How long does it take to evict a tenant in Western Australia?

Three years after changes to Western Australia's tenancy laws were proposed — and in a rental market distorted by pandemic impacts — new legislation to boost tenants' rights appears to be edging closer to reality. 

According to a 2019 review by the Department for Consumer Protection, the proposed changes are designed to acknowledge a shift away from renting as a "stepping stone" to home ownership, providing more stability and opportunity for tenants to make their rental a long-term home.

But the Real Estate Institute of WA refutes the claim that long-term renting is on the rise.

While specific changes to the legislation have not been released, rules around pet ownership and property modifications are among the possible changes to the Residential Tenancies Act 1987.

Rental vacancies in the state, meanwhile, are extremely low.

The ABC has compiled a list of three key issues expected to be on the table and what changes could mean for renters and landlords.

Terminating a lease

Currently, a landlord or agent can choose to end a fixed-term lease by giving tenants 30 days' notice to vacate or 60 days' notice for periodic leases.

There is no obligation to provide a reason for the termination.

But tenancy advocates want to see an end to without-grounds evictions, saying without this none of the other proposed reforms will have any teeth.

Alice Pennycott, principal lawyer for tenancy at Circle Green Community Legal, said existing laws included grounds for landlords to evict tenants for a variety of reasons.

"It may be that those grounds should be expanded to include situations like the landlord needs to move back into the property or sell the property, or want a family member to move in," she said.

"We don't want it to be a case where landlords don't have that option at all. What we're saying is that they should have to demonstrate what that [reason] is."

But Ms Pennycott said, without this provision, none of the other proposed rules regarding pets and property would stand up.

She said if landlords could cancel a tenancy without reason, tenants would fear eviction if they tried to enforce their right to request maintenance, to have a pet, or make modifications.

"None of it is really that beneficial unless tenants have protection to stay in a property for as long as they want to," she said.

"I think there's no point doing anything else unless you have that."

She said it was a daily occurrence for her team to speak to tenants who were too afraid to enforce their legal rights in case the landlord cancelled the lease or declined to renew it.

The Consumer Protection review paper from 2019 stated that allowing no-grounds evictions was "increasingly out of sync with the rest of the world and even within Australia".

It said no-cause evictions accounted for 2 per cent of rental terminations during a survey of tenants and landlords from February 2018 to March 2019. 

Tasmania and Victoria do not allow evictions without cause for a periodic lease.

Damian Collins, the president of the Real Estate Institute of WA, said putting an end to without-grounds evictions could leave landlords without any recourse to harassment from abusive tenants.

"Sometimes in a relationship between a property investor and a tenant, the relationship breaks down," he said.

"If we look into the Victorian model, that relationship can be toxic, can be well and truly broken down, and the property owner doesn't have that right to end that relationship."

Making modifications to a property

Under existing laws, there are some circumstances in which a person is allowed to modify their rental property but not without consent.

For example, a tenant can attach furniture or fittings to a wall for the safety of a child or a person with a disability, but they must have permission from the landlord.

Tenant advocates hope new legislation will remove the need for consent in some circumstances.

"Particularly for tenants with disabilities, people ageing in place, it's really important to make modifications that are necessary for improvements to their day-to-day life," Ms Pennycott said.

"And also just to make the house feel like home — painting walls, those sorts of things that don't impact the structural integrity of the property."

She said Circle Green had seen multiple situations in which tenants with disabilities had paid to make modifications with their landlord's consent, only to be forced to leave the house when their lease expired.

But Mr Collins said the maximum four-week bond for residential properties was not high enough to cover, for example, the cost of repainting walls if the tenant left without doing so.

"What happens if a property owner was looking to get a bank re-evaluation on their property and the tenants decided they liked bright blue and pink colours?" he said.

Mr Collins said requests to make changes to the property should be agreed upon in the initial rental agreement.

"It shouldn't be that just the tenant decides on their own to make modifications to an owner's property."

Renting with pets

The 2019 review of the legislation also identified that rules around pets needed to be addressed.

There is no law surrounding whether or not a landlord should allow pets in the home; the decision is simply at the discretion of the landlord.

However, having a pet when it is not allowed could be considered a breach of the tenancy agreement.

The review proposed that tenants be automatically allowed to keep pets unless the landlord could show in an application that it would be "unreasonable" to allow them.

The landlord would still be able to charge a pet bond of a maximum of $260.

"This proposal appropriately balances the interests of lessors in protecting their property from potential damage, with the recognition that the keeping of pets provides well-known benefits to social and mental well-being," the report said.

A similar model exists in Victoria where landlords are not allowed to "unreasonably" refuse to allow pets if the tenant asks for consent.

If the landlord does not want the tenant to have a pet, they have to apply to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal for an order that says they can refuse.

Mr Collins said the existing laws better-protected landlords.

"The pet can run rampant and trash the place and rip it to pieces but that $260 doesn't go to cover those costs," he said.

"All this will do is scare off investors, meaning we'll see less investment properties and rental [costs] rise."

A date has not been set for the release of the proposed changes to the act.

• Tell us your location and find more local ABC News and information

The first time I represented someone in an eviction trial, the magistrate was accused of bias by our opponent and we still lost the case. Despite two adjournments and the best efforts of the magistrate to find a statutory path that would enable my client, an elderly Aboriginal man, to remain in his home, the legislation that governs renting in Western Australia offers no defence at the end of a fixed-term tenancy.

The end of the lease period foreclosed any rights the tenant had to remain in the property, while the landlord had no need to establish any breaches of the tenancy agreement. Two weeks after we lost the trial, my client lost his home and was out on the street. A year later he was dead.

In Perth, more than 120 people died as a consequence of homelessness in 2020 and 2021. Part of this is due to the state’s tenancy laws, which may be about to change. The deputy premier, Roger Cook, confirmed this week that the McGowan government is undertaking the most comprehensive review of residential tenancy laws in Western Australia in well over a decade. After extended public consultation, recommendations include permitting pets and minor property modifications as standard, limiting rent increases to once a year and, crucially, removing “no grounds” terminations except at the end of the first fixed-term tenancy.

The Real Estate Institute of Western Australia suggests that only 1.8 per cent of evictions are caused by “no grounds” terminations, but a survey of more than 800 renters by the WA Make Renting Fair campaign in 2020, found 8 per cent of renters had been terminated without reason. Neither figure includes tenancies terminated at the end of a fixed-term lease.

In 2020, the most recent year for which these figures are available, 470 families were evicted from public housing properties in Western Australia before a 12-month Covid-19 moratorium led to a temporary lull that ended in March last year. In the private market, April 2021 saw a 30 per cent increase in applications to terminate tenancies through the courts in WA. Since the start of the pandemic, meanwhile, the public housing waiting list in WA has shot up almost 40 per cent, with more than 18,000 families now jostling for a few vacancies. Despite a record public housing investment in last year’s state budget, total social housing stock in WA increased by just four homes in the past five years, according to recent census data.

