By Joey King
In light of the Government’s decision to ignore the recommendations of the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee report to raise the rate of all Social Services, I have been reflecting on my life and why I bothered voting for the Labor Party in the first place.
I googled the term “dirt poor”. I know it comes from a time when people couldn’t afford to have flooring or even straw in their homes, but I wanted to see what it might mean here, in Australia. Many dictionaries said, “suffering extreme poverty” or “very poor”, but Dictionary.com states: “lacking nearly all material means or resources for living”. This resonates for me, a 54-year-old woman living in Australia in 2023.
I am part of the fastest growing demographic for homelessness and poverty in Australia. I have had a severe and persistent mental illness for most of my life and I have been living in my car around Perth and the South West of Western Australia, for the past four years. I do not have the material means or resources to secure viable safe housing or employment. I do not have choices that will help me move on from where I find myself. I do not want to be this person but cannot see a way things will change.
We are desperate and real change needs to occur – or the chasm that exists between rich and poor will continue, and ever more people will be living and dying in poverty. I am looking at least another two years before public housing becomes available. I miss meals, juggle my medication, have no social life, and wonder how I can be expected to look for employment when I might go days without a shower or have been awake all night because I’m in fear of my surroundings? I am one of the 40% of women my age who live in poverty. I am ‘dirt poor’.
I am constantly stressed, afraid and triggered. My mental health has been further destabilised because of my financial and housing situation. Women like me experience (in no particular order): uncertainty, fear, loneliness, truly being cold, vulnerability, mental and physical health decline, risk of being assaulted or being moved on by police, discrimination, judgement, assumptions you are an alcoholic or drug addict or that you chose to be homeless.
I’m not what people assume homeless people should look like, therefore not considered desperate enough to be helped. As a 53-year-old woman without children, I am the lowest priority for both government and social services – as I was informed by WA Department of Housing staff. I tell people I’m homeless and they just shrug likes it’s no big thing. I wonder: when did the wellbeing of some of the most vulnerable people in this country become so dismissed? When did homelessness and poverty become normalised in people’s eyes? When did people stop caring? When did the Labor Party stop caring?
Luke Henriques-Gomes, Social affairs and Inequality Editor at Guardian Australia, wrote in 2021 that 44 homeless people have died so far this year in Western Australia. Matching data from homelessness and health services with hospital records, 255 people known to those services had died in Perth since 2017 and that was two years ago. The average age of death was 47. These people didn’t need to die. They died because they were “lacking nearly all material means or resources for living”. They, like me, were “dirt poor”.
Poverty is a choice decided by Government to keep those of us living in poverty.
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From 2019:
The Prime Minister couldn't answer a simple question about Newstart, so I'll answer it for him:
Of course he couldn't live on $40 a day. No one can. And that's exactly why Newstart should be increased. pic.twitter.com/FWu6AtGFXI
— Anthony Albanese (@AlboMP) July 31, 2019
Poverty directly affects more than one in 10 Australians, but it indirectly affects us all. #APW2019 pic.twitter.com/V6VJ499SHD
— Senator Penny Wong (@SenatorWong) October 17, 2019
And 2020:
The Government has been forced to admit that $40 a day isn't enough to live on.
In the aftermath of the pandemic, we can't have people sliding back into poverty.
Because when Australians fall on hard times, we should help them get back on their feet. pic.twitter.com/ZGYdUunKcC
— Anthony Albanese (@AlboMP) July 23, 2020
Now this:
Government ignores calls from its own experts to lift ‘seriously inadequate’ jobseeker rate #auspol
Labor NOT lifting jobseeker in May budget, we understand.https://t.co/WVjsEAAkOk
— Paul Karp (@Paul_Karp) April 18, 2023
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Please show us that the Labor Party has not forgotten its roots.
The factors leading to the formation of the Labor Party were:
- The influence of socialist writers who promised a new society free of poverty and inequality.
- The influence of English born trade unionists.
- Nineteenth century liberalism which, in the Australian colonies, accepted that workers should be represented in the colonial parliament.
- The presence of manhood suffrage.
- The introduction of payment of members of Parliament in 1889.
- The determination of the Inter Colonial Trade Union Congresses throughout the 1880s to have Labor represented in parliament by a separate Labor Party, not by Liberals or Conservatives.
Please help us by raising the rate of Jobseeker and other social service payments, so that we can afford to be a part of our community again, to afford to eat, to have the medications we need, to be treated like Australians.
“The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.” (Thomas Jefferson).
You can listen to me speak about living on Jobkeeper on the Full Story podcast, and read more about her perspective on welfare in The Guardian.
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