 Welcome to the Australian National University and the fifth panel discussion in a series, the vote, the 2016 federal election. I would like to acknowledge and to celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and to pay my respects to the elders of the Ngunna war people past and present. Every Tuesday night until the 2nd of July, here in the Melonglo Theatre, ANU public policy experts will discuss the key issues of the 2016 federal election. This election series is presented in partnership with PolicyForum.net, which is based here at the Crawford School of Public Policy. PolicyForum.net is the Crawford Schools platform for analysis and for discussion about the region's public policy challenges. The podcast of tonight's panel and every panel in the series will be available to listen to, so just go to anu.edu.au and click on the 2016 federal election series banner to find out more. Now please tweet too. Don't just sit there, tweet. Our Twitter conversation is using the hashtag Ospaul at our ANU. Tonight I'm joined by four of the university's leading policy makers and researchers to analyse some of the social policy issues most important to voters. On the end there, Professor Matthew Gray, who's director of the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods. He's published research on a wide range of social and economic policy issues and has undertaken major evaluation of government policies and programs, including the family law system, income management and service delivery models. Next to him, Sharon Bessel, who's director of research at the Crawford School of Public Policy and an associate professor in the Policy and Governance Program. Her research interests revolve around social justice in human rights, such as the rights of children, children's participation and citizenship, quality education, child labour, child protection and support for children without parental care. Next to her, Peter Whiteford, who's professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy. He's published extensively on various aspects of the Australian and New Zealand systems of income support and worked on child poverty, family assistance policies, welfare reform and other aspects of social policy, particularly ways of supporting the balance between work and family life. And next to me, Sue Regan, who runs the Social Policy and Participation Program at the H.C. Coombs Policy Forum based at the Crawford School of Public Policy. Sue was previously the founding chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, and that's a UK-based research institute focusing on the well-being of low-income earners. Please join me in welcoming our panellists. Now, I'm going to begin the discussion tonight with some preliminary questions to just lay a bit of groundwork and hopefully prompt some food for thought for you. I'll begin the discussion and then hand over to you for your questions, but please do make them questions rather than statements. And if you'd like to give our panellists the benefit of your carefully considered sorts in-depth, maybe do so after we finish. But let me begin by asking, I guess, whether any of you have been impressed and delighted thus far to see social policy issues right at the forefront in this campaign. Peter Whiteford, to you first, what role have they played at the halfway point? Well, it was the release of the policy on childcare over the weekend by the Labor Party, but I think there's been very little detail released so far. Maybe we'll have to wait till the formal launch of the release speeches. I'm not even sure when that is. Although, having said that, there are two documents or two things that obviously lay out much of the social policy agenda. The first is the Budget, the 2016 Budget, which is presumably, there may be some additions to that, but that clearly represents in social security and welfare terms the main policy directions that the government adopts. There was also a very broad platform that the Shadow Minister, Jenny Macklin, released some about six or eight weeks ago now, which was not a detailed set of promises, but was a broad platform about social inclusion and shared prosperity. So, apart from that, I don't think we know a lot of the details. Sharon Bess also, it's there, but it's been a little sketchy. Would you agree with that analysis? Yeah, I would. I think, as Peter says, we've seen a little bit recently, very recently, the last 24, 48 hours, particularly some of the discussion around childcare policy. You know, it was just starting to get to a little bit more depth on a really important issue, but I think the general observation I would make is that we're just seeing not very much in regard to social policy. We're seeing a lot of discussion, perhaps not as much detail, but a lot of discussion around the economy. You know, the coalition's jobs and growth budget reflects that as a priority, and obviously that's important, but we're not seeing much discussion around social policy. What we're not seeing, I think, is a broad vision for Australia, a broad vision of where we want to go. The discussion around social policy tends to be rather ad hoc and piecemeal rather than bringing a whole range of issues that are interrelated together in a cohesive way. And if I could just give a quote, Genevieve, I think this is a great quote that sums up where I think we're at at the moment with a lot of the discussion. So the quote is, it's a lot about the economy. It's almost as if Australia is a business, and who would be the best CEO is the question, but a prime minister, well, you're in charge of a community and people are a lot more complex than just about the money they've got. And that was a quote on the ABC website today from a year 12 student in Victoria, John Janane. And I think to me that actually sums up what we're seeing at the moment, and we do need a lot more vision around social policy. And Genevieve, that website says, kids say the darnedest things. That's very patronising. You can't go back and change that website. I cannot bear those quirky little things. They just drive me up the wall. Matthew Grater, to you. Perhaps what Sharon's also suggesting there is that social issues are a little bit tangential, that they come up in connection with things like superannuation and various other fundamentally economic issues. And social issues play around the edge there rather than being the central focus. Yeah, I think that we're facing some very serious challenges around social security, social services, which do warrant very serious attention for the long term around the implications of what we do for the type of society we are, for the fiscal sustainability. I'd have to say that today the election campaign, I'd say, has been really quite disengaged almost around social security and social services. There are