Children, poverty and health promotion in Australia

"For our next term, we are setting achievable new goals for Australia's future in the world. And at the head of those goals is the future of all our children. So we set ourselves this first goal: By 1990 no Australian child will be living in poverty."

This is the well-known and often quoted goal from the election campaign launch of 1987 delivered in the Sydney Opera House by the then Prime Minister Bob Hawke. At the time there were ~580 000 Australian children living in poverty. The most recent data puts the poverty rate for children in 2014 at 17.4%, or 731 000 children. The risk of poverty is much higher in single-parent families, where the rate for children is now 40.6%...