According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, there were 163,500 families on public housing waiting lists throughout the country last year, with more than a third of those in the priority category. While private rental vacancy rates remain below 1 per cent in many parts of the country, a family that is evicted from their home will struggle to find another one.

Alice, an Aboriginal woman in her 20s, who asked for her name to be changed while she looks for a home, is evidence of that. I was with her in court in August 2020 when she was evicted from her private rental property in Perth’s east. When we spoke this week, almost two years later, she was staying in a homeless refuge south of Perth, still waiting on the priority public housing list.

“You just have to adjust if you want stability, which is what I want,” she tells The Saturday Paper. “So I’ve adjusted all my thoughts and perspectives on things, just so I have somewhere safe.”

Alice has applied for about a dozen private rentals, and has been unsuccessful. Her young nephew, previously living with Alice because his mother was unable to care for him, has been unable to stay with her since the eviction. “He needs to be able to be stable and have a home where he can grow and have all those learning capabilities,” she says.

Kate Davis, the former principal solicitor at Tenancy WA, who is now researching a PhD on children’s right to housing, agrees. “Eviction to homelessness is devastating for children,” she says. “It completely undermines children’s access to education. Homelessness places children in unsafe situations at significantly increased risk of violence.”

Davis says the WA Department of Housing fails to consider children’s needs when managing tenancies. “Eviction to homelessness casts aside hope of the stability and security essential for children’s development,” she tells The Saturday Paper. “These have lifelong impacts.”

The proposed amendments would bring WA into line with other states that have already reformed their rental laws to make them fairer for tenants. It follows the lead of Victoria, which last year removed “no reason” terminations except at the end of the first fixed term, and Queensland and Tasmania which both have a legislated requirement to establish a justification for evictions, though only in the case of periodic tenancies. This week, the ACT government announced their intention to do away with “no reason” terminations entirely, including for all fixed-term tenancies, in a draft bill before the legislative assembly.

Joel Dignam, executive director of tenants’ campaign group Better Renting, says the proposed changes give ACT renters greater security than anywhere else in the country. “If a tenancy is ending, it should be because the property is no longer available for rent. There’s no good reason that tenants should be kicked out of their home when the property is still existing as a rental.

“Importantly,” he says, “we’ve seen other jurisdictions allow termination at the end of a fixed term. In effect, this still allows retaliation and makes people worry about whether they’ll get to remain in their home. The ACT has not allowed this, which means we are much closer to a ‘good cause’ framework where there needs to be a decent reason to end a tenancy – not just taking a dislike to the tenants.”

In WA, the real estate industry has suggested that “no grounds” evictions are analogous to “no grounds” divorces and suggested that removing them would drive investors out of the market, thereby depriving the state of thousands of rental properties. There is little evidence for this elsewhere in the country, with Victoria showing little sign of increased rents or rental property sales since it reformed its legislation last year.

Michelle Mackenzie, chief executive of Shelter WA, makes the point that it will remain simpler and quicker to evict problematic tenants via a normal breach notice. “The main change this reform makes is to protect good tenants from arbitrary eviction into homelessness,” she tells The Saturday Paper. “This reform will improve security of tenure and help prevent homelessness. From what we understand, it’s about safety, security and fairness for everyone.”

Perth’s street homeless population has hovered near 1000 for the past year, up two-thirds since the emergence of Covid-19. The state’s shadow minister for Housing, Steve Martin, notes that rents in Perth have increased 40 per cent in five years. “Rents are rising, vacancy rates sit at record lows and the number of people on the public housing waitlist continues to increase,” he says. “Homeless numbers remain stubbornly high and the welfare sector continues to report growing demand for their services.”

Over the past few years I have advocated for dozens of Aboriginal families facing eviction through the courts. Some struggled to pay rent for months on end; some families were unable to maintain their property to the expected standard, usually due to a catalogue of trauma and family breakdown; some faced neighbours’ allegations of antisocial behaviour from them and their visitors. In all these cases the burden of proof was on the landlord, and in many cases the evidentiary threshold to justify making a family homeless was such that the court was willing to grant a degree of latitude to a struggling but willing tenant.

But in cases involving “no grounds” terminations, or the end of fixed-term tenancies, we may as well not have bothered showing up to court. There is no defence, no evidence required, no justification needed. As things stand, a landlord can simply take issue with a tenant and 60 days later legally remove them from a property without having to explain why.

Renting is not like being married. It is a commercial agreement in which one party profits in exchange for the other party having somewhere to live. If either side fails to meet their contractual obligations, there are immediate remedies available. Rental housing affords a stable foundation for families to raise their children. Reforms to ensure this basic right cannot be revoked without reason are long overdue. It is heartening that protections could soon be enshrined in more Australian jurisdictions.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 30, 2022 as "Shifting grounds".

A free press is one you pay for. Now is the time to subscribe.

Share this article

Page 2

The image is of a swath of creamy brown severed by a flaming wire. Smoke and blackened earth follow the flames.

Translated from Ukrainian, the caption reads “Russians burn our bread”.

American writer and journalist Rebecca Solnit had linked to a post by Ukrainian politician and journalist Ihor Lutsenko, that described the destruction of a wheatfield set alight by the invading Russian army. Since the invasion of one of the world’s major breadbaskets, wheat exports have been blocked from leaving Ukraine’s ports and damage to the country’s agricultural sector has topped $US4 billion.

As the conflict enters its sixth month, the risk of a global famine is growing more potent. That’s because the conflagration in Ukraine is compounding a longer-standing crisis: climate change is already making food harder to come by for billions of people. The field in Ukraine is one small fragment of a planet on fire.

It’s a cold winter’s day on the other side of the world when I sit down with Professor Lauren Rickards to talk about disasters of our own making.

Rickards is an expert on human geography, agriculture and climate change, and their deep interconnection. She runs the urban futures program at RMIT University in Melbourne, which focuses on how cities can become more sustainable and equitable while rapidly developing. As well as being a Rhodes scholar, she was a lead author of the Australasia chapter in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, writing specifically on the impacts of human-induced climate change as seen from a global and domestic perspective. When asked whether thinking about climate catastrophe on a daily basis affects her, she laughs dryly.

“Like most people who work in this field, I do a really good job of ignoring my feelings on this – or trying to – as a coping strategy.”

Rickards chooses her words carefully. “My career has been shaped by climate, and climate change,” she says, going on to describe her early career consulting during the millennium drought – until recently one of the worst long-term natural disasters Australia has seen.

Between 2001 and 2009, large expanses of southern Australia went without regular rainfall, devastating the Murray–Darling Basin and surrounding farming communities, and threatening Adelaide’s water supply and the broader economy.

Farming runs in Rickards’ family – her parents studied agricultural science and her grandparents were dairy farmers. An early academic interest in natural disasters, coupled with a focus on agriculture, brought her to climate change and the IPCC. When asked about what climate change means for food security in Australia, Rickard stresses the complexity of the issue. “A purely calorific counter means that you miss the actual nuance of food insecurity. And one of the things that climate change is doing is not just threatening yields, it’s diminishing the quality of food in a number of ways,” she says.