major issues to do with changing nature of the labour market and what that means. There's issues to do with how long we expect people to work and ageing with changes to the age pension, which are actually eligibility age, which are actually quite dramatic, but which are not really being talked about at all. And where there is some more discussion, in many ways the two parties, this is some sense of different in rhetoric and language, but when you look at, say, the childcare policy, in many ways it's pretty similar. Yeah, the amount of money that's been committed is the same or very similar. We haven't done the full modelling yet, but the distributional consequences are probably not that, there'll be some differences are not that great. So in a sense it's almost a disengagement from many of these issues. Okay, and Sir Regan, I think we do see health and education closer to the front line, because they're things that affect everyone, I think, but more complex areas say mental health funding, family and children's services, refugee services and the like tend to play a role that's further back. Why do you think that is? Well, you know, I think picking up on what Sharon was saying, and I think there's really a lack of vision in terms of what we want from a fairer and more socially just Australia. You know, and therefore if we don't have that vision in the political debate, it's hard to have a conversation about the breadth of long-term policies and investments in the social infrastructure that's needed to get to that vision of a fairer and more socially just Australia. And I think, you know, part of that vision is also about a stronger civil society and a strong community sector and an independent and robust community sector, which of course delivers a lot of the services targeted at people who are most disadvantaged. So, yeah, so we're not really having that conversation yet. Let me be completely cynical and ask you whether it's because politicians think there aren't many votes in justice for poor people. Yeah, I mean, I mean, they may think that. I mean, I think you can say that if you feel that's true. I mean, I think that there are ways of talking about social justice and social policy which does appeal to people. I mean, I think we saw by the reaction from the 2014 budget, which was clearly, you know, condemned by many as being a very unfair budget. I think that kind of demonstrated that, you know, the community, you know, is concerned about fairness and justice, you know, and so I think they could be themes which could appeal to the electorate. Sharon, you nodded there at the thought that maybe it's just electorally unappealing in the marginals. Yeah, I think what we were seeing... Microphone up, Jim. Sorry, I was told to do that. I think what we're seeing across the board is a very kind of populist reaction to the kinds of issues that will capture attention. And as Matt said on Chalky, you know, there's not much difference on some of the issues that do matter to people. And I think, you know, are there votes in talking about poor people? Maybe, maybe not. Are there votes in talking about funding for domestic violence? Maybe, maybe not. I think that perhaps if politicians are making that call, they're making the wrong call. Because we see issues like domestic violence and the awfully deleterious impact that funding cuts to legal services have had in that area is something that really worries people. And I think, you know, one of the big issues to me that's facing Australia that's really not being addressed in a comprehensive way is inequality. And, you know, we've seen the ACOS figures. We've seen the OECD figures. So, you know, according to ACOS, 10% of the wealthiest Australians own 45% of the wealth. That's not just about poor people. It's fundamentally about poor people because they get hit hardest. But it's actually about the kind of society we live in. And so I think those issues really should be driving our discussions much, much more than they are. So let's talk about some of those realities. Peter Whiteford, how much do we spend on social security and welfare? And where do those predictions sit for the next sort of decade or so? Well, if you look at the Commonwealth Government spending, which is what we're talking about, obviously, this year it's about $150 billion, which sounds like a lot of money, and it is. It's about 35% of the total Commonwealth budget, so it's the largest single component of Commonwealth Government spending. And that's projected over by the next five years to rise to about $190 billion. The thing about that is, though, is that we actually spend a lot less than most other rich countries in terms of cash payments, so social security benefits, where actually the sixth lowest in the OECD. Mainly because even though it's our biggest program, we spend very little on age pensions, much lower than the OECD average. The other thing that's very important about what we do is that we have a very unusual social security system. We target poor people more than any other country in the OECD and probably in the world. More than 80% of what we spend goes to the bottom half of the population in terms of income, whereas in a lot of places, you know, sort of in the US it's about 60%. In a lot of European countries it's only about 30 or 40%. So we target money to the poor more than anybody else, and what that means is that, even though it's our biggest spending program, and when governments look at, you know, where they're going to try and achieve budget balance, they almost never do look at social security, that if you cut social security and welfare without designing it carefully, it'll increase inequality in Australia more than any other country. And one of the things is, in fact, over the last 15 years or so, in fact our social security system has become less effective and our tax system has become less effective at reducing inequality, mainly because of a series of tax cuts that happened from about 2005 onwards, but included in 2007 and 2008. Okay, so a comment from you on how we compare to other nations where we position ourselves, people like Canada, the UK, countries with a common sort of heritage? Yeah, I mean, interestingly, I mean, we obviously have a common heritage, but our social security systems are really quite different. I mean, you know, fundamental differences we don't hear in Australia have a social insurance or a national insurance base to our system. So, you know, as Peter's just said, the welfare payments are very targeted at people lower down the income scale. You know, and there's pros and cons of these different approaches. I mean, I think interestingly with a social insurance model, you tend to have greater buy-in across the population because more people get payments out of the system. So I think, you know, perhaps