Western Australia, a state whose government talks about being the most prosperous in the nation, now has an estimated 456,000 people living in poverty. That's the headline finding of the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre's 2026 Poverty Snapshot, released on Sunday 11 October, and almost 99,000 of those people are children.

Photo: Gnangarra / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5 AU), cropped