Social Inclusion Board that will lead consultation in the community, listening to leading welfare advocates, economists and policy specialists.

Its task will be to advise the Government on what, how and where our major social investment efforts must begin, feeding into the operations of a new Social Inclusion Unit to be established in the Prime Minister’s Department.

Let me be clear: our social inclusion initiatives will not be about welfare – they will be an investment strategy to join social policy to economic policy to the benefit of both. For this reason, our Social Inclusion Unit and Board will be made up of serious economic and social thinkers, not just welfare representatives. This won’t be a memorial to good intentions – it will be about action and hard-headed economics.

We have to change the way Governments at all levels deliver services to tackle disadvantage. It’s going to be about bottom up not top-down measures to tackle disadvantage – so we will be asking local governments, non-government organizations and businesses to participate in new place-based governance arrangements that bring together Commonwealth, State and local funds in the most effective way to lift up disadvantaged communities.

Today I’m asking for your assistance in making this work. Already, our policy down-payments to deal with social inclusion are there for all to see and judge.

Labor recognises that education is critical to social inclusion. The fact is that school completion rates among low socio-economic groups in Australia are far too low. If we’re going to compete with other nations we simply have to get more young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to complete twelve years of schooling and go on to further education and training.

Our goal of getting retention rates back up to 90 percent by 2020 will require big improvements among the most disadvantaged groups. We’re going to do it by investing $2.5 billion to boost trades training in schools.

And we’re going to do it by ensuring every child has access to a computer when they’re at school – and, when they get home, the computers, broadband, books and other educational resources they need to study, through our education tax rebate for families. In a world of scarce education resources it makes sense to invest funds where they will make the most impact – and this means years 0 to 6.

One of the most significant commitments of our social inclusion agenda is universal preschool education for 4 year olds. And we’re also teaming up with the Brotherhood of St Laurence to establish 50 community based programs to help parents develop their children’s early learning capacities.

Tackling disadvantage also means doing more to help job seekers – particularly those facing the highest barriers to employment. That’s why we intend to improve the operation of the Job Network and the Disability Employment Network:

• by focusing more on early intervention;
• by ensuring struggling job seekers get the most intensive assistance; and
• by putting the emphasis on preparing people for sustainable jobs, not simply churning them through a system.

We’re going to commit an extra $20 million to the JET Child Care programs to allow some 10,000 parents who are studying to receive the benefit for two years. And our Social Inclusion Board will be asked to develop a national employment strategy for those with a disability and mental illness.

Of course before we do anything else, we must ensure people have a roof over their heads. 100,000 Australians find themselves homeless on any night. Of these, nearly half are under 24 years of age and 10,000 are children aged twelve or younger.

While the services that are funded to assist the homeless do their best – and manage to accommodate more than 12,000 at any one time in around 7,500 shelters, units and houses – this is not enough to meet demand.

To tackle this, Labor will invest $150 million over five years to build 600 new houses and units for homeless people across the country. Our aim is to halve the number of people regularly turned away from shelters each night.

We’ve also been listening to members of the National Housing Affordability Summit and their call for a National Rental Affordability Scheme, which will provide investment incentives for 50,000 new affordable rental properties in return for owners holding rents to 20 percent or more below the market rate.

Perhaps one of the cruellest aspects of the Howard Government’s neglect of the disadvantaged was their scrapping of the Commonwealth Dental Health Program in 1996. Because the last thing you can afford when you’re poor is a trip to a dentist. As a result of that callous decision, today some 650,000 low-income Australians are on public dental waiting lists, some waiting for years in pain.

This is totally unacceptable in a civilized society – and to tackle it Labor is going to spend $290 million to re-establish the program and treat up to 1 million patients in the next 3 years. This is one of Australia’s largest public health problems and it is time it was fixed. And it will complement our $2.5 billion National Health Reform Plan that will work with the states to improve our public hospital system.

Conclusion

Labor’s social inclusion agenda will be as expansive as it is inclusive. Today , I’m asking for your cooperation. I know that many of you have been fighting long battles against some of the most depressing and punitive policy changes of the Howard Government years:

• the abolition of the Commonwealth Dental Health Scheme;
• the slow strangulation of the Commonwealth-State Housing Agreements;
• the failures of the Job Network;
• the sheer vindictiveness of breaching rules against the homeless and the ill;
• and the neglect of education; and
• closer to home for some of you – the gagging of advocacy functions which give your communities a voice.

Like you, I’m getting sick of protesting against enduring disadvantage. I want to do something practical to reduce it. A Labor win on Saturday will give all of us here the opportunity to channel our cooperative efforts into a positive strategy that will do just that. And should we win, I look forward to working with all parts of the community sector to start putting our strategy into place.

Thank you.

Downloads

• An Australian Social Inclusion Agenda