The Reality of Poverty in Australia

We often hear from the media, the government, and even friends and family about ‘Dole bludgers’ or ‘welfare rorters’, you know, the ‘bad ones’? A sort of catch-all that applies to seemingly everyone and no-one on the dole, something to trot out to have an opinion, but to still remain a ‘good guy’, a sort of ‘I’m not bad, I don’t tarnish all with the same brush’ statement.

But a dubious sort of doublethink takes place whenever a conversation about the poor comes up in Australia and the rhetoric begins to be scrutinized. Everyone’s there in support and solidarity for those who ‘are doing the right thing’, who don’t ‘just sit on their phone all day’ or ‘waste taxpayer money’, yet any conversation surrounding people on social security quickly reveals how the poor are actually viewed.

‘People are made out to be criminals simply because they’re poor’ ~ Andrew Black

Whether its a tone-deaf ‘Centrelink — living the dream’ shirt, comments about lower income suburbs and towns, such as Ipswich, Logan or Caboolture, in Queensland, or a good old yarn over a beer about people ‘getting shit for free’, Australia presents itself with quite a lot of open hostility directed at the most vulnerable members of society. So much so that the statement about it ‘just being the bad ones’ begins to seem a trite transparent.

When the government is trumpeting about the ‘$2.9 billion (saved) through cracking down on welfare fraud and non-compliance’, or media witch hunts, or Cashless Welfare Cards being introduced into already marginalised and poor communities, one could be forgiven for thinking that a war is being waged on the poor. And there is:

“Absolutely, there’s a war on the poor” says Andrew Black, a young Australian from Brisbane who has experienced poverty for most of his life.

When I asked him how long he had lived in poverty, the response I received “13 years or so’, ‘half of it [my life]”, he continued.

For a country known colloquially as the ‘lucky country’, things don’t seem so lucky when you talk to the poorest members of our society, and why should it?

According to ACOSS (Australian Council of Social Services), 3 million Australians live below the poverty line. How far below? $135 a week below.

For a country whose GDP sits at 1.3 trillion USD, surely there’d be some wealth to go around? Seemingly no, with each new budget announced, the rhetoric comes closer to declarations, great gaping chasms that governments seem unwilling and unlikely to cross.

“There is a new divide — the taxed and the taxed-nots” was the infamous dichotomy levied by then treasurer, now Prime Minister Scott Morrison, in 2016 regarding the economic plan of the Liberal National Party. These divisive and callous words have aged all the more poorly in the wake of the Robo-Debt debacle, where over 2000 people died after being automatically issued debt notices by the Department of Human Services between July 2016 and October 2018. A fifth of that number were people aged under 35. A spokesperson from the Human Services Minister, Michael Keenan told Hack in February;

“Any suggestion that the Department of Human Services’ debt recovery efforts have contributed to customer deaths is simply not supported by the facts or statistics” “As far as I know, there’s been no admission of guilt or wrongdoing” ~ Andrew Black — in reference to the Robo-Debt.

The financial and mental hardships experienced by the people who received debt notices contributed greatly to that figure of 2000. From people in their mid-20’s who felt the only escape from the aggressive demands of debt collection agencies operating on behalf of Centrelink was to end their own life, to people receiving Disability Support Pensions who simply couldn’t afford to keep themselves fed, these numbers are damning, regardless of where responsibility has been laid. These people are casualties of war.

Presently as it stands, the government has made no plans or moves to adequately address the Robo-Debt debacle. Nor have they made plans to raise the rate of Newstart, the welfare payment that most people on Centrelink and in poverty end up recieving, despite ACOSS recommending increasing the payment by a nominal $75 a week, with various welfare advocacy organisations taking up the call for the increase. One such group is the Anti Poverty Network, who are calling for an increase of $390 per fortnight to the dole, to place it above the Henderson Poverty line.

Jayden Oxton-White of APN Brisbane had this to say:

“We are not doing enough to adequately address poverty in Australia, this is evidenced by the fact that Centrelink payments are far below the poverty line and that the homelessness crisis has only become more apparent”

Given the recent victory of the Liberal National Party in the 2019 May elections, an increase is unlikely to take place within the near future.

The systemic hazards that people living in poverty face every day are growing more and more overt, violent and prevalent. With news recently passed on by the Reserve Bank of Australia is tipped to announce a recession, and the news that Australia’s largest telecommunications provider Telstra will be making 10,000 fulltime positions redundant, many Australians who have taken shots at the most vulnerable in society may find themselves facing the same future.

“What we need to do is collectively help each other, engage in mutual aid, support each other, try and create networks so that we don’t rely on the government solving poverty because they never will. We need to do this together as people, as communities.” ~ Andrew Black, closing statements.

Andrew Black ~Interviewed for this article

— Written by Christopher Bingham —

Twitter: chrissoaffairs

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