Quality is just one of the measures of secure access to food; affordability and availability are also key. By each of these measures, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, refugees, people under the poverty line and international students are among the most disadvantaged.

While data isn’t often collected, the proportion of the Australian population that is regularly unable to access nutritionally adequate and safe foods may be as high as 13 per cent, and rises to as much as 23 per cent in First Nations communities, according to the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group (ASLCG), a collection of former defence and policy leaders. With food prices in Australia climbing at the fastest rate in more than a decade, it is those who have few options for accessing food who will be most impacted.

Australia’s food landscape is not short of crops. According to the Australian Food and Grocery Council in June 2020, “we produce enough food to feed 75 million people”. Supply chains were described as “safe, efficient and reliable”. Our wheat production amounted to 25 million tonnes of grain, or 3.5 per cent of the world’s supply.

However, in circumstances frustratingly similar to those that surround our recent gas crisis, our focus is overwhelmingly on export markets. Domestic supply chains work like a spider’s web of interconnecting threads that are incredibly vulnerable to disruption.

“We’re somewhat blinded to food insecurity in Australia because we have had a very strong focus on agricultural production by quantity, and in particular the proportion that’s exported,” says Rickards. “We’ve used a very simplistic arithmetic to conclude that because we export the majority of agricultural commodities that are produced, we therefore have some kind of enormous surplus.”

It’s becoming increasingly apparent that what Rickards terms “violent shocks” to our food networks could turn into a cascading and compounding system-wide failure. A recent example is the January floods in South Australia, which shut off trucking supply routes between Adelaide and the Northern Territory, causing weeks-long food shortages across the Top End.

That happened in part because most fresh food grown in the NT is trucked to Adelaide for processing. It is then returned north on road trains, recrossing a distance of roughly 3000 kilometres, to be sold in Territory supermarkets.

While this works in theory, the quantity of “once-in-500-year” natural disasters across the nation means each link in the chain is increasingly vulnerable to climate-related impacts. The cost of flooding in New South Wales alone – before this year’s devastating La Niña-related floods – is estimated at $250 million a year. This situation is not expected to improve.

IPCC modelling is generally accepted as being somewhat conservative, which is why the most recent estimates for global heating and its flow-on effects in the panel’s sixth report released earlier this year drew global alarm. Rickards explains that climate-change scenarios are conservative, as modelling typically cannot account for all the possible interactions of events caused by heating the atmosphere and oceans.

So while wildfires rage across western Europe and the rate of glacier melt in the poles accelerates exponentially, research bodies such as the IPCC cannot envisage the full impact of these cascading crises.

Australia’s population is anticipated to grow by 40 per cent by 2050, at the same time as our capacity to produce food decreases. The southern half of the country is expected to become even drier, with below-average rainfall and higher temperatures likely to depress wheat yields across the country. According to a 2019 report by the Climate Council of Australia, the Murray–Darling Basin – the source of half of Australia’s agricultural output – is expected to halve in production by 2050 as a result of climate change. Food, both in quantity and quality, will become scarcer.

A report released in June by ASLCG outlined the dire implications of climate-change-enhanced global and domestic food insecurity.

The very first summary point of the paper states, “Australia is ill-prepared for the security implications of climate-change enhanced global food crises” and their associated risks. These risks include global declines in crop yields, drought, political instability and anticipated regional and international conflict. An upswing in climate-related migration alongside crop failure, inflationary pressures and ongoing natural disasters means that food networks will come under increased strain. In the Asia–Pacific region, heatwaves such as those in India and Pakistan have already affected large areas of cropland and have resulted in India banning wheat exports.

Australia’s proximity to these crises means the country is likely to feel their impact, while dealing with what Rickards calls “crazily nervous and brittle” domestic food networks.

In its pre-election energy and climate policy pitch, Powering Australia, the Labor Party pledged to assess the nature of climate-security risks such as food insecurity. However, it’s unclear what sort of action will ensue. A climate-focused crossbench will test the strength of the Albanese government’s credibility, starting with the upcoming debate over its “floor, not a ceiling” target of 43 per cent emissions reduction by 2030.

From Rickards’ perspective, finding solutions to climate-induced food security is “about vigilance and staying vigilant. We can’t just slip into oblivion.”

She notes some of the work being done by state and federal governments to positively adapt and address the issues within our current systems, such as adaptation action plans in Victoria and Queensland, as well as the Goulburn Murray Resilience Strategy.

“Because of the scale of the risks, but also because of the opportunity to do things better, we need to ask bigger questions about ‘is this whole approach and system what we need and what we want?’ ”

The United Nations World Food Programme estimates 345 million people in 82 countries are facing acute food insecurity.

As crops around the world are destroyed – whether in conflict or by the slow burn of climate change – more action is needed. To date, Australia’s policy response is fragmented and fails to properly address these issues. Until progress is made on a holistic solution that ties together climate, industry and consideration for social inequality, things are only going to get worse.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 30, 2022 as "Breads are burning".

A free press is one you pay for. Now is the time to subscribe.

Share this article

Page 3

When the new Albanese government chose an aged-care reform bill as its first to pass the 47th parliament this week, the praise from at least two pro-reform politicians – one current, one former – was laced with cynicism.

Independent MP Rebekha Sharkie and former senator Rex Patrick both welcomed the much-heralded measures to improve standards in residential and in-home care.

But they also questioned Labor’s claim to being the party of care, pointing out that, like the Coalition, it deliberately passed up the chance to legislate the same changes four months ago, choosing politics instead.

On March 30 – his last sitting day as a senator – Patrick persuaded Labor to help him amend the then government’s aged-care bill to require facilities to have a registered nurse on duty at all times and make providers reveal how much of their budgets was spent on salaries, food and care.

Before the vote, Patrick got on the phone.

After the senate, the bill would go back to the house of representatives before it could become law. Passing it there against the government’s wishes would need the backing of all Labor MPs, plus a couple more. He called Sharkie and asked if she could persuade any Liberals to defy their leader and cross the floor.

Sharkie made some calls and said she thought four Liberals were prepared to do it. When the senate passed the bill that night, Patrick contacted Labor’s then shadow minister for Aged Care Services, Clare O’Neil, and told her the amended version was coming back to the house in the morning and there were Liberals who might cross the floor. She thanked him.

But Sharkie and the would-be rebels never got to vote. When the amended bill went before the house just before 12.40pm the next afternoon, Labor joined the Coalition government to shelve it.

“I had four interested Liberals,” Sharkie told The Saturday Paper this week. “You can never tell, but one followed up with me later in the day – they were awaiting the bill.”

An hour after the bill was deferred, Queensland Labor backbencher Anika Wells rose to blast the government over aged care.

