Dear Prime Minister Albanese,
Let
me first congratulate you on your election win, it is a justification of that
stereotype often attributed to Australians as to not suffering fools, but that
is not the purpose of this letter.
It has been roughly a year since
I wrote a letter to your predecessor imploring him to act like the christian he
purports to be and allow two Australian born girls and their parents to go home
to Biloela. He didn’t respond but that doesn’t matter because you’re in charge
now. Given you committed to granting the whole family visas – I see that was what
you first tasked Mr Chalmers with – and they are now home in Bilo, but
Permanent Residency really was the way to go and I’m hopeful you’ll have that
sorted soon enough. Once again, not the purpose of this letter.
Nor is it Climate Change,
although it probably should be given the threat it poses to the planet and I
must commend you on despatching Senator Wong to The Pacific in an attempt to
repair the damage that was wrought over the previous decade. We have a long way
to go here Prime Minister. Please don’t fall into the trap of referring to
neighbours and friends as “our” Pacific Family, it is as insulting as referring
to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as “our” First Nation’s people.
Unlike that person you defeated in your run for office, I actually have a Pacific
Family. Climate Change is affecting The Pacific more than any other populated
region on Earth which means my relatives will have water “lapping at their door”
as the former QLD cop (?!) who jokes about it and has recently become your
opposite number in The House, is wont to do.
You cannot fail The Pacific and
that is all I have to say on that topic for the moment. I am writing to you
about something a bit closer to home and it appears yours and Senator Wong’s
trips have been productive, so let us move on. We are a Nation in crisis, Prime
Minister, although not of your doing, there are many issues you must address
but you are obviously busy, so I won’t bother you with all of them. It is
heartening to hear that the Indue Card is to be abolished and that cannot come
soon enough. But the entire social security system needs an overhaul, not just
this draconian card that exists purely to control the populace, but all the
rest as well.
The reality of living on
Government payments is a far cry from the assistance you received when you were
but a wee lad. While I commend you on raising yourself from what is often
framed as a childhood of abject poverty, I also question your understanding of
what poverty looks like in modern Australia. Public housing is nothing near
what it was like, back in your day. I know more people who are currently, or
have been, homeless than I do people who live in Public housing and this is a
problem that is only getting worse.
Having been homeless on more than
one occasion myself – surfing between couches, living room floors, garages, the
space underneath Queenslanders that were being renovated, the occasional park
bench, or, the memorable time I got busted sleeping in my storage unit because
it was cold and I couldn't find accommodation – doesn’t make me an expert yet
it does allow me to speak from experience and that was over a decade ago, but from
what I’ve heard recently, homelessness is well beyond crisis point. The takeaway
from the previous paragraph is “have been, homeless” which, as much as it pains
me to say, were only able to afford accommodation because the previous
Government (temporarily) raised the unemployment payment TO THE POVERTY LINE.
Not above it but just scraping by.
Scraping by in Australia these
days, after the rate was lowered to a level comparable with pre-pandemic
payments is difficult to say the least. Not that it was easy before the rate
was temporarily raised but when it was, having the ability to pay bills on
time, get all prescriptions filled in one visit to the pharmacy, feeding not
only your companion animal but yourself and then a bit left over to purchase
such things as phone and public transport credit (which are necessities when
looking for employment) provided some sort of stability, then it was all stripped
away.
When the rate was raised, some,
but not all, of those people I know who were homeless managed to get a roof
over their heads. Now they are struggling to keep themselves housed despite many
of them having found some form of employment, often at the minimum wage and I
commend you for your government’s successful submission to the Fair Work
Tribunal, but it will do little to lift Australians out of poverty when
millions continue to rely on Government payments to survive. Raising the rate
of all payments will go a long way to curbing the growing rate of poverty in
Australia.
