The Greens are trying to establish a national poverty line in Australia

The Greens want to establish a new antipoverty commission that would set a national poverty line.

Senator Janet Rice will introduce a bill before lunchtime Thursday that would, if passed, create the new commission.

“This bill is a constructive step towards ending poverty in Australia,” Rice will say in her second reading speech. 

Rice’s office said while there are different benchmarks used to measure poverty in Australia, there is no nationally legislated income below which a person can be considered living in poverty. 

“For far too long, governments have used the lack of an accepted measure of poverty as an excuse to keep people living on inadequate payments,” Rice will say in her speech.

“We need a national definition of poverty, one that takes into account different needs and contexts, and one that government can be held accountable to.” 

In the absence of a national poverty line, the Greens have so far used a measurement known as the Henderson poverty line, which was suggested as part of a poverty inquiry in the 1970s. 

The most recent calculations from the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research define the Henderson poverty line at $1146.88 per week for a household of two adults, one of whom is working, plus two dependent children. 

Rice says her proposed commission would go further than Labor’s interim Labor Economic Inclusion Committee, which was established to advise government budget planning as part of a deal with independent Senator David Pocock last year.