“It is an absolute disgrace that you are failing to fix this,” Wells told parliament, adding that nurses were “begging” for change. “And you are squandering the seven hours left that you have in power by doing nothing.”

She said the budget had been silent on a catalogue of needed changes, including more nurses in nursing homes and spending transparency. “Older Australians, their carers and aged-care workers deserve so much more than you.”

Much of what Wells listed had been in the amended bill that her party had just deferred. That night, the centrepiece of Labor leader Anthony Albanese’s budget reply speech was a promise to ensure every aged-care facility had a “registered, qualified nurse on site, 24 hours a day, seven days a week” – something his party could have tried to legislate seven hours earlier.

“Unbeknownst to me, they had another plan,” Patrick says. “There’s no question they had the opportunity to pass it and they didn’t … They didn’t even try. Politics was clearly more important than outcomes for people in aged care.”

This week, the Albanese government reintroduced a version of the unamended bill and passed it. The measures contained in Rex Patrick’s amendments were bundled up in a second bill, to be debated and passed next week.

With Clare O’Neil promoted to the Home Affairs portfolio, the new minister for Aged Care was an MP just starting her second term in parliament: Anika Wells.

“This isn’t the first parliament that has needed to take action on aged care,” Wells said this week, introducing the bills. “Too many parliaments, too many governments have shunned the hard work needed to support our aged-care system … We must confront the missed opportunities. We must see change.”

Both Rex Patrick and Rebekha Sharkie are glad change is now a priority. “But it could have been addressed four months ago,” Sharkie says. “For people in the aged-care system, that’s an agonisingly long time.”

Wells rejected the criticisms.

“So if I understand this correctly, the critique is that in the last days of the Morrison government, the Labor opposition didn’t usher Liberal MPs across the floor in order to pass a Liberal bill the Liberal government didn’t support,” she said. And in a reference to the TV series Stranger Things, she asked: “Are we in the upside down?”

In question time on Thursday, Wells ignored her own party’s role in the delay and blamed the Coalition.

“In the dying days of the Morrison government, one of the very last things they could have done was legislate 24/7 nurses for older Australians across the country,” Wells said. Addressing those opposition directly, she added: “But you didn’t. You didn’t. So now we will.”

Sharkie and Patrick were not alone in accusing Labor of being disingenuous. The deputy Liberal leader, Sussan Ley, told parliament on Wednesday that it was “a shame” Albanese and Labor had “played politics with older Australians”.

Ley also criticised the new government for removing a provision for pre-employment staff screening, accusing it of bowing to union demands.

Wells told The Saturday Paper the Coalition’s proposed screening had not been due to start for two years. She said she was following the recommendation of the aged-care royal commission and consulting on a “robust” national registration scheme instead.

“I can see how talking to people to implement a policy would be confusing to the Liberal Party,” she said.

The accusation that actions aren’t always matching rhetoric was extended to other issues this week, including government changes to how parliament is run.

The government has given crossbenchers more question time opportunities at the expense of the Coalition, but trimmed their duration and introduced a provision for ministers to declare a bill “urgent” and rush it through. The Coalition and crossbenchers protested they received very little notice of the detail.

The manager of opposition business, Paul Fletcher, called it “an extremely problematic way to proceed, particularly by a government that talks about a new kinder, gentler approach to politics”.

Leader of the house Tony Burke accused the former Coalition minister of hypocrisy, suggesting he was suffering a sudden memory loss reminiscent of the movie Men in Black.

In his first address to the full Labor caucus, Albanese vowed to break “the inertia that the former government was stuck in”.

“We often came to the parliament without much to do in terms of an agenda,” he said. “The Labor government will not be like that. And we will hit the ground running.”

Albanese had vowed to introduce 18 major pieces of legislation in the first week of parliament. Among them are bills to entrench new climate change targets, provide tax concessions for buying electric cars, introduce paid family violence leave, replace the national skills commissioner with Jobs and Skills Australia, and abolish the cashless debit card.

But as the 47th parliament settles into both its agenda and tone, crossbenchers are expressing surprise at the new government’s slightly passive-aggressive approach to relations. Some are still angry at having previously boosted staffing allocations cut.

Also this week, Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ economic statement was both a curtain-raiser for the coming early budget in October and an exercise in severely lowering expectations. Following confirmation that inflation was now at 6.1 per cent annually, Chalmers warned on Thursday that inflation was now likely to reach 7.75 per cent by December.

He said there was “no use tiptoeing” around the truth. “You didn’t send us to this place to bury the bad news or gloss over the glaring issues or wish away the warning signs. Or to pretend that our problems will somehow solve themselves with more waiting and more wasting time.”

Chalmers said while growth would slow, Australia would likely avoid recession. But the pressure on real wages – how well wages keep up with inflation – would continue for a while yet.

Labor is aware there is only so long it can blame its predecessors for the state of the economy, especially after running on a message of taking responsibility. But it considers that time isn’t up yet. “The fault lies with a decade of wasted opportunities, wrong priorities and wilful neglect – that Australians are all now paying for,” Chalmers said.

The new Labor speaker, Milton Dick, reminded the treasurer that a ministerial statement was to outline policy, not for politicking, and warned all ministers that they should “think forwards, not backwards”.

Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor said while no government could control all circumstances it faced, “for this government to suggest it didn’t know any of these challenges were there before the election is false”.

While the attacks indicate not everything has changed, Albanese remains insistent he wants “the tone of politics” to be different.

“We want to be more inclusive,” he told Labor MPs. “We want to make sure there’s less shouting and more delivery.”

But there was shouting in the senate, and more accusations that the practice wasn’t matching the preaching.

Independent senator Jacqui Lambie blasted the government for refusing a request to allow Greens senator Jordon Steele-John, who has a disability, to be elected chair of the joint committee on the National Disability Insurance Scheme, of which he is a long-time member.

“When are you going to learn?” Lambie asked. “When are you going to start paying merit to people who deserve it? ... It’s not the best person for the job in here; it’s whether you’re mates with someone or you’re in a certain faction. This has to stop.”

When they voted, only the Greens, Lambie and her Jacqui Lambie Network colleague, Tammy Tyrrell, supported Steele-John.

Over in the lower house, Rebekha Sharkie is trying to keep an open mind about the promised new politics.

“We’re not going to really know what the culture is of this government for some time because the proof is always in the practice,” Sharkie says. “And I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. In this job, if you are not optimistic at least in the beginning of a parliamentary term, it bodes for a sad three years.”

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 30, 2022 as "Aged reforms".

A free press is one you pay for. Now is the time to subscribe.

Share this article

Page 4

Ukraine: The European Union this week accused Moscow of using energy supplies as a “weapon” and announced that it will scale back purchases of Russian gas from August, prompting Russia to retaliate by immediately cutting its flow of gas to the continent.

Despite the imposition of sanctions, Russia’s economy has benefited from the continued sale of oil and gas, whose prices have soared due to its invasion of Ukraine. The International Monetary Fund this week said Russia’s economy was faring better than expected, though it was still facing a serious recession. The organisation’s chief economist, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, told AFP that high energy prices were “providing an enormous amount of revenues to the Russian economy”.