there's an argument that can be made that the residualisation of welfare in Australia means that it is more difficult for it to have greater public support. And Matthew, do you think we spend effectively? Is there a margin where we could reduce inefficiency and waste without compromising need? I mean, efficiency is, I think, quite a strong Australian political value. I think Peter's assessment is right that the Australian system is very efficient at redistributing to lower income. I mean, there's always ways that you can, you know, evaluate what's working, what's not working and how you might do things more effectively. But there are some real issues which have emerged. For example, the level of Newstart payments, which I think it's fairly widely accepted, are pretty low. But also some changes around family tax benefit and the indexation of that, which will mean that it's going to go into a continuing kind of decline in real value. And that, you know, it's a little bit like boiling a frog. I mean, for a long time, the frog doesn't realise what's happening and at some point you say, gee, it's hot. And at that point, it's going to be very expensive to try and sort of do what's going to be needed in order to have the type of society that I think a lot of Australians are going to want, where people expect to get a reward for their effort. But on the other hand, if they do end up in a situation where they can't provide for themselves, that the society will provide a decent living standard, modest, but decent. And we're going to run into problems. So there will be real pressures around that. And so there will be a lot of pressure around the extent to which we make payments through the family tax benefit, for example, to families in which people are employed who are not low income, but that no means high income. Peter Whiteford, you've made some interesting observations that our welfare spending is actually fairly stable over the last couple of decades. What does that indicate to us about need and how we meet it? How well we're balancing our priorities? Well, I mean, we've had, particularly after the 1970s and up to the 1990s, we had quite substantial increases in welfare spending. That was largely driven by recessions, you know. So when unemployment goes up, spending on unemployment rises quite significantly. And that also has very long-term consequences. It entrenched a lot of the most worst cases of disadvantage in our society. We're actually the results of the severe recessions in the early 1980s and 1990s. But since the mid-1990s, spending on most items of social security, the proportion of people who receive welfare payments of working age has declined quite significantly, which is not what people necessarily think. Also, the proportion of people over the age of 65 who are receiving an age pension or a Veterans Affairs pension, which is a substitute for it in many cases, has also actually declined. It's just there are a lot more age people now than there were in the past. So, but still, you know, the proportion of people who get most of their income from welfare has fallen for the last 20 years. What, and this spending has been stable. Now, there's a degree of substitution between what happens at the Commonwealth level and the state level, not so much in social security, but certainly in services. And if you look forward over the projections in the most recent budget, spending on social security and welfare is gonna rise from about 9.3 to 9.6% of GDP. But spending on disability is gonna rise by about 1% of GDP, and that's on the, that's the National Disability Insurance scheme, which is bipartisan agreement by both sides of politics. So it's actually deliberately agreed on both sides of politics that that spending is gonna go up. But if that goes up by about 1% of GDP and the total goes up by 0.3, everything else is going down. So over the forward estimates, we're seeing spending going down. That assumes that everything that's in the 2015 budget gets passed by the next Senate, because there are many cuts in this year's budget that were left over from 2015. So that might not be so positive. But what we generally, apart from the aging of the population, which is pretty predictable, what really causes surges in welfare spending and also in really negative economic consequences of that are recessions. Having said that, I mean, Sharon was referring to the fact that we concentrate on the economy, sort of the National Accounts figures last week were sort of widely said to show that our economic growth is much stronger than we think. But in fact, that isn't GDP, is not a measure of how well off households are even, because a lot of that was driven by exports. If you look at what's called household disposable income per person, which is what households actually get to consume, we have actually not had any real growth in household disposable income per capita for the last four and a quarter years. That is the longest period of stagnation in household incomes since records began. So that's 17 quarters. The long-term effect of that is more, it's much bigger than the temporary downturn in the GFC. It's bigger than the 1990s recession. It's not quite as big as the 1980s recession. So even though it's not a recession, it's in income terms, we've just been going backwards for the last four years. And I think that's gonna pose challenges for the future. Can I also just say on the unemployed, because I think clearly what's happened is the fact that we've had, up until 2008 we had a very strong income growth in Australia. But essentially because the unemployment payment is indexed to prices, people on unemployment benefits didn't share in any of that because they haven't had real terms of anything like a significant increase since 1996. In fact, we're paying the unemployed an unemployment beneficiary about $20 a week more in real terms than they were paid in 1975. So we've had 40 years of changes in the community and the unemployed are basically sort of, not much better off than they were 40 years ago. And unless we choose to do something about it, that's just gonna continue when economic growth resumes, hopefully. Now I'm gonna turn over to you in just a moment. Sharon, I know you've got a comment to make and then I've got one final question for Matthew after that. But go ahead. I just wanted to pick up on what Peter was saying about household incomes, the issues around payments to those who are unemployed, but about household incomes generally. And I guess to move from the big picture to the human experience of that. And I just wanted to briefly share with people some research that I've been involved in was over a period of four years. We were working with children aged between eight and 12. And it was about what makes the strong and supportive community. Now one