The Aus­tralian NGO Angli­care has released a new report on poverty in Aus­tralia. The report says that the global eco­nomic reces­sion has not cre­ated a new class of poor in Aus­tralia. Angli­care is also call­ing on gov­ern­ment to come up with a dif­fer­ent model of assis­tance, one that treats the root causes of poverty.

From the ABC, reporter Simon San­tow talks to the Angli­care CEO.

SIMON SANTOW: Sin­gle par­ents, peo­ple liv­ing alone, renters, peo­ple depen­dent on wel­fare and Indige­nous Aus­tralians con­tinue to be the poor­est in soci­ety.

And Peter Kell rejects recent reports that there’s evi­dence a new class of poor aris­ing from the global finan­cial cri­sis is swamp­ing social services.

PETER KELL: The expe­ri­ence of our emer­gency relief cen­tres would indi­cate that it’s not a major part of the peo­ple that we are helping.

How­ever I would put one caveat on that. This report deals with the period end­ing in Feb­ru­ary this year. Unem­ploy­ment here is only just start­ing on the rise. All the econ­o­mists tell us that it is going to get to 8 or 9 per cent from its cur­rent 5 point something.

So the demand for this kind of help is clearly going to go up over the next 12 to 18 months as unem­ploy­ment goes up.

SIMON SANTOW: Angli­care says it has wel­comed huge boosts to the amount of money pro­vided for emer­gency relief for the poor but now it wants the focus to move beyond bandaids and towards tack­ling the under­ly­ing causes of poverty.

PETER KELL: We need to work out how we wrap around the imme­di­ate help of food vouch­ers, rent pay­ments, util­ity pay­ments with other case man­age­ment assis­tance which helps peo­ple with their other needs, their needs in rela­tion to child prob­lems or lack of skilling, lack of edu­ca­tion, not even know­ing how to pre­pare a nutri­tious meal — all these sorts of things which we sort of take for granted in nor­mal Aus­tralia but which go to present these peo­ple on this con­tin­uum of despair that they are on.

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