Increasing Jobseeker certainly hasn’t been something the major parties have wanted to talk about during the election campaign. When it does get raised, it is usually batted away as something that would be good to do but we have to live within our means.

Compare that to the current discussion on defence spending. Both sides are not just committing to spend more but committing to ever larger increases as the economy grows. This funding commitment comes even when, in the case of the Coalition, they don’t even know what the money would be spent on.

But lifting welfare recipients would not even be that expensive. It would cost about $6 billion per year to set Jobseeker at the base rate of the age pension.

To put this number in context, the govt spends:

• $14 billion per year on tax concessions that encourage property investors to push up house prices – $7.5bn of which goes to the richest 10%.
• $22 billion per year to give the top 10% of income earners superannuation tax breaks.
• $5bn per year to mining companies because they use fossil fuels.

And of course we are about to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to possibly buy submarines decades from now.

Poverty is a policy choice and successive Prime Ministers have been happy for people to live in poverty.