The Child Poverty in Australia 2024 report by Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre released during Homelessness Week was commissioned by the Valuing Children Initiative for the End Child Poverty campaign.
Key findings
• Over 3.7 million people in Australia including nearly 823,000 children and 1.85 million households are living under a ‘standard’ (50 percent)
poverty line in 2022.
• This represents 14.5 per cent of our population.
• The poverty rate increased by nearly half a million people between 2021 and 2022, driven by rising living costs and housing stress. This includes an additional 102,000 children moving into poverty.
• An estimated 71,000 children in WA (nearly 1 in 9, or 11.8 per cent) live inpoverty in WA
• Rising interest rates and essential living costs and a tightening housing market since 2022 suggest these numbers will be higher still in 2024.
• Rental costs for the average family rose 11.2 percent between 2020 and 2022, while rental costs for lower income families rose faster still, at
17.8 per cent.
• This will put nearly 21,000 more children into poverty in WA, including13,600 more children in single parent families, and 7,000 in couple families.
• Single parent families and single person households are at the greatest risk of poverty.
• One in three single parent families (33.4 percent) are living below a 50 percent median poverty line, while over two in five (42.7 percent) are
living below a 60 percent median poverty line.
• Single parent families represent 14.7 percent of families, hence there are 367,000 children in single parent families living below a 50 percent
median poverty line.
• The proportion of children living in single parent households rose over 11 percent in the decade from 2013 to 2023.
• Couple households are at less risk of poverty, with one in six (16.3 percent) living below a 60 percent median poverty line and less than one in ten
(9.3 percent) living below a 50 percent median poverty line.
• There are three times as many children living in couple households, hence while their risk of poverty is lower, the actual number is higher
with 456,000 children in couple households living below a 50% poverty line.
Children in extreme poverty
• The risks of significant and severe poverty are also much higher for children in single parent households.
• 25,000 children live in severe poverty in WA (in families having to survive on less than $40 per day to cover all living costs once housing costs have
been covered).
• One in five children in single parent households are living in significant poverty (40 percent of median) and over one in ten living in severe poverty (30 percent of median)
• A quarter of single parent families live in poverty in WA, including nearly 1 in 10 (9.6 per cent) single parent families living in severe poverty.
• By comparison, only around one in twenty (5.4 percent) children in couple households are living in significant poverty and around one in forty (2.7 percent) are living in extreme poverty.
• However, because there are more couple households, this represents this represents approximately 213,000 children in couple