of the things that children raised again and again, particularly in the disadvantaged communities that we were working in, was the high cost of living and how that impacted on their lives. So eight to 12 year olds remember. So there was one incident in a particular community where a group of seven children, all around eight or nine years old, argued about whether or not rents should be capped. And that issue came up because a girl who was nine put forward the proposition that this would make communities better. And she said she thought this was important because a lot of times her mum couldn't afford to pay the rent. And that meant that there wasn't enough food to eat that week. That meant that there were a whole lot of things that the children couldn't do, but eating was one of those things. And these children then debated whether or not that was a good idea, essentially around the social justice implications of that. We also in that research had children talking about their decision to throw away excursion notes rather than take them home because they knew their parents couldn't afford to pay for the excursion. They talked about choosing not to play sport because they knew their parents couldn't afford to pay the registration fees or couldn't afford to buy them the shoes. So I think Peter's points really well made in terms of household income. And what our research is showing is what that means for people's lives. And so when I say we need to think about inequality and we need to think about social policy as well as the economy, what I'm suggesting is we need to see the economy as a means to an end. And to me, that end should be children being up to afford to engage in school and in community life rather than worrying about protecting their parents because they know their parents are in financial crisis. Yeah, what horrendous thoughts that nine-year-olds would be having those discussions. Matthew Gray, what about that baby boomer population bump? What about all those free-living hedonists who didn't think they were ever going to get old? How are they going to affect our welfare spend? I, Peter, sort of talked a little bit about how the aging of the population will inevitably have consequences for the budget. I mean, I think it's quite a lot of research now that shows that it could be the case that young people now will be one of the first generations in certain reason in Australia to not have a stronger economic position as their parents did. So, you know, the policies around superannuation sort of, some of them are really at the margin. I mean, I think they're in the right direction, but they're really at the margins in many ways. Labor has, I think, said that the superannuation and guarantee contribution, employer contribution, they'll increase that from 9.5% to 12%. You know, the coalitions put that sort of a hold through to 2020, and so that kind of thing could have a really quite long-term impact. So, clearly, the age pension age is another one where the coalition wants to increase, the policies to increase the age pension age to 70. When we've done surveys of the ANU poll, what it showed was that the majority of Australians, almost half, thought it should be 65 for men and women, and more people thought it should be 60 for women and 65 for men than thought it should go to 70. So, in a sense, again, this is, I think, this sort of policy has been driven by our sort of elites of society, but there's not really been a serious discussion about what this means for people and for different groups of people who've had different lifetimes of work and different types of jobs. Yeah, and look, I think certainly we've had that discussion on the radio and I very strongly recall callers ringing in and saying, Jen, I've been laying bricks on my life and buggered. I can't go on, you know, past sort of the mid-50s or 60 or whatever, it's an unthinkable situation for people. Okay, let's go on to questions. Now, we've got a microphone. So, pop your hand up, and I always have great faith in Canberra audiences. You've endorsed that already. Let's, I think, look, you're closest to up here, so keep your hand up, just up there, yeah. Can you take the mic? Thank you. Oh, sorry, yeah, Trish, no, I was actually pointing beyond. I need you to go to the mic. Hello, everyone, my name's Trish Carr. For transparency reasons, I'm one of the green's candidates for the federal election. I just wanted to say thank you for tonight and also, the Uniting Church ran a seminar on Saturday which Eva Cox spoke at, on a building a truly civil society and saying we're not just an economy and all the wonderful things that Eva says that she asks us to actually do action on, not just talk about. But she also raised the gender issue of all this policy. I was wondering if you'd comment on that because, as she said often, it's a women's issue. Thank you. Yeah, Sharon, that's absolutely accurate, isn't it, that poverty is often strongly gendered in its effects? Yes, yes. I mean, I think on all of the issues that we're talking about, you know, there are gender issues to be considered. You know, what, I see Marianne saw sitting in there. You may want to comment on this, but I think what we see in Australia is something of a stepping away from what we had a very long time ago, you know, the 1970s Australia was at the forefront of international efforts to ensure gender equality. You know, there are all kinds of ways that can be achieved, but gender budgeting, you know, identifying the way in which money that's spent impacts differently on men and women, you know, doing gender analysis so we deeply understand the gender dimensions of poverty is fundamentally important. We don't do that. We can do that. We know how to do that, but we don't consistently do it in Australia. And our preparedness to do that from the 1970s seems to me to have very steadily declined over a number of decades. We know from the research that these issues play out, but at a policy level, we don't address them as we might, but we've got the tools to do it. Sue, would you like to make a comment on that? Yeah, I mean, I am... So when Bill Shorten made his budget response, I got quite excited because one of his themes was around gender equality, and I suppose I hoped that he would have spent more time on that in the election. I mean, I think he's framed the childcare as a gender issue, and we can have a debate about that, whether that's right or wrong. I mean, I think there was a recent poll that showed that among undecided voters, there's more women than men. So I think this is a case where perhaps there are votes to be had in appealing to female voters. So I mean, I think we need to go beyond the childcare debate and there's other arenas which clearly have strong gender implications. Well, in strong contrast to several of his