Do we really know what Australia’s position on poverty is?

This week, the Brotherhood of St. Laurence (BSL) will host international poverty measurement expert Professor Sabina Alkire to gain a clearer insight into how Australia can better measure and track poverty rates. 

In 1975 a landmark Commission on poverty in Australia called for the establishment of a national poverty measure. Now, nearly 50 years later, we still don’t have a nationally agreed definition or measures of poverty, agreed objectives to reduce it or indicators to track progress.

Australia falls well behind countries like Canada and New Zealand in setting clear, unified goals for poverty reduction. How can we effectively work to eradicate poverty without a comprehensive understanding of the issue? Without a nationally agreed benchmark for poverty reduction, it is impossible for governments to measure success in preventing and alleviating poverty.

The Federal Government’s own Productivity Commission recently estimated that one in seven Australians, or over 3.5 million people, are living in poverty – the highest recorded level since 2001. One in ten Australians are in persistent poverty.

BSL has long called for Australia to adopt a more comprehensive approach to measuring poverty that integrates two critical components.

First, we need nationally agreed income-based measures that clearly identify the number of people living in poverty, including regional disparities.

Second, and crucially, these income measures must be paired with a broader poverty index that reveals the causes of poverty and highlights actionable solutions. This approach considers access to essential services like health, education, housing and transport—key factors that directly affect quality of life.

Professor Alkire’s data driven method for measuring and working to decrease poverty rates ensures that people and institutions are deeply involved at a local level when deciding what needs to be measured to determine who is ‘poor’ and most importantly, how we can track improvement against key indicators.

Her work with Professor James Foster resulted in the Alkire-Foster (AF) method for measuring multidimensional poverty. This flexible technique allows for the creation of poverty measures that are relevant in the local context by incorporating various dimensions and has been successfully implemented in over 100 countries to help lift millions of people out of poverty.

During her visit to Australia, Professor Alkire will share insights into how her work can be applied in an Australian setting – specifically through informing policy design and budget decisions – to give us a clearer picture on how we can accurately measure poverty and work to eradicate it.

Her advice will also inform an ongoing joint initiative between BSL and the University of Melbourne, ‘Defining and Measuring Poverty’, which draws together experts and partners from economics, social policy, public health, education, gender, disability, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs to assess current poverty frameworks and measures and identify a way forward for Australia. This builds on considerable work on poverty measurement from partners across the sector.

BSL will continue to advocate for a national definition and official measures of poverty. Establishing these benchmarks is an essential step in breaking the cycle of persistent poverty that Australia has been stuck in for decades.

For interviews, contact steph.jones@bsl.org.au or 0482 163 395