The current system prices the unemployed
out of gaining employment and the homeless finding themselves homes. It is forcing
people to prioritise medication over food which results in prioritising the
medicine that one does not need to consume with food over the others where eating
is required. This is a serious health issue and given health was a priority at
your first National Cabinet meeting I suggest you consider the flow on effects poverty
has on the health system. When people who can’t afford their medication because
they can’t afford to eat, have a propensity to end up in Emergency Departments with entirely preventable ailments.
Increasing all payments currently
managed by Centrelink is a stimulus measure the economy is asking for and you
are in a position to deliver it. Given that most Australians who don’t already
have a mortgage will never be able to afford one and a growing number can’t
even qualify for a rental should be enough motivation for you to take action on
this matter. There are few things that people require to physically survive –
shelter, water, warmth and food, yet our current “safety net” often fails to
provide Australians with some or all of these things.
My credentials are well
documented, having graduated from a fancy pants private school with a B+ in economics
(could have been a B-, but no one really cares (I certainly don’t)) and I
worked in banking for roughly the same amount of time I spent in high school,
which makes me more qualified to comment on financial matters than anyone who
currently sits on the opposition benches so you would be better served
listening to me than any of them.
The main gain for Australia when
you raise the rate of all government payments is that those people receiving
said payments will overwhelmingly spend that money. Of course, some will put a
little bit away for “a rainy day” or their children’s birthdays, but speaking
generally, that money will end up in the hands of those fortunate enough to be
employed.
Granted, those business owners
who are currently having a massive sook cry about the minimum wage rise will
benefit as well but they are too daft to realise that if they can’t pay their
workers a living wage they shouldn’t own a business, which is slightly off
point, however if you bear with me, I’ll elaborate.
Were those currently on
Centrelink payments to have their payments raised to at least to the poverty
line, they might be able to afford a coffee on their way to a job interview,
dressed in appropriate clothing having just disembarked from a bus they caught
from near their house after consuming a nutritious breakfast. It is not just
the café owner who will benefit from this but the barista who doesn’t lose
their job, whoever owns the clothing store, and their staff will as well, so
will the bus driver and council who operate the service, let alone the whole
supply chain who grew, transported, and sold the ingredients of the aforementioned
nutritious breakfast.
Imagine for a moment, if you
will, that the above example gets the job. That means probably more than one
coffee a day, maybe lunch if the café has a kitchen, new clothes as one cannot
be expected to wear the exact same outfit everyday unless it is a uniform (but
even those need to be washed), the bus driver gets a new regular and the
council benefits from that twenty odd bucks extra per week in pre-paid fares. The
supply chain will also reap the rewards as not only will nutritious breakfasts
be consumed but nutritious dinners will be added to the menu and given crunchy
water was recently at twelve bucks a head, people might be able to afford to
feed themselves as a result of being able to afford to gain employment.
That I felt the need to explain
that scenario in such simple terms saddens me Prime Minister. I know you are an
intelligent man and Australia has been led to believe that you are also a
compassionate one. Please show some compassion when considering the plight of
those who subsist on Centrelink payments. Your election victory was greeted with
cautious optimism by those who thought, with your well advertised upbringing,
might deliver something of substance in terms of policy for those festering
below the poverty line. Instead, you let Mr Burke launch WorkForce (an even
more punitive system than JobActive) and it is already showing it is not fit
for purpose. I know I am not the only one who has had trouble accessing it and
I have to report my job search efforts, or I don’t get my payment. Which means
the rent doesn’t get paid (pretty sure my gas bill is overdue as well) and I
will have to cast myself into the torture pit that is Services Australia to
plead my case.
What is currently passed off as
Social Security in Australia is a joke if I’m being polite. If I’m being
honest, it is a disgrace. For a country as rich as Australia purposefully keeping
its own citizens in abject poverty beggars belief. That the most
profitable companies and individuals pay little to no tax (mainly none) while
women over fifty are the fastest growing homeless demographic in the country is
in no uncertain terms, a failure of the social security system.