cabinet ministers, the Prime Minister says he's a feminist, so perhaps there's a gender debate emerging there, I don't know. Yeah, up there. Hi there, I'm Dean Williams, Monash University alumni. I just wanted to ask a question about the age pension particularly. I think it seems it would probably be a fairly universal acceptance that the age pension is sort of a fairly frugal level of existence. As the baby women start to age and continue to be sort of a significant voting bloc, do you think they'll be happy with what the age pension provides and if not, will they sort of expect a higher level of support and what the implications might be looking forward to the future? Okay, Peter, can I go to you on that? Well, I mean, the age pension is... We don't spend very much on the age pension relative to other countries, but having said that, we have a very unusual combination of what you might call resources in retirement, which is that while, if you just look at people's cash incomes, older people, people at the age of 65 in Australia are relative to the rest of the population, have the second lowest levels of income in the OECD, but they probably have the highest levels of wealth, so housing wealth, but also financial assets are much higher in Australia amongst older people than they are in other countries. So it's a complicated situation. If you look at the proportion of people who have no other income except the age pension, it's actually... Well, I don't publish the statistics anymore, quite, but last time I looked, it was less than 5%. But about half of people over 65 are either on a full rate of age pension. So they've got a bit of extra income, but it's not a lot of extra income. It's only about $3,500 a year above the age pension. So a lot of people are really on quite low incomes because that'll get you, if you're a single person, up to about $25,000, $26,000 a year. But it's the home ownership that... And it's also the combination of other services, like Medicare, that's very important for living standards. It is our largest single program. It's going to go up, but it's going to go up everywhere. I would say in the next... Usually within the next decade and possibly within the next five years, China is going to be spending a higher proportion of its GDP on age pensions in Australia. So we're very frugal in many respects, but it's still our biggest program. So I think that it needs to be looked at, but the choices that you make about winding it back are not very attractive, really. I mean, two things. Say, for example, in the 2014 budget, the government proposed that they'd change the indexation of age pensions from wages to prices. Now, two things about that is, if you did that 30 or 40 years from now, you would have extremely high poverty amongst age pensioners. And of course, 30 or 40 years from now, it's not the current age pensioners who are going to be affected. It won't quite be you, I imagine, but it'll be people in their 30s now. So that sort of proposal actually has very long-term negative consequences, but not for the current age pensioners, for the future age pensions. The other thing is, say, for example, I think the business council posed that the age pension become a loan that the estate would have to pay back. Now, one level that sounds well, you know, well, why not? But one of the effects of that is, is that the bottom half of the population would get no inheritance, right? So the distribution of wealth off in the future would be much more unequal than it is now even, than the Sharon's pointed out is pretty unequal. So I think really what my conclusion is, is that in thinking about things like age pensions, we actually have to think about the long term and think about what's sensible policy rather than what we have now, which is, yeah, I was going to save a few hundred million dollars in the forward estimates. And so long as it saves the money, it's a good policy. It's not about how much money you save or spend. It's about making sure that the parameters of it are sustainable in the long run. Sue, did you want to comment? Oh, I was just going to pick up on Peter's point about, you know, the level of the age pension can be fairly modest in Australia because of high levels of home ownership. And there's a, you know, a sort of trade-off there. But it's really older people in the private rented market who I think are a very, you know, a big priority group, which we should be doing more and saying more about. And I was just going to say, I mean, partly your question made me think that you were suggesting older people won't vote to have reductions in their age pension. But I mean, I think older people vote with a much, as we all do, with a much wider array of interests and that, you know, older people are often, well, usually parents or grandparents or, you know, so it's not just about their narrow focus. Okay, next question up here, yep. Good evening, guys. Thanks for speaking tonight. I would love your guidance on how to cast my vote in the upcoming election. If, would you, or in as few words as possible, would you all identify what you think are the highest priorities in social welfare for us and which parties best represent those values? The social welfare-led voter, there is a unicorn in the room. Matthew Gray, let me start with you. No, I wouldn't. As I said, at the start, in many ways, I think certainly between the coalition and Labor, they're not that different really at this stage. I mean, maybe the next four weeks of the campaign will start to emerge, but I think I'd expect that we largely know what the coalition policies from the budget. I mean, I think that the family tax benefit differences are quite significant and that the cuts to family tax benefit that are in the budget from a previous budget but not yet approved will impact on single-parent families and on low-income, couple-parent families, and they're not trivial impacts. I mean, something like here, the single-parent on $60,000 with two high school children could be something in the order of two and a half $3,000 a year worth of. And that is because they're going to, for children over 13, the family tax benefit comes from cut to $1,000. So there's quite significant changes. Childcare policies, well, they're pretty similar, probably in the distribution of consequences, although the Labor policy looks like it'd be more generous to high-income families. So apart from the family tax benefit, it's hard to see major differences certainly from around the tax transfer system at this stage. Sharon? I think in terms of who will I vote for, who you should vote for, perhaps I shouldn't reveal that for fear of biasing myself. We can talk about it later, perhaps. I think following up on what Matt said, I think one of the, you know, we've said that the childcare policies, for example, are