Poverty harms children now and into adulthood. It limits health, learning, and wellbeing, and undermines rights set out in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, including an adequate standard of living, health care, education, and play.
In Australia, fifty years after the Henderson Report, we do not have an official definition and measure of poverty. In 2024, the Senate Community Affairs References Committee inquiry into the Extent and Nature of Poverty in Australia urged government to act to reduce child poverty, but progress is held back by the absence of an agreed definition and a way to measure child poverty that reflects children’s real lives.
Over the past three years, we at the Children’s Policy Centre have undertaken research with children with experiences of poverty to understand what matters to them. We have developed a definition of poverty and a means of measuring it that is child-centred. The MOR Framework, developed by us, supports better policy design and enables child poverty to be tracked. However, we are lacking the child-centred data required.
Defining child poverty: Income and multidimensionality
Income is central to the experience of poverty: without sufficient money, families cannot meet basic needs. Standard income measures, for example having less than 50% of median household income, allow comparisons over time and across countries.
In 2019–20, 16.6% of Australian children under 15 lived in income poverty—around 761,000 children—with far higher rates for children in sole-parent families. The temporary COVID-19 Coronavirus Supplement cut child poverty, and its removal saw rates rebound, revealing how policy choices drive outcomes.
Yet, as important as income measures are they miss important aspects of children’s experience – especially non-material aspects like stigma, exclusion, the quality of relationships, and opportunities that shape children lives now and into the future.
That poverty is multidimensional is now well established. Beyond money, poverty is characterised by overlapping deprivations, such as poor quality and insecure housing, limited access to services, unsafe or isolating environments, and barriers to learning.
Many existing multidimensional tools, however, are adult-focused or use the household as the unit of analysis. This means that the ways in which children experience poverty are often excluded from measurement. To respond effectively to child poverty, Australia needs a child-centred approach that starts with children’s experiences and then identifies the indicators that best capture those experiences.
More for Children: Starting from children’s lives
More for Children is a program of transformative research that aims to understand, assess and respond to child poverty in ways that are child-centred. The first phase of the research used a rights-based, child-centred methodology in four Australian communities (two regional and two urban) with 162 children (mostly aged 6–12), 39 parents/carers, and 28 key informants. The research was guided by four principes: respect, consent, age appropriateness, supportive.
Figure 1: Principles guiding research with children
The MOR Framework: Material, Opportunity, Relationships
From this research, we developed a child-centred definition of poverty:
Poverty is the interplay between key material and non-material deprivations, limiting children’s choices now and into the future.
It means children do not have the material basics, their opportunities are narrowed, and foundational relationships are not in place or are under pressure.
To translate the definition into action, we developed the MOR framework based on the three dimensions of poverty that matter most to children.
Material Basics: Insufficient money and material resources to meet basic needs and inadequate and inaccessible essential services and infrastructure,
Opportunities: A lack of meaningful connection and participation; narrowed choices now and into the future; and limited opportunities for play, recreation and learning.
Relationships: Family relationships are absent or under pressure; a network of trusted caring adults in not in place; and there are repeated negative experiences with key institutions and services.
Figure 2: The MOR Framework
From framework to measurement
Having identified the dimensions of poverty and the themes that sit within each, we began the process of developing a child-centred index of multidimensional poverty. We followed the process established through the development of the United Nations’ Multidimensional Poverty Index to build a universe of potential indicators.
The key steps were as follows:
- Review existing data sources for candidate indicators
- Compile candidate indicators and rank according to the importance children placed on them during the research
- Map each indicator to MOR dimensions and themes to determine alignment
- Expert review
We identified 213 candidate indicators from 41 data sources. We then ranked them by (a) how often children raised them during the research and (b) relevance to poverty, retaining 163 that were both child-centred and conceptually aligned. We then established a set of selection criteria by which to guide the selection of the most suitable candidate indicators for each dimension of the MOR Framework:
- Grounded in the findings of the More for Children child-centred research
- Aligned with at least one dimension of the MOR Framework
- Drawn from a single dataset or from datasets that can be reliably linked (preferably panel data, though cross-sectional data may also be acceptable)
- Reflective of children’s direct experiences, with particular emphasis on sentiment-based indicators
- National in scope, rather than limited to individual states or territories
- Contained within an actively maintained (that is, not discontinued) dataset
- Ideally accessible through public data sources
- Available across multiple historical time points
- Applicable across the full age range of childhood (0–14 years)
- Capable, when combined with other indicators, of yielding policy-relevant insights to inform evidence-based change.
Disappointingly, of the 163 candidate indicators identified, none met all criteria.
The data problem (and promise)
Australia has a wealth of data, yet we lack child-centred, nationally representative, regularly collected data suitable for a MOR Index. Some sources align well conceptually—such as the Tasmanian Student Wellbeing and Engagement Survey, the Victorian Child Health and Wellbeing Survey, the Australian Child Wellbeing Project, and the Child Deprivation Index – but they are not national, not ongoing, or not linkable. The Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey (HILDA) offers rich longitudinal insights but is adult-reported.
We held an experts’ workshop in 2024 to discuss our findings and there was agreement on two points: (i) Australia lacks the child-centred data needed to measure multidimensional child poverty, and (ii) this problem can be resolved.
In seeking to overcome this data gap, several principles should be maintained to ensure child-centredness:
- Children’s experiences and priorities are not lost in the process of developing a measure.
- Guard against the possible unintended use of the model and indicators in the future.
- Care must be taken in the use of proxy indicators, which may provide inaccurate information.
- Avoid using adult assessments as proxies for children’s experiences as children move beyond early childhood.
- Avoid assumptions or conclusions that are inherently risky in a data reductionist approach.
Where to?
A dual approach of income-based measurement of child poverty and a multidimensional MOR index will provide the information needed to track progress towards reducing and ultimately ending child poverty, and to act where it matters most.
The MOR Framework provides a child-centred definition of poverty. It also provides the conceptual foundation for a child-centred measure of multidimensional poverty, built on children experiences and priorities.
While we are lacking child-centred data, this gap can be filled. It is essential that we do not to resort to a data-driven approach to measurement that uses existing data that are not fit for purpose and abandons what matters to children.
Australia can create a genuinely child-centred measure that drives better decisions—and delivers more for children.
Authors’ note: This piece is a shortened version of Bessell, Sharon, Cadhla O’Sullivan, Trevor Rose, Megan Lang and Talia Avrahamzon (2025) ‘Measuring Multidimensional Child Poverty in Australia’, Australian Economic Review 58: S22-S35. doi.org/10.61605/cha_3022
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