In their campaign war rooms the major parties are busy devising ways to “control the narrative”, to steer this election debate towards issues where they believe their pitch is strongest.

But there is a group of Australians whose desperate situation neither major party really wants to discuss. This moral issue of pressing national importance sits outside the major parties’ carefully tested election messages and there is a real risk it might not be raised in the campaign at all.

Poverty as a moral question: do we have the collective will to end it? Read more

Despite Australia’s 28 years of continuous economic growth, almost three decades of uninterrupted national good fortune, we have achieved virtually no change in the 10% or so of Australians living below the poverty line. Nothing. The number of children living in poverty is by some measures actually rising.

The most obvious, immediate and effective policy response would be to raise the level of unemployment payments

Scott Morrison rejects the very idea that inequality is a worsening problem. His ministers slide around the data to find evidence that there is nothing to see here.

Bill Shorten wants to tap the building resentment at wage stagnation to build a case that the deck is stacked against the ordinary worker. He wants to talk about relative inequality, the gap between rich and poor, and deploys statistics to build this case. He talks far less about the stark realties for almost 3 million Australians who live below the poverty line.

Guardian Australia believes this policy discussion is too important to be sidelined, just because it doesn’t fit the major parties’ talking points. And the overwhelming response to our Life on the Breadline series, where we gave a public voice to Australians living in poverty, suggests our readers also think this is a necessary discussion. The facts are just too stark to deny, or avoid.

It’s not only welfare advocates who are shouting from the rooftops about Australia’s unacceptable and unchanging levels of poverty.

The Productivity Commission did a stocktake of all the available evidence last year to decide whether inequality in Australia was rising. It found that the benefits of economic growth had been far more evenly shared here than in the US or the UK, but that there was a glaring lesson for policymakers – for the Australians living on very low incomes nothing much had changed in 30 years.

And the commission chair Peter Harris was unusually blunt in his advice.

“As political parties ask themselves what are good ways to respond to the popular view that the benefits of growth are not being shared, rather than narrow the search to a favourable statistical model of inequality, perhaps it might be better to focus instead on persistently disadvantaged elements of this group,” he told the National Press Club.

“After 30 years, perhaps simply shifting money around and doing more of the same is not sufficient,” he said, suggesting our political leaders should make “a commitment to a comprehensive policy response to persistent disadvantage ... because we ought to be able to do better by our fellow Australians as we look out at a fourth decade of uninterrupted economic growth” and because there was clearly “genuine policy failure”.

The most obvious, immediate and effective policy response would be to raise the level of unemployment payments – Newstart – something that has had long-standing and broad support, but still hasn’t happened.

Increasing Newstart has been recommended by numerous cross-party parliamentary inquiries, the Henry taxation review recommended raising it by $50 a week, the Business Council of Australia has for many years argued that the payment is so low it impedes people’s ability to get work, former prime minister John Howard agrees that the 25-year freeze on any real increase in Newstart had “probably gone on too long” and the frontbencher Arthur Sinodinos recently expressed a “personal view” that over time it “should be higher”. And yet, as we enter another election campaign, neither major party has promised a real increase.

Morrison says if he had the money to increase Newstart, he’d rather give it to pensioners – even though the pension, unlike Newstart, is already increased each year in a way that maintains its real value over time, while the real value of Newstart has fallen dramatically. Shorten has conceded no one could live on the current payment, and that it is an important issue, but has only promised a “root and branch review” in government. The Greens have a policy for a $75 a week increase.

Record number of sick or disabled Newstart recipients as Coalition seeks savings Read more

Besides the cost, the reluctance of the major parties to make concrete promises is almost certainly linked to the way we have conducted the national conversation around welfare and poverty for a very long time – the “narrative” of blame, where the multiple complexities that leave people reliant on payments are ignored in favour of simplistic and brutal rhetoric about “dole bludgers” and “rorters”. Perhaps politicians have talked that way for so long, or at least failed to call out that kind of labelling, they are worried voters may have been convinced there is no real cause for compassion.

In Life on the Breadline, welfare recipients told their stories, explained the reality of their lives, the pointless complexities of the welfare system and the indignity of being shamed for circumstances they could not control.

In this series, Fair Go? Why 10% of Australians are still being left behind, Guardian Australia wants to take that conversation into an election campaign, to listen to Australians who have been left behind, examine the policies that govern their lives and ask the questions that they want answered.

As Peter Harris said, the fact that the proportion of Australians living in poverty remains virtually unchanged through so many years of plenty is due to the policy choices of successive governments. Guardian Australia wants to discuss why we aren’t choosing differently.

Reporting in this series is supported by VivCourt through the Guardian Civic Journalism Trust