On Tuesday, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said Europe was being “terrorised” by Moscow over energy supplies and urged Brussels to impose tighter sanctions. “Using [state-owned energy firm] Gazprom, Moscow is doing all it can to make this coming winter as harsh as possible for the European countries,” he said in his nightly video address. 

Russia’s military has continued to launch strikes across eastern Ukraine but has not expanded its ground offensive. Ukrainian forces have been slowly recapturing territory in the southern Kherson region, which they lost in the early stages of the war. 

Ukrainian officials were hopeful this week that they would finally be able to resume grain exports after Kyiv and Moscow reached a deal brokered by the United Nations and Turkey to allow shipments through the Black Sea. Shortly after completing the deal, Russia fired missiles at port infrastructure in Odessa. But officials from both sides said the deal would proceed. About 22 million tonnes of wheat, corn and other grains are trapped in Ukraine, adding to shortages of global food supplies. 

The neighbourhood 

Papua New Guinea: Residents of Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, were urged to stay indoors this week after violence erupted during vote counting in the national election. An estimated 50 people have been killed in election-related violence, amid accusations of vote-rigging and interference with ballot boxes.

A Commonwealth team of election observers this week expressed concern about the conduct of the ballot, saying it found instances where as many as half of those eligible to vote were not on the register.

“We are concerned that this could have disenfranchised high numbers of eligible voters,” said the team’s chairperson, Baron Waqa, in a statement. “We also witnessed the distribution of money and food to voters during the polling period.”

As footage showed rival groups fighting in Port Moresby, the prime minister, James Marape, denied attempting to rig the election, pointing to results that showed a senior member of his Pangu party had lost his seat. 

Marape became prime minister in 2019 and pledged to combat corruption and to secure a greater share of wealth from resources projects. He has admitted during the campaign that corruption remains widespread. Marape’s main rival is his former coalition ally, Peter O’Neill, who resigned as prime minister after a series of defections – led by Marape – over the handling of a major gas deal.

On Tuesday, the governor-general, Sir Bob Dadae, accepted a recommendation from the electoral commission to delay the return of writs for an additional two weeks. Writs are now due to be returned by August 12.

Democracy in retreat 

Myanmar: Phyo Zeya Thaw, a well-known hip-hop artist who became a pro-democracy activist and MP, has been executed by the military regime in Myanmar. Democracy activist Ko Jimmy and two other figures in the resistance, Hla Myo Aung and Aung Thura Zaw, were also executed this week.

The executions, the first carried out in Myanmar since 1988, drew global condemnation. Myanmar’s military said the four men had committed “terror acts”. The families of the four visited them in prison last week but were not informed it would be their final meeting. 

Myanmar’s military overthrew the elected government in a coup in February last year but has faced fierce opposition from the pro-democracy movement and ethnic minority groups. More than 120 people have been sentenced to death.

The executions were condemned by the United Nations and the United States, which said it was considering further sanctions, including on Myanmar’s gas sector. Cambodia, the chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, issued an unusually strong condemnation, saying it was “extremely troubled” by the executions. 

Phyo Zeya Thaw, who was 41 years old, was close to the ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi and was a member of her National League for Democracy party. In 2012, he met with then prime minister Julia Gillard in Canberra during an AusAID-sponsored trip. He also met with former US president Barack Obama in the White House. 

Australia’s minister for Foreign Affairs, Penny Wong, said on Tuesday the government will consider imposing sanctions against members of the military regime.

“Australia is appalled by the execution of four pro-democracy activists,” she said. 

Min Yan Naing, a close friend of Phyo Zeya Thaw, told the BBC: “Zeya Thaw didn’t give a damn about the death sentence. His belief – for ending military dictatorship – was so strong that he was always ready to face whatever danger he came across. Even though he might feel something inside, he wouldn’t show [the military regime].” 

Spotlight: Pope sorry for Canadian ‘evil’

On Monday, Pope Francis travelled to a field in Alberta, Canada, that had been the site of Ermineskin Indian Residential School, which operated from 1916 to 1975 and was one of the largest of the 139 schools in Canada that separated Indigenous children from their families to try to forcibly assimilate them. 

More than 150,000 children attended the institutions from the late 1800s until 1996. Students were forbidden to speak their languages, and many were physically or sexually abused. An estimated 6000 children died from suicide, disease and maltreatment. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada said the schools amounted to a “cultural genocide”. About 60 per cent of the schools were operated by the Catholic Church; others were operated by the state.

At a ceremonial site near the Ermineskin grounds, Pope Francis, escorted by four chiefs, issued an apology for the “catastrophic” attempt to destroy the values, language and culture of Canada’s Indigenous peoples. 

“I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples,” the Pope said.

The apology, part of a week-long “penitential pilgrimage”, as the Pope put it, follows increasing moves by the church to recognise, and seek forgiveness for, its past transgressions. But the apology drew a mixed response from those who attended the schools. 

Phil Fontaine, who went to a school in Manitoba, told CBC that accepting the apology would help survivors to “move on”. “If we can’t bring ourselves to forgive, then this matter, this burden that we’ve had to shoulder for years and years, that’ll carry on endlessly,” he said. 

But Vivian Ketchum, who attended a school in Ontario, said the Pope had failed to address the sexual abuse or the harm to later generations of Indigenous peoples. 

“I think the sincerity might have been there, but I don’t think he fully comprehends the whole situation and what was done to us … the loss of language, culture,” she said. “I didn’t see it as a full apology.”

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 30, 2022 as "Zelensky accuses Moscow of energy supply ‘terrorism’".

A free press is one you pay for. Now is the time to subscribe.

Share this article

Page 5

This is the year of hope, denial and cognitive dissonance about the emergence of newer and more challenging variants of SARS-CoV-2 far outpacing vaccine development. Like saying your grandfather smoked all his life and lived to 100, thus smoking is fine, people are telling each other “I had Covid and it was mild”.

The virus doesn’t care that we are fed up with dealing with its fallout. It is here to stay – not a cold, as we were promised, and not even the flu, but a rapidly mutating virus that affects various organs, including the brain, and can cause debilitating long-term illness.

Reinfection is common and increases your risk of bad outcomes. Being infected with Omicron BA.1 earlier in 2022 does not give you much protection against the newer variants. One health leader told us getting infected is “necessary”, but sadly herd immunity is not a thing, not with current vaccines, not after infection and not with “hybrid immunity”. Adding to the confusion are health experts who drove our pandemic response now saying they just didn’t see this coming. But plenty of experts did see it coming – and urged the government to act.

One part of the answer is expanding and improving third and fourth dose vaccinations. Vaccines are both primary prevention in normal times and an epidemic control measure. For the latter, though, policy must be agile and timely to ensure as many people as possible can be protected in the face of an oncoming wave. Vaccine policy in the good times can proceed at a slow and considered pace, but, in a pandemic, time is critical, and delayed or restricted access to vaccinations will result in missed opportunities to prevent disease.