quite similar. Perhaps one of the main differences is the way the government has linked its childcare package to the changes to family tax benefit. And so there will be clear losers out of that. Not people who have young children in childcare, but generally people who have slightly older children, you know, entering secondary school and in secondary school. So to me, where we see those policies, those kinds of policy reforms linking to one another, so someone wins but someone clearly loses. I see that as really very problematic. I would vote for a party and would encourage others to vote for a party that move beyond, A, add hoc approaches to policy, and B, talking in ridiculous ways about class warfare, to engaging in a serious conversation about what kind of country we want to have and how central social policy is to that. Look, if I could quote Richard Dennis in the monthly actually writing about the car industry, but I think making an excellent point, policy is no longer about solving problems, it's about winning votes. And there's been a transition that we've gone through in the last decade or two where we no longer look in that direction. Peter, what about you? Sorry, sorry. I guess the other thing that I would love to see is some genuine bipartisan discussion or multi-partisan discussion around these issues rather than everything almost instantly moving into oppositionalist terms, but to some fairly serious mature consideration of what we want as a country. It's interesting that it's oppositionalist terms when there's so little distinction between them so much the time, isn't there? Not a cigarette paper between them, but they hate each other. Peter. Yeah, well, I'm just going to say, if one thinks about, you know, as I said, probably people on unemployment payments are, in terms of people on benefits, are the most disadvantaged in our community. There's been bipartisan neglect of the unemployed for the last 20 years, but neither side of politics has done much about it. So, but also, you know, you don't have to go back all that far in the past to see positive things done by both sides of politics. You know, back in the night, you know, sort of family allowances was introduced by the Fraser government. Payments for supporting fathers were introduced by the Fraser government, you know, sort of, even though they were cutting back in lots of other places, you know. So it's not as if there's one party that does all the positive things and one party that does all the negative things, and in fact, you know, you can actually argue that when you look at the longer run, it was actually decisions by the Halk-Keating government, which actually make a lot of sense, which led to a lot of the fact that we have stability in social security spending since 1996 and a reduction in the proportion of the population on benefits. It was actually things like raising the age pension age for women, getting rid of the assumption of dependency in the social security system to a large extent. So it's not as sort of one side does all the good things and one side does all the bad things, but I would really reinforce what Sharon was saying, which is that, you know, sort of, there's a lot of ad hoc decisions, and maybe in the last few years, there've been too many ad hoc decisions. And a lot of, you know, this is, you know, this is the sort of, I spend too much time looking at Commonwealth budgets, Brian, and an awful lot of policy initiatives are how much space there is in the forward estimates. So the government, you know, sort of, and it is actually about, you know, you cut here in order to give space for an initiative and it's all within the constraints of what are essentially a set of imaginary numbers, which Treasury has got wrong, first underestimating for about six or seven years and then overestimating revenue for about six or seven years. So a lot of the debate is about this little marginal changes that are not actually, and as I said, they're based on imaginary numbers, or they're the best projections of those imaginary numbers, but they're also taken with short-term perspectives. And I think we need to reintroduce, we're trying to reintroduce a longer-term vision of not only of what society we want, but also how we pay for it. And I think, in fact, it was the head of the business council who at the beginning of this year said, is there a politician in the country with a vision for the next 10 years? And that seems to be an increasingly difficult question to answer. Sue, what are your thoughts about the difference between the two of them? I mean, I agree with lots of the comments being made, but, I mean, I, you know, there's that fine print, isn't there, that you get on financial documents which says past performance should not be seen as an indicator of future performance. But I do think that, you know, I would suggest that you go back and have a look at what previous labor and previous coalition and other forms of government have done and use that as a basis to help your thinking. I mean, it's, you know, I think trying to make a decision on the information that you get during election campaigns is kind of a, is pretty flawed. Take a longer term view. Okay, I think we've got one more question up here and then we'll go down here. Yep. Good evening. My name is Matthew Dailey and like Duncan over there I'm one of the many Monash University alumni that appears to have infiltrated this story tonight. Firstly, thank you for coming and speaking to us and providing some really rich insights so far. One of my questions, I suppose, is to address one of the elephants in the room. I might respectfully acknowledge that we had the tax discussion last week about raising revenue. But Peter, you mentioned that, you know, going forward the parameters around how we pay for these welfare supplements need to be sustainable. But you also recognize that unemployment benefits have only risen about $20 over a number of decades in real terms. And I think Sharon, you mentioned, you know, some of the real struggles that children are having to, you know, do basic things like sports. So evidently there's a need for some of these amounts to rise. How do we pay for those things? And if you agree that they're sort of a set pot to take it from, do we tinker with things within welfare payments itself? Do we go through and tinker on the edges as superannuation of things like that? Or are there other policies that you think could be restrained in order to provide or some very essential services? There you go, the $64 question. Peter, where does the money come from? Taxes. I mean, if you look at the... I think the Gratton Institute a couple of years ago did, and you get this in the intergenerational report as well, that, you know, if you look to the middle of the next decade and you have a continuation