As he walked to the laundromat, his possessions in a plastic bag, my daughter judged him a proud man trying to keep up appearances. How do you keep up appearances, let alone your spirit, if you find yourself out of work these days, trying to survive on around $40 a day? And how might you do it alone, advancing years your companion, life having dealt you a bad hand? A man or, often more distressingly, a woman: too old to have a reasonable chance of getting a job; too young to get an age pension. There is a great population bulge of such people. Of the 720,000 Australians on Newstart, the fancy name for what we once called the dole, 173,000 are aged from 55 to 64.

That’s the single largest age cohort of all. Police check a beggar's bowl in Melbourne. Credit:Joe Armao These people – including, you might imagine, that lost man trying to raise the money to keep up appearances, maybe for a job interview – are unlikely ever to get a job again. Those aged below 25, out of work but still possessed of the rev of youth, spend an average of 46 weeks on Newstart. The 55-64 group, facing age discrimination, skills depreciating, spend a life-sapping average of 190 weeks on Newstart. That’s getting on for four years: marking time – fruitless, poverty-stricken time – on the way to an age pension.

“How good’s a job?” said Prime Minister Scott Morrison this week, employing his studied bogan to bat aside questions about whether his government might increase the dole. Loading He may as well have been asking “how good are these sausages” at a barbecue. Morrison, who prays for us all and promises we’ll get a go if we have a go, is more interested in handing tax cuts to those with jobs than any further relief to those without. But others around him are getting restive.

The exasperation of the Country Women’s Association – hardly a radical organisation – was high when its members came together in Albury during the election campaign to tell Morrison that Newstart payments must rise ... only for their message to be lost when a witless protester bounced an egg off the PM’s head. Loading Barnaby Joyce this week pointed out the unemployed who fled the cities because they couldn’t afford the rent often found themselves in a new bind. The rent may be cheaper, but the cost of travelling for job interviews, services or groceries could be beyond them. Morrison has taken to becoming defensive, pointing out – correctly – that like his government, Labor did not bring to the election a proposal to increase Newstart. Labor’s effort was to suggest a “review” of the system, and only now says it wants a raise. Too late. Morrison also says 99 per cent of Newstart recipients get benefits beyond $40 a day. He’s clearly talking about the energy supplement his government announced at the last budget: 60 cents a day.

There is family tax benefit and rental assistance for some, too – single people renting privately can get up to $137.50 a fortnight if their rent is more than $305 (which leaves them $26.50 a day for every other essential). The catch, according to a recent Anglicare survey, is there is not a single home in any capital city that a single person on Newstart can afford. But give the PM his due. A job is a fine thing, and Australia keeps producing work for most of those who seek it. About 200,000 jobs a year have been created over the past decade, rising to 290,000 over the past year, though population growth means 240,000 new jobs are needed each year just to keep the unemployment rate steady. You’d have to be seriously sight-impaired, however, to miss what is happening to Australian society at the bottom. Not so long ago, you could travel to the big cities of the world and bless yourself that you were Australian.

Loading All those armies of the homeless shuffling around San Francisco behind shopping trolleys loaded with their earthly possessions, disappearing to burrows beneath bridges or no-go footpath townships of raggedy tents … Door stoops in London, too, crowded with the dispossessed sleeping rough in cardboard boxes. No one should have been surprised. Former British PM Margaret Thatcher laid down the rules when she declared of the needy in 1987 that "they are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” It could never happen in Australia, we reassured ourselves. We are a compassionate people. Yet this cold winter, on a single block of a main shopping street in one of our own great cities, countless commuters and I walk by a dozen of the lost curled upon the footpath within blankets and anything they might have scrounged to keep them alive.

And a man in a suit, trying to keep up appearances on $40 a day, becomes a beggar.