Campaign brings voices of South Hedland children to parliament

The End Child Poverty campaign is taking the voices of children from South Hedland to federal parliament.

The team found children in South Hedland were exposed to poverty, despite living in one of the wealthiest regions in Australia.

The movement is now calling for a clear strategy on childhood poverty to better understand and address the issue.

Every month, billions of dollars in trade is exported through Port Hedland, the iron ore-coated export hub in WA's Pilbara region.

But on the doorstep of the world's largest bulk export port, about 1,630 kilometres north of Perth, children in South Hedland are experiencing what has been described as "profound disadvantage".

The Pilbara has long been touted as the engine room of Australia's economy. So how is it that one of the wealthiest regions in Australia is seeing children go without, less than 15 kilometres down the road?

Tania Murray, chief executive of South Hedland's Youth Involvement Council (YIC), said the contrast was confronting.

"For some of our young people, it's going home to housing that is below acceptable standards, very little food, overcrowding, there's no adequate air conditioning, even though we live in a desert," she said.

Working with locally based YIC, the Valuing Children Initiative's (VCI) End Child Poverty campaign captured the voices of children in South Hedland.

The kids' voices were recorded through a phone and will be played to federal ministers and MPs in Canberra today.

"When the researchers from VCI came up, our job wasn't to research what children in Hedland experience; our job was to create a safe opportunity for children to tell themselves," Ms Murray said.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics' Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA), a tool that ranks areas according to their relative socio-economic advantage and disadvantage based on census data, South Hedland's score was 989, lower than the broader Port Hedland area average of 1,011.

End Child Poverty campaign lead and VCI executive director Sarah Quinton said it was important that children were asked about their experiences directly.

"We were invited to South Hedland by the Youth Involvement Council because they were so concerned about the number of children that they were seeing," she said.