Response to 2026 Federal Budget from Anti-Poverty Network SA member, Samantha, May 13, Parliament, North Terrace, Adelaide.
I want to begin by acknowledging that we meet today on Kaurna Country — stolen land. Land that was never ceded. I pay my respects to First Nations Elders past and present, and especially to any First Nations people with us here today.
Aboriginal communities have survived invasion, dispossession, forced removal, stolen wages, and generations of governments treating housing, health, dignity and even life itself as conditional.
We have never paid the rent, so it’s impossible to talk about poverty in this country without talking about colonisation.
Because the oldest injustice on this continent is also the foundation of many of the inequalities we still see today.
Any conversation about poverty, homelessness, housing stress, child removal, health inequality or incarceration in this country must recognise that First Nations communities experience these harms at vastly disproportionate rates — not by accident, but as the ongoing result of colonisation and systemic racism still embedded in our institutions and economy today.
Which is why budgets matter.
Because budgets aren’t just economic documents — they’re moral documents. They reveal who’s protected, who is sacrificed, and whose suffering is considered politically acceptable.
And last night’s budget contained some important reforms, especially the changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax that finally begin challenging the idea that housing should primarily exist as a wealth-building machine for investors.
For years, people in poverty have watched Australia reward property speculation more than work, more than care, and more than survival itself. And even the government admitted last night that the system has become more generous to assets than it is to labour.
We welcome measures that may reduce speculative pressure in the housing market, along with investment in cheaper healthcare and medicines, because for many people, cost-of-living relief means being able to afford food, rent and medication all in the same week.
But let’s be clear, cuts to the NDIS, increased spending on defense, not taxing the shit out of our gas, and no substantial increase to JobSeeker or other welfare payments, shows that this budget still falls short for people living in poverty.
People are still being asked to survive on payments well below the poverty line while rents continue to soar.
And while the government keeps talking about housing supply, it refuses to seriously confront the thousands of empty homes sitting unused across this country.
They’re still approaching housing mainly through the idea of fixing the market so more people can buy into it, rather than recognising that housing is a human right and should be decommodified enough that poor people can live securely.
That distinction is critical.
What we have seen creeping across public life for decades is structural. A toxic, selective and socially engineered process that strips away public services, weakens collective support systems, and prioritises corporate profits over people.
And it’s a false economy.
Lifting people out of poverty would inject money straight back into communities. It would save billions in healthcare costs. It would reduce homelessness, pressure on crisis services, and the long-term costs of disadvantage.
Make no mistake: poverty is a political choice.
And while poverty shortens people’s lives every single day through stress, illness, homelessness and neglect — that never appears on the death certificate.
But these issues aren’t abstract policy debates.
They shape whether people can keep a roof over their heads, afford groceries, survive on income support, care for family members, or live with dignity.
And the people speaking today are experts in that reality through lived experience.