Every additional booster given will save lives, prevent hospitalisations and protect against long Covid. We still have no ATAGI recommendation for children aged two months to five years, long after the United States approved vaccines for this age group, and even after the Therapeutic Goods Administration approved vaccines for this cohort.

The rate of vaccination in children aged five to 11 years – just 40.5 per cent have had second doses – remains abysmally low. Meanwhile, day care, schools and families remain disrupted by Covid-19 outbreaks, with teachers and child carers, like health workers, burnt out and seeking other careers, and parents at their wits’ end as reinfections affect households again.

We now face a wave of BA.4/5, the globally dominant new variants. These are so distant from the original virus that the vaccines designed to combat the first wave do not protect nearly as well as they did for Delta or even BA.1. Most of the monoclonal antibodies are also ineffective against BA.4/5, but antivirals remain effective. Currently Australia has between 40,000 and 50,000 confirmed new cases a day, which is likely to be an underestimate. There are more than 5000 people in hospital and upwards of 11,000 deaths, most of which have occurred this year. That excludes deaths that do not get counted as Covid-19-related, such as a sudden cardiac arrest, heart attack or stroke in an adult months after they had the coronavirus – a risk that remains for at least a year after infection.

The BA.4/5 wave might peak in August, so the worst could still be ahead. As for long Covid, an unfortunate term that tends to minimise the illness and the real pathology of it, we face health, disability, economic and workforce impacts well into the future – another reason to use a vaccine-plus approach, with layered strategies to mitigate transmission. Widespread and affordable access to antivirals will also help, but currently the majority of people who don’t qualify for discounted Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme prescriptions have to pay about $1200 a course.

We don’t have data yet, but perhaps the rapid use of antivirals may reduce the burden of long Covid. To realise the promise of antivirals, testing is essential – treatments can never benefit the economy until testing is widespread, accessible and cheap or free, because to get treatment you need a positive test. Many people do not get tested because taking multiple rapid antigen tests – at $8 to $15 a test – becomes expensive quickly, and PCRs are no longer free or easily available to all. Use of QR codes, too, would help reduce case numbers, because contacts are the next tranche of cases. Forewarning people by using digital tracing would help. Clear treatment guidelines for Covid-19 in the community would also reduce the burden of disease, with cheap treatments such as asthma preventers and other drugs shown to reduce severe outcomes.

SARS-CoV-2 is airborne and is spread through inhalation of contaminated air, a fact many remain unaware of as they religiously apply sanitiser to their hands. A public campaign to educate and empower the community on transmission would go a long way to reducing the spread of the virus but has been left to private groups such as The John Snow Project.

Masks have been shown to work, especially high-quality ones such as the P2 or N95 respirators, but without a mandate only about 30 per cent of people will wear one. With a mandate, as we saw in Australia, that number rises to more than 70 per cent, and this would make a massive difference to transmission.

Masks remain a dirty word and disinformation keeps pouring into our feeds without correction.

For heaven’s sake, it’s just a mask. Get over it, mandate it, save more lives, prevent more illness and protect businesses. Cases matter – they can all cause workplace absenteeism, disruption to schools and households, hospitalisations and deaths. Reducing cases will reduce those unwanted outcomes and will be best for our lives, our health, our businesses and our economy. Time is short and the new government should not tiptoe around the politicised and polarised landscape that is the legacy of the previous incumbents.

The first Omicron wave in January saw supply chains affected, supermarket shelves empty and delays in essential services, all due to mass workplace absence. Absence from work rose from a normal rate of about 2 per cent to more than 20 per cent at the peak. People complain of chaos at airports all over the world, wondering why their luggage didn’t arrive or their flight was cancelled. It’s partly because workers are sick with Covid-19. Chances are if you need your car serviced, or groceries delivered, or your oven fixed, there will be delays because so many staff are off sick with Covid-19.

As soon as it was allowed, your boss likely insisted everyone come to the office – just like in the 1990s, when they insisted you keep using the fax machine instead of emails – even though productivity was unchanged or even improved with remote working. And then, when everyone obeyed and came back to the office while Covid raged on, productivity took a hit when mass infections occurred at work. These effects will be even worse when long Covid impacts the workforce. The blinkered approach by many countries in ignoring the chronic burden of disease and only focusing on acute infection is a mistake. It is not a choice between unmitigated transmission and zero Covid. Any measures that are used to reduce the spread of the disease will reduce the potentially crippling effects on society and the economy of long-term disability and chronic illness. Our children and young people are our future, but a new study shows that after mild Covid, people aged 18 to 30 years are at highest risk of long Covid.

And yet here we are, waiting passively for another rinse-and-repeat cycle of health, economic and societal pain. Covid-19 does not look as if it will be ending any time soon, and it is a question of how much loss and societal damage we will endure before beginning to address things such as safe indoor air, masks as a part of normal life in the same way seatbelts are, and flexible work models for a more sustainable “living with Covid” future.

Meanwhile, there was a failure to prepare ahead of the event for monkeypox, which has left us without the required antivirals and with limited vaccine choices at the start to aggressively stamp out the epidemic. If  it becomes established in animal hosts in Australia, we will live with it forever. It is another all-too-familar catch-up game.

Japanese encephalitis, never previously present on the mainland, was missed entirely while it silently crept across Australia somewhere between 2019 and 2022. This catastrophic failure, for which no one has taken responsibility, has condemned us to forever live with JE, a fatal disease in up to 30 per cent of humans and devastating to our livestock industry. Another biosecurity threat, foot-and-mouth disease, is also knocking on our door.

Like it or not, we face a future that will never again look like 2019. The sooner we accept that and adapt, the better off we will be. Looking ahead a decade or two, Covid may be the defining event that tipped the balance of power globally between the US and China.

If China keeps the virus under better control, its population will be fitter and healthier into the future, while the US, Europe and much of the rest of the world, including Australia, will be groaning under an unprecedented burden of chronic disease and disability that will have major long-term economic impacts. This is not a call for lockdowns, just for better control using layered strategies that do not impinge on freedoms.

In Australia, we are at a crossroads, with a new government and a rapidly closing window of opportunity to change course with Covid to control and forge our own path ahead.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 30, 2022 as "Hope, denial and Covid-19".

A free press is one you pay for. Now is the time to subscribe.

Share this article

Page 6

More than any other figure in our democracy, a prime minister can influence the direction of the nation. Anthony Albanese knows it, and he is not allowing the most difficult economic and strategic circumstance in more than three decades to deter him from forging new pathways.

One of those pathways is action on the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which has languished since it was first proposed five years ago. The statement would give substance to recognition in a process that involves a Voice to Parliament, a makarrata commission to supervise agreement between governments and First Nations people, and a truth-telling process about our shared history.

Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull rejected the Uluru statement for proposing what he speciously described as “a third chamber of the parliament”. When Scott Morrison became PM, he was similarly disinclined. While he talked about legislating the called-for advisory body, instead of enshrining it in the constitution, he didn’t get around to it.

Given the failure rate of constitutional referendums in Australia, there is a view shared by some Aboriginal leaders, including Marcia Langton, that any controversial or contested proposal that doesn’t have bipartisan support is doomed to failure and would be better not put.

But Senator Patrick Dodson – Albanese’s special envoy for reconciliation and the implementation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart – does not agree. He believes the time for prevarication is over and the referendum should be put to the people. If it fails, he has told colleagues, it will be a reality check of where we are as a nation. It would show we are still reluctant to take this significant step towards healing the hole in Australia’s heart.

While Albanese would welcome bipartisan support for a referendum – and takes heart from shadow minister for Indigenous Australians Julian Leeser’s support for the implementation of the statement – he is pushing ahead either way. It is still not clear where Peter Dutton and the opposition will end up, but hostile rejection would be a big political risk. On Tuesday, after Albanese described his intention to put the voice proposal to a referendum, Dutton gave a well-thought-through response that did not challenge Albanese’s direction.

This weekend Albanese will go to the Garma Festival of Traditional Culture in East Arnhem Land, where he will give more information on how he will progress his promise to put a referendum this term. The prime minister says the Uluru statement is a generous offer from Indigenous Australians. He says it is about reconciliation, recognising dispossession and colonisation: “Why wouldn’t you grasp that generous and gracious offer?”

Albanese believes the proposal is like the 1967 referendum recognising Indigenous Australians, or the apology to Stolen Generations delivered by Kevin Rudd in 2008. He says no one would now say “I wish that never happened.”

At Garma he won’t announce a date for the referendum but will explain why a simple proposition to enshrine the voice will be put, leaving it to parliament to decide on how to implement it, with future parliaments able to amend it.

Albanese is investing all the prestige of the prime ministership in this project and every time he has mentioned it in key events he has been greeted with loud, spontaneous applause.

The prime minister is confident his victory came because Australians wanted change, and he is determined to give it to them. He describes his agenda as being that of “a government of ambition, a government which sees it has a responsibility to break Australia out of the inertia that the former government was stuck in”.

Beyond the Uluru statement, Albanese is acutely aware of the other issues he will have to deal with in office. He says he is conscious of the deep anxiety many Australians have as they struggle to make ends meet with cost-of-living pressures mounting. He understands that these worries are compounded by catastrophic climate change for those who have seen their homes and businesses devastated by floods and mega bushfires.

International economic and security instability is exacerbating these domestic crises. In its latest outlook, the International Monetary Fund trimmed its global growth forecast, citing high inflation and the risks posed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which could push the world into recession.

This fed into the highest inflation rate in Australia for 21 years – 6.1 per cent – which was announced this week. There is even more upward pressure on borrowers, with interest rates forecast to keep rising as the Reserve Bank battles to curb inflation.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers responded by saying the numbers were “confronting”. The next day he unveiled a list of even grimmer figures, trimming optimistic forecasts in the Coalition’s pre-election budget. Like the prime minister, he warned inflation will get worse before it gets better. He said the idea that forecast wages growth would keep up with the rising cost of living “will not be credible”.

While there is no doubt Scott Morrison’s performance as prime minister contributed in a significant way to his defeat, the onset of rising inflation and a higher interest-rate cycle can’t be dismissed as a factor.

And in this there is an amber light in the latest Guardian Essential poll. It asked how respondents rated the government’s handling of the cost of living. Only 23 per cent thought it was good or very good. Another 37 per cent were neutral – rating it neither good nor bad – and 40 per cent thought it was quite poor or very poor.

In parliament, the treasurer said it took “nine years to make this mess and it would take more than nine weeks to clean it up”. He has just under three years to convince an overwhelming number of voters he is doing a better job of it.

Chalmers’ answer, like those proffered by other ministers in the first question time, demonstrated what Albanese means when he talks about a new “inclusive politics” and that people are suffering “conflict fatigue”. It certainly doesn’t mean refusing to engage in argument, leaving assertions uncontested or being soft on your opponents.

Many on the Labor side will be relieved. Few would disagree with the observation of maverick independent Bob Katter. After 29 years, he is now the longest-serving current member of parliament. He claims “devious cunning” and “ruthless brutality” are hallmarks of successful politics.

We did see something of the iron fist in a velvet glove when Prime Minister Albanese congratulated Dutton on being the new opposition leader and then wished him many years in the job. Some commentators, however, thought the government was weak in not going harder on their opponents. It probably means the government had disappointed the media by not feeding its blood lust. There’s nothing television news producers like more than a bit of “biffo” to enliven their bulletins.

The new speaker, Milton Dick, showed promising gravitas and familiarity with the standing orders to establish his control of the house. It was a more assured first performance than that of his immediate Liberal predecessor, Andrew Wallace, who took over from the impressive Tony Smith. Mind you, Wallace’s task was harder, with an election about to be called and an opposition intent on destroying a decaying government.

Peter Dutton set the tone for the opposition’s day one attacks, linking the government to the construction union, the CFMMEU, which he said was a $5 million donor to Labor and had members charged with criminal behaviour including sexual assault.

Dutton got under Albanese’s skin when he went on a fishing exercise, asking if the prime minister had held meetings with any of these people. Albanese demanded Dutton put names to the smear. One suspects the opposition leader is merely warming up. He winked to the press gallery, clearly pleased that his niggle rankled.

On the government’s part, the “Dorothy Dixer”, or prepared question ignoring the quaint “questions without notice” charade, is still alive. Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen used one to attack the Coalition’s policy failures and its hiding of energy price hikes immediately before the election.

Bowen told ABC Radio that “reminding people of the previous government’s appalling record is fair enough”. After a decade of inaction, he finally introduced emission reduction targets into the parliament. The real test for that legislation will come when it reaches the senate.

The Liberals aren’t buying Albanese’s talk of wanting a parliament “where there is a genuine debate and dialogue and discussion”. The manager of opposition business in the house, Paul Fletcher, accused the government of skewing the standing orders to the benefit of the enlarged crossbench because it did not want to be held up to more rigorous scrutiny from “experienced shadow ministers”.

To add to the Coalition’s disappointment, the government accepted an amendment from the independent member for Warringah, Zali Steggall, giving the crossbench and indeed the parliament more say when the government wants to declare a bill urgent and ram it through the house.

There is an argument that, in the age of 24/7 TV news channels, radio and social media, the parliament doesn’t have the cachet with the electorate it once did. However, if a government can’t progress its agenda or set the dominant narrative, voters will soon lose faith in it. The early signs are both Albanese and Dutton are well aware of this. 

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 30, 2022 as "Putting a statement into action".

A free press is one you pay for. Now is the time to subscribe.

Share this article

Page 7

Australians are, on average, the fourth-richest people in the world.

