Name: Mick Smart

Age: 32

Turning point: Was injured falling down a retaining wall as a work-for-the-dole contractor. Now suffers chronic pain and mobility issues and is unable to find work.

Lives: Lakes Entrance, Victoria.

After housing costs, has to live on: $245 a week.

Life is full of many lessons and teaching moments, both good and bad, and we pass these lessons on to each other, and our children. Some lessons seem to stick with us, like not to touch the hot stove, to look both ways in traffic, whereas others – like not to judge a book by its cover, to treat others as you would like to be treated – don’t seem to translate well into adulthood, nor often are the lessons of Buddha or Christ practised by the Buddhists or Christians, especially when it comes down to how we treat or perceive poor people and migrants on the sociopolitical stage.

I think truth is sorely needed in this world, which sadly is often oversaturated in lies and broken promises. So what is the truth?

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Well, the data right now shows that countless people are suffering unnecessarily in the world. We know that poverty can be a detriment to our physical and mental health, and that in Australia, a country rich in resources, there are more than 3 million people living below the poverty line, including more than 730,000 children. We know there are roughly 120,000 homeless and another 2.1 million Australians of working age that live with disability – of which more than 115,000 are looking for work, and all of whom compete for around 170,000 job vacancies without having the advantages associated with financial stability, such as access to safe and secure housing or being able to afford the relevant education or training with which to qualify for most of the positions vacant.

Using my own life as an example, even before the injuries I suffered while on the work-for-the-dole program I struggled to find gainful employment, but not for a lack of effort. The year prior I must have applied to over 470 job advertisements and received hundreds of emails stating that the position was either filled or my application rejected, and while I consider myself as intelligent, well spoken, determined, driven, with a wide range of experience in a variety of industries, I never seem to be able to meet the criteria for most jobs. That is true for so many because, regardless of certifications or qualifications, the unemployed far outnumber the amount of jobs currently available.

When it comes to how we treat the unemployed, a shameful pattern of blame and bias emerges. Many are crushed beneath the heavy hand of the news headlines highlighting the “crackdown on dole bludgers”, portraying millions as “lazy job snobs” against all logic – that somehow we choose to struggle and live in poverty. It makes it hard to feel as though the data or “truth” has been given much consideration at all. This rhetoric seems to then justify further persecution, stripping recipients of various freedoms otherwise entitled to the “working class”; our dignity and self-worth decimated beneath layers of punitive policies which penalise those who are victims of poverty, seemingly designed only to make life on social security as undesirable as possible.

All this seems to point to poverty as being a symptom of a society that incentivises competition and consumerism over collaboration and cooperation, a moral vacuum used to justify the corruption of human values by placing profit before the needs of a growing populace – which is in itself completely unsustainable and only further entrenches the problem – so instead of accepting or acknowledging the issue we shift the blame to those who are victims of the system, and so sometimes we lie to each other because the truth can be too painful or damaging to accept, so painful that many are unwilling to believe or even hear it. And all too often the truth is not as profitable as a well-told lie.

Now, three years after my injuries, I come to the crossroads of a very uncertain future. My fate seems literally woven into the debate on various policies enforced by separate political parties with very divided ideologies. Meanwhile, every affordable rental my partner and I have applied for has been leased without us even getting a chance for inspection. We aren’t eligible for really any kind of home or cash loan, and I have so far been unable to find a cheap caravan to move into. Luckily a friend has a room for us to stay in, helping us to move in temporarily until we are able to secure proper accommodation, rending us “surfers of the couch”.

While my life fundamentally falls apart and I struggle to find a sense of stability, I am trapped in daily chronic pain and try to self-manage my own physical and mental health issues. I have never stopped looking for work, and I have been stuck in a compartmentalised kind of sociopolitical limbo, where nobody seems to be able to agree on, or work together towards, any kind of meaningful social change for the benefit of all.

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The data doesn’t lie and the factors causing widespread poverty and unemployment never seem to change and people live in fear for their future, as I have these last three years.

So then I have to ask myself: is the value or purpose of human life nothing more than an individual’s ability (or lack thereof) to fulfil the needs or requirements of more powerful men? Or is a person’s worth truly just a measure of how much wealth they can amass?

Personally, I see everyone as equals, but through the narrow lens of social hierarchy that doesn’t seem to be the case, and to paraphrase a line from the popular 1999 hit movie Fight Club – you are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank, you are not the car you drive, you are not the contents of your wallet.