If you really want to be a Prime
Minister who governs for “all Australians”, I would argue that those who
qualify for Centrelink payments as a result of their Citizenship are
Australians, yet your Government appears to be willing not only to continue the
Howard era initiated subjugation of the least fortunate for the profit of
privileged private “providers” but punish them further. The Job Network system
is broken and has been from the outset. If you were to do anything useful that
wasn’t raising ALL Centrelink payments, it would be to get rid of Job Network
altogether and abolish “Mutual” Obligations as there is nothing mutual when one
considers the relationship a jobseeker has with their ridiculously titled “Job
Service Provider”.
For those words to be applied to
these private enterprises is a misnomer if I have ever seen one. No service is
provided and more often than not, those fortunate enough to find employment is
without any assistance from them, only to be harassed for the details of the jobseeker’s
new employer in order for the agency to receive a financial reward for doing
nothing.
Read that again if you need to.
I’m interested to know how you plan on justifying to the Australian taxpayer
why you insist on giving their money to private corporations for nothing. They
have one job – to get other people jobs. Simple really, but they don’t. Even to
the point where you know they have a vacancy in their own office and enquire
about it only to be told you wouldn’t be suitable despite being more qualified
for the job than the person you would be replacing. They are supposed to
furnish jobseekers with job ready clothing. They Don’t. Credit for phones and
public transport is supposed to be provided. It isn’t. If they didn’t exist and
the rate of ALL Centrelink payments were raised to at least the pandemic level,
people would be able to do all the things “Job Service Providers” don’t do,
even though that is their one and only job.
During your tenure as Opposition
Leader, you often (rightly) criticised the former Prime Minister for his
inaction and incompetence by saying that “he has/had one job”. Be it fires,
floods, or the vaccine rollouts, you used that line, so in all fairness I would
suggest that you have “one job” and that is to solve the poverty crisis in
Australia. Delegate the tasks as you see fit, I’m sure Mr Burke and Ms
Rishworth are capable of scrapping the current system immediately and implementing
a more humane one, but that is your one job, so I’ll leave it up to you make
sure they do it.
To continue on your current path will
only serve to further entrench poverty in Australia, not to mention put greater
strain on our already overstretched health system and exacerbate the homelessness
crisis.
For far too long have the least
fortunate in Australian society been treated as second class citizens at best,
but in reality are subjected to a life of begging, pleading and grovelling in
order to feed and house (if they’re lucky) themselves. At worst they are simply
discarded and left to die somewhere, only to become another statistic. For a
person to have their life reduced to nothing more than a number on a Government
database and then be forced to justify their desire to remain on this mortal
plane for as long as possible by a process of demeaning requirements, then
forced to play a game of satisfying an arbitrary number of tasks in order to
live is a cruelly perverse practice that doesn’t fit well with the oft quoted
mantra of Australia being the land of the “fair go”.
Australia is crumbling from the
bottom up because “trickle down” economics doesn’t work. If it did, the most
profitable corporations and wealthy individuals would pay tax, meaning I would
have no reason to write you this letter as there would be no excuse for the
insistence of the political class to keep roughly four million of their constituents
reliant on the scraps from the table in order to keep breathing. But to
compound this nonsense mindset is that private (for profit) companies are
contracted to administer the punishment(s) on a group of Citizens who are only
looking for, as your predecessor liked to frame it, “a hand up” not a Jackboot pressing
aggressively on the back of their neck.
You have an opportunity here,
Prime Minister, to forge your legacy in the opening days of your Government by
overseeing the implementation of a humane Social Security Service that exists
to assist people rather than punish them. Do not let it pass you by.
As you sit down for your taxpayer
funded lunch in Parliament House before Question Time, having disembarked from
your taxpayer funded CommCar after a restful sleep in your taxpayer funded mansion,
spare a thought for those who don’t have it so good and reflect on the fact
that you can, with the stroke of a pen, change the lives of millions, “All
Australians”, as it were.
As you wisely decided to be sworn
into your office without a bible I won’t bother asking what jesus would do, but
I will ask you one question.
What would your Mother do?
Regards,
