Campaigns

Catholic Social Services Victoria has added its voice to the following national campaigns:

Raise The Rate

Logo text for Raise the Rate for Good campaign

Catholic Social Services Victoria has joined the national campaign to Raise the Rate for Good, which is key to reducing poverty and inequality in Australia. The goal of the Raise the Rate campaign is to fix our social security safety net for good so that it keeps people out of poverty, with income of $500 per week. Experts define the poverty line in Australia as $480 – $500 per week for a single person with no children, including housing costs. 

Before the COVID-19 crisis, the rate of Newstart had not been increased in real terms for 25 years, while the cost of living, especially housing, has gone through the roof. 

There is broad support for a permanent increase to the JobSeeker Payment (formerly Newstart Allowance), including from community organisations, such as anti-poverty networks, unions, business groups, not-for-profit organisations, local governments, territory governments and several federal parliamentarians.

Polling shows the majority the community agrees that we cannot go back to the old Newstart rate of $40 a day (Essential Research 2020).  

The key recommendations for the campaign are:

  • Increase the base rate of JobSeeker Payment by at least $25 a day, and ensure everyone receives at least $65 a day.
  • Ongoing indexation of payments in line with wage movements at least twice per year
  • Establishment of a Social Security Commission to advise the Parliament on the ongoing adequacy of income support payments

Everybody’s Home

Australia’s housing system is broken. From people wanting to buy their very first house, to others struggling to just find a safe roof over their heads, it’s clear that the system just isn’t working for everyone.

Crazy house prices and a system focused on property investment is locking a generation out of home ownership and creating more renters.

Growing competition for rental properties are causing rents to skyrocket, so every-day workers can no longer afford to rent ordinary homes and don’t have the security they need.

With more and more people struggling to afford the private rental market, the demand for affordable or social rental properties is outstripping supply.

And a chronic shortage of social and affordable housing is forcing record levels of homelessness.

But there really are simple things our government can do to fix this. And that’s what Everybody’s Home is all about – we’re working together to call on our government to bring balance back to the system, so that everybody has a place to call home.

So join the campaign now, and together, we can make our decision makers fix this broken housing system.

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