of current policies, they'll be at the Commonwealth level about a $25 billion a year gap between spending and taxes. I think you could do lots of things in the social security system, even though it's the most targeted in the OECD, you can do lots of things to target more. You can do lots of things in the healthcare system. What you can do in the social security system, you could save hundreds of millions of dollars, but you're not going to get $25 billion, right? And a lot of the... I mean, if you look at the intergenerational reports, you know, they project big deficits. The reason why they project big deficits is that they hold the level of taxes to GDP ratio the same, where we've got a lot of needs that the community wants things done about, Pogonski, maintaining the quality of healthcare, the national disability insurance scheme. All of these are things which people have said are really important. We're also going to have the aging of the population, which is a major structural change in our population structure. I think the idea that we can continue to provide quality services without having higher taxes is whistling in the wind, basically. Sharon, let me go to you on that. Plenty of countries to which we would compare ourselves, in fact, have higher tax rates. We seem to have this sort of constitutional Australian aversion to the idea that we should simply pay more, and yet we expect there to be a safety net at the same time. Yeah, I think I should just out myself as well. I am also a Monash alumni. I guess I think that's right, and Peter's better able to comment on this than me, and people like Miranda Stewart is back last week, but I think we can't ignore the fact that taxes are, you know, first and foremost, a way to fund what it is we need. I'm not convinced that the Australian electorate is as unsophisticated as is often assumed around taxes. I mean, a lot of the discussion is about what is spent. If taxes are high, what does that mean? And I'm not sure we've had the kind of debates that we need to around not just the level of taxes, but what taxes are then used for. I guess the other point I would make, and this is, you know, with the benefit of hindsight and it's looking backward, not forward, so perhaps not terribly helpful, but if we think about a country like Norway, which was incredibly poor, until they found that beautiful North Sea oil in the 1970s, a very conscious decision was made about how that money would be used and how it would be used to build a social democratic welfare state. And if you look at any of the indicators around social inclusion, around equality and inequality, Norway's at the top. We had a commodities boom, where we had a lot of money splashing around, and we didn't have that discussion. We failed to have that discussion about how we can not splash money but invest it, how we can use that money to build the kind of society that we might want. Now, we don't have that commodity boom going on anymore, but I think there's a lot that we can learn from what we didn't do when we were a little more cashed up than we are now. I think you've made out absolutely an excellent point that we didn't even have the conversation. It's not that we didn't take the decision. The conversation didn't happen in the first place. Marion. Thanks, Genevieve. Marion saw A&U, not a monet, not a monet, I love it. It's all right, Marion, I'm not either. I wanted to go back to child care policies for a moment and how similar or dissimilar they are in distributional terms, because I think that one important difference, of course, relates to the wages of child care workers and early childhood educators, and the last Labor government was making some moves to support equal pay in that sector and that stopped under the current government. So I think in terms of gender pay gaps, there is considerable differences between Labor and coalition, and wages in these areas and aged care are absolutely central to addressing this issue of gender pay gaps. Sue, would you like to start with that one? Yes, I mean, I agree. I mean, and I also think there are... I mean, they're similar, but there are other fundamental differences between the child care positions of the two main political parties. You know, I think the coalition's policy is... It involves more structural reform, which you could say is good in the long term, and it's certainly a simplification of the current child care subsidies, whereas Labor has been less radical in its proposals, but is obviously introducing them sooner, which if you have a young child in child care at the moment, it's kind of appealing prospective. They might get more funds in the coming January, as opposed to two years' time. So there are some differences, but I completely agree with you that we should also be talking about pay in the care sector more generally and policies that support that. Sharon, this is just this really tight-point child care, isn't it? It's the collision of so many urgent priorities about women's participation in the workplace, about access to the mechanisms that make that possible. It's about very poorly paid workers and yet very high expectations of what they'll be able to provide. It's a car crash illustration of everything that's going wrong with social issues. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, Marion, I think the point you make is an excellent one, that the child care sector is very heavily reliant on very low-paid workers and low-paid and unappreciated workers at a social level, even though I think many parents greatly value those people who are caring for their children. At the social level, we don't value those caring roles and we don't remunerate them. And I think your question, to me, actually points to broader issues around child care too. The way the child care debate is being framed and has been framed for a few years now in Australia is all around women's involvement in the workforce, women's workforce participation. I'm not convinced that framing is because it's good for women, because it brings about great agenda equality, because it brings about a stronger society. A lot of it is around sort of productivity and labour force participation as the way we contribute and evaluate. So I think we've got the issue of the low-paid workers there and I agree with you that labour was moving in a positive direction that way. We also see in those debates references to child care being good for children, children having access to early childhood education. Well, yes and no. The evidence clearly shows that when children have access to good quality, very high quality child care or early childhood education with well educated, capable carers, the outcomes are great. The evidence is not so clear if we don't have that quality of care. So I think this issue is much more nuanced than