Dr. Karina Doorley:

For the first time this year we are estimating the poverty rate for people with disabilities. If you put the cost of disability into that - if you adjusted their income with regard to the fact that they have higher out-of-pocket costs for their consumption need - you would get a higher disability rate for that group. I do not know if the change in the rate would be higher or lower but, certainly, there would be a higher base rate. In fact, that group already has the highest rate of poverty of all the groups we analysed. I think it was 23%, which is very high.

On the issue of the elderly poverty rate, the Deputy is right that we have been seeing an increase. This is quite a change from what we have seen in the preceding years. The social welfare payments to pensioner households had been relatively protected during the financial crisis when compared with other payments. Their poverty rate as we were coming into the pandemic was quite low when compared with other groups in the population, such as children or working-age adults. We are seeing that creeping up now. Our latest simulation of the poverty rate for 2023 shows that they are now just below children. Children still have the highest poverty rate, followed by the elderly, and then working-age adults.