Before we start celebrating our luck or cleverness, we should be sobered by The Smith Family’s statement in its most disturbing TV advertising, that one in six of our children and young people are growing up in poverty.

The distribution of income and wealth – and more broadly opportunities – remains hugely unequal. Before the pandemic it was widely reported that the top 1 per cent of Australians owned more wealth than the bottom 70 per cent combined. Far too little attention has been paid in politics and policy debates to the reality of increasing poverty and inequality in this country. Our political leaders have made many trite commitments that no one will be left behind, lamenting the gender pay gap and the disconnect between full employment and stagnant real wages, while often deliberately pursuing policies that compound these issues.

Economic growth hasn’t “trickled down” as was once assumed, profits have boomed relative to the stagnant wages of workers, asset speculation has mostly benefited the top end, and changes to the tax and transfer system have often further skewed the distribution of income and wealth.

A recent, authoritative report by the Australian Council of Social Service and UNSW Sydney Poverty and Inequality Partnership points out that “our overall household wealth has grown as much in the last 3 years as it did in the previous fifteen, despite the Covid-19 pandemic and the recession in 2020, thanks mainly to the soaring cost of residential properties across the country during that same period”.

The report goes on to say that “rising house prices increase the divide between people who bought their homes when they were more affordable, and younger people and those on low and modest incomes who are shut out of home ownership or struggle with escalating rents and mortgage payments”.

It is important to note that as housing is more evenly distributed across the population than other kinds of wealth, rising house prices have caused wealth inequality to decline slightly during the pandemic. However, those increases have also effectively put homes out of reach for many.

The Morrison government knowingly over-stimulated the housing boom, pouring billions into the sector directly and through the Reserve Bank, while excluding the construction sector from the lockdowns and other medically driven restrictions.

Failing to recognise the significance of the impact on the unemployed, the Coalition reset the JobSeeker allowance at a level below the poverty line, and ignored the desperate need for affordable housing.

The report also offered a longer view of the worsening position during the period from 2003 to 2021. Home ownership among young people dropped markedly, and for those aged 30 to 34 it fell from 57 per cent to just 50 per cent. The proportion of median household disposable income needed to service a typical mortgage rose from 27 per cent to 41 per cent, while the share of median household income required to pay the median rent rose from 26 per cent to 31 per cent.

Moreover, nearly one-third of low-income households are “over-indebted” by OECD standards, meaning their debt is more than three times their annual disposable income.

Anglicare surveyed some 46,000 rental listings for its April 2022 report, finding that only nine were affordable for a single parent on JobSeeker with one child aged over eight, and just one for a person on a youth allowance.

Although income supports and rental assistance early in the pandemic helped to lift some people out of poverty, failing to get the reset right ensures that mortgage increases and higher rents are now putting people on low and modest incomes under incredible financial pressure.

The governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, as you would expect, has concentrated on the likely impact of rising interest rates on financial stability, with little thought to the impact on inequality.

Philip Lowe takes great comfort from what he and his colleagues consider healthy household balance sheets with significant “buffers”, by way of accumulated savings, enabled by government financial support during the pandemic to households and employers. But the focus is mostly on the “aggregate”, with little attention to distribution.

The most important question is, what can be done to address poverty and inequality?

To begin, perhaps most obviously, we must raise public awareness of the issue of inequality, especially the economic, social and health costs of inequality, and focus our processes of government and business on the urgent need to address it.

There has been no shortage of recommendations about what to do. There was a senate inquiry in 2014 and various think tanks have held roundtables on the subject, such as Australia21 and The Australia Institute, which summarised recommendations in the report “A Fair Go for All Australians”, released in 2018.

How can government increase the focus on inequality, given that it is mostly ignored during cabinet discussions?

One proposal worthy of consideration would be to require cabinet submissions in all areas of public policy to attach an assessment of the likely consequences of the proposed policy on inequality.

In a similar vein, now that the Reserve Bank is subject to review, the central bank could be required to report regularly on inequality in the financial system, in terms of both access and outcomes. So too with the Treasury, which could release an inequality impact statement with each budget.

Perhaps most importantly, the tax and transfer system needs to be reformed to become more equitable. There are many concessions in the tax system that favour the wealthy, including in housing, superannuation and the way the GST is applied and distributed.

Given that tax increases will inevitably be on the table when the government settles down to budget repair, it would be essential to do so in the context of broad-based reform to deal with inequities across the entire system.

In terms of transfer or welfare payments, our system is seen, in the context of the OECD countries, to be fairly egalitarian, given its focus on the means-testing of most benefits. However, there is genuine concern about the inadequacies of child- and aged-care benefits, and particularly about the jump in effective marginal tax rates as some benefits are phased out.

These are more aggregate responses. Action is also required directly in housing for low- to middle-income earners, which has now become a crisis. Over the years governments have offered various schemes to assist first-home buyers and renters, but most of these programs have failed to match promises or expectations. For example, grants to assist with the deposit often have failed to assist the buyers, as home builders and developers have seized the opportunity to raise their prices commensurately.

Moreover, governments both state and federal have been slow to introduce large-scale projects for affordable housing, even though such projects can be an effective avenue for infrastructure spending aimed at stimulating overall economic activity, as we now need in the recovery from the pandemic. The last election saw Labor propose assistance in the form of fractional government ownership, the detail of which is yet to be released. Over the years, seeing housing projects come and go, I have been fascinated that there hasn’t been a proposal along the lines of what was done in the ACT to attract public servants to move to the nation’s capital. The government built housing, which was then made available to rent or buy. Prospective buyers could also rent initially and count their payments towards an ultimate purchase.

To complement the government’s role in addressing inequality, the business sector needs to move on from its predominant focus on maximising shareholder value. The Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry, led by Kenneth Hayne QC, and tabled in 2019, identified a culture of greed”, as evidenced by the banks’ strategies to “clip the ticket” as often as they could on any transaction.

Business needs to consider its role in relation to all stakeholders, especially clients, employees and the community. In terms of the latter, companies need to recognise and accept their broad social responsibilities and to reset strategies accordingly.

Some have considered the challenge of dealing with inequality serious enough to advocate a living wage, even a charter of human rights and broad-based reform of industrial relations to better define workers’ rights. These have all been controversial proposals over the years and potentially divisive in our political system. But the challenge to address inequality is very real and urgent, and simply can’t be left to drift further, given the likely economic and social consequences.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 30, 2022 as "Unequal to the task".

A free press is one you pay for. Now is the time to subscribe.

Share this article

Page 8

‘A hand outstretched’: Albanese proposes way forward on Voice Karen Middleton

Climate: Inside the Greens’ four-point strategy Mike Seccombe

It’s time for Labor to dismantle its factions Dennis Glover

The deadly consequences of rental evictions in WA Jesse Noakes

Australia is not prepared for a climate-related food crisis Esther Linder

Why are we still waiting for aged care reform? Karen Middleton

Zelensky accuses Moscow of energy supply ‘terrorism’ Jonathan Pearlman