it's often presented at as being. Now we need to think about the payment of workers, we need to think about the quality of the experience that children are having in child care. I think it goes to a broader point that I just make too from the research that we did with children in our communities. The one issue that children talked about continually as being most important to them was time with their parents. But particularly children whose parents worked in low-paid jobs with irregular or unsocial hours. They talked about the fact that they really saw their parents when they did see their parents, they were exhausted, they're often grumpy because of the pressures on them. So I think it's a much broader issue, Marion, that I've kind of taken your point from. But I think we also need to be thinking much more just about people participating in the workforce, but the terms on which they're participating and what that means more broadly for society and issues that are crucial to social policy. As you're speaking, I'm conscious that I addressed the child care question to the two female panellists and I just want to assure you that that wasn't a deliberate choice. It's really about farming out the answers. Look, we've actually only got time, we've got two more questions and let's, yeah, up there. Hi, my name's Alex, I'm from the University of Adelaide, I'm not Monash, apologies. One of you, you've mentioned sort of entrenched, disadvantaged and disadvantaged and I'd be interested to know, I mean, obviously, I believe, you know, we need a safety net, we will always need some people to have government assistance for that to be there, but in your opinion, how do we sort of help people out of that and be self-sufficient? What, in your view, is the best thing we can do to sort of fight entrenched disadvantage and allow people to be self-sufficient? OK, Matt, I'll start with you. I mean, you can't get away from the macroeconomy and labour demand, so there was quite strong growth in Indigenous employment, in employment of single parents, single mothers, largely, from 1996 through to 2008, driven by a strong demand. So at the moment where we have much more soft labour demand, very low growth or any, probably declines in real incomes, in a sense, all you can do is you can shuffle the job queue. So what you can do is you can give away jobs into Indigenous people, something like that, more attractive to employers, but that means there will be a big displacement effect and somebody else won't get a job. So that's kind of a pessimistic answer, but I mean, partly what we're talking about is having to cut expenditure, perhaps at a time when we should be considering fiscal expansion. We have a debt, but nothing wrong with debt, per se. We've got very low interest rates, as well. Yeah. So that's one issue. The other is, I mean, the long term, I think we know pretty clearly that things like education, quality of public education in disadvantaged areas, public transport policies, there's a whole plethora of things we know, which can mean that people can become very difficult for them to... I mean, I suppose an assumption I make is that household families will need paid employment. Without that, it's going to be very... Yeah, the income provided by Social Security will hopefully make people's basic needs, but it's going to be pretty modest. So it's sort of a combination of policies, but really in the end, without sort of macro growth, it's quite hard to see other than at the margins, you know, some increases potentially in some payments. New start, for example, will make a big difference, but it's not going to make, probably, a transform people's position. Yeah, and wage stagnation inevitably means that people who are already existing at the margins are going to be pushed towards welfare. And, you know, we're talking about the adequacy of those payments. We've actually just got time for one more question. Thank you. Good evening. One social policy issue that hasn't really been discussed tonight or in the election as a whole is Indigenous affairs. This election cycle, we saw Indigenous affairs move from, say, what was, Faxia, to Pam and C. Do you think the best way to kind of discuss issues around Indigenous affairs is to bring back that responsibility to a social policy agency? Soon. You know, I think the issue of where it sits within government is secondary. And I think another MOG change, as it's called, machinery of government change is probably would cause more damage than keeping it where it is, given if it has recently moved. You know, and I'm probably going to pass to Matt on this, so I know it looks more. But I mean, I'm picking up on these last two questions about, you know, I think we do know more, increasingly more about how to help people who are at most disadvantage. And it is about, you know, the economy and local economies. But it's also about, you know, we know that it's more than that. It's also about secure, affordable housing and, you know, and it's all those support services and caring services that sit alongside that. And those things that we don't, you know, are not high-profile and don't get well invested in. But I'm going to pass to Matt our Indigenous affairs expert. I mean... So he said there's pluses and minuses to having Indigenous affairs in the portfolio of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, as opposed to in social services or... Put your microphone up to your mouth, Matt. Social services or elsewhere. So, I mean, there's pluses and minuses. I mean, I think that, of course, the extent to which the Commonwealth is involved in significant service delivery, then, you know, permanency is not necessarily the natural place for that. But on the other hand, if it's about coordination of policy and trying to get a more sort of... Perhaps coherent policy approach, then you can see some advantages. But you're right that there's not really been that much discussion Indigenous affairs in the election. I think that's a good thing. Both parties, I think, are favouring fairly paternalistic policies, not just Indigenous, but more broadly, but targeted around things like income management, link to child immunisation payments, sorry, immunisation of children to recede or benefits, the school attendance enrolment measure, and so on. So there is going to be a real debate around the extent to which that type of policy is effective or not, whether there's better ways to achieve the outcome and whether it kind of residualises and leads to further entrenching of some of the most disadvantaged groups in society. Yeah, and certainly PM&C just looks like gesture politics in some ways, doesn't it? That's brought us to the end of a pretty intense hour of discussion. Please thank Matthew Gray, Sharon Bachel, Peter Whiteford, and Sue Regan. Thank you very much.