There is no “right way” to protest or otherwise advocate for change

Be polite they say, don’t graffiti they say, don’t smash a window to break un unjust law. Don’t block the road, don’t camp there. Fill out this complaint form, submit to this enquiry, accept the status quo.

I’ve always been a “good girl”, not rocking the boat, trying to make peace in a house, in a group. Trying to keep things calm at the expense of what I believed was just. So I’m new to all this. New to rocking the boat. Hell  I’ve not yet don’t a port blockade because my father works the tugs and my mother doesn’t approve. But I’m learning what boundaries I’m happy to push, while maintaining the fluffy pink outer shell and making others comfortable.

The federal Health Minister has visited the Hunter, announcing a new urgent care clinic for either Newcastle, or Lake Macquarie.While it’s good news for patients, some say more needs to be done to improve access to bulk-billing.
Recently on the local news, complaining that no-one bulk bills anymore – video is here

Protest can’t be effective if it doesn’t inconvenience SOMEONE. I find extreme weather cause by climate change pretty inconvenient, the people being killed by it the ecosystems being destroyed, so I don’t see it as an overreaction to block a coal train to disrupt supply or shut down peak hour traffic to bring attention to the cause. You’ll never make everyone happy.

This week was winter solstice, and Vinnies’ biggest fundraising gig of the year – the CEO sleepout. This is where bosses and other bigwigs pretend to be homeless for a night by sleeping in brand new Kathmandu sleeping bags with Visy branded cardboard to protect them from any elements that may appear in the football field or parliament underground carpark that night. They get to network and go to sleep with a full belly, able to sleep through the night undisturbed by the weather, nightmares from trauma, police moving them on, critters at their toes or dickheads walking home from the pub trying to provoke them

How lovely and clean is the parliament house underground carpark? There’s toilet onsite, and guards to keep away those pesky actual homeless people who might see it as better than sleeping under the Lake Burley Griffin bridges. People have been pointing out the flaws in the event for years.

Mel aka Artist Affame is a good friend and recently too on the convener role at the Antipoverty Centre. She uses her wealth of “lived experience” to advocate for change, using her art to bring more eyes in, and has learned amazingly well how to express herself through her art and writing, and through the “proper channels” of meeting with politicians and attending consultation events and being generally awesome.

That didn’t stop her state’s premier’s media teams from blocking her on Twitter this week for questioning why he’d do the CEO sleepout when he has the power to actually change things for poor and homeless people in South Australia. or Vinnies themselves from also blocking her this week (they’ve previously blocked other antipoverty activists) after questioning the efficacy of the sleepout, and why they’d be doing that while still exploiting people through work for the dole. But I don’t think we have laws here where you can’t block your constituents for asking questions of you.

So, we’ll keep taking you petitions to ignore, making submission you’ll ignore and going through peer led advocacy which you’ll ignore, while you have lunch with ACOSS and still ignore their recommendations to stop keeping people poor. We held out hope that the Robodebt’s revealed horrors would be dealt with by the corruption commission, but no, people just got to remain nameless and move on. So, at some stage people are going to get more than a little frustrated that going through the right channels, being polite, being calm, that they’re not getting them anywhere.

And then we’ll see things burn.

drawing of a frog with a molitov cocktail with text be the light you want to see in the world

Hey, have you tried shopping at Aldi? (and other unhelpful advice given to people on welfare)

Thanks, Choice and Labor, for letting us know that it’s mostly cheaper to shop at Aldi. They’re promising to report back quarterly on that basket of goods, which is about as harsh a whip the current government is going to take to Colesworth and their duopoly. Telling us what we already know.

Labor (the party currently in power) helping out during the cost of living crisis

Aldi is certainly not a secret any more. Some people are still pleasantly surprised when they finally go there, but noone on a low income hasn’t considered it, if it’s anywhere nearby.

But defining nearby and accessible when it comes to a grocery store is difficult. Personally,  I drive, have good mobility, my brain works well enough most days and I have a lot of time. So that brings more options into play.

But many of my friends don’t drive. They can’t, or they can’t afford to have or keep a car. They might be reliant on public transport or taxis to do their groceries. They may even struggle with that, with Cole or Woolies delivery being the only true option for their grocery shop for a variety of reasons.

I know many people who can’t deal with the Aldi environment, whether the layout, the shelves, not knowing what’s not going to be in stock and whether you’ll have to do a secondary shop at the other place anyway.

I prefer to shop Aldi alone, a little distraction throws me off and I tend to just go for my targeted items, avoiding the middle aisle unless I have money and energy to burn on a browse. If something’s not in stock, like ham or bacon, I may just not get it that week rather than going to the nearby Woolies, because I just want to go home after one trip around the store.

Then there’s click and collect – an amazing brain saver, you can shop in the comfort of your home, they bring it to your boot, and you don’t have to go into the store? Sweet deal.

Aldi is not good at all for special dietary needs – need dairy or gluten free? Better off going to the other majors and pay their high prices, at least there will be something there for you. Coeliac disease isn’t a special buy unfortunately.

Nor are other dietary restrictions and sensory overwhelm, all supermarkets are hell in their own ways, but if you know you can get food you’ll eat in a layout you know, your autistic brain will not leave you staring at a wall for the rest of the day because you attempted to do half your shop at Aldi to save $10.

Though that $10? Is a large amount in the budget of a welfare recipient in their country, where $50/day is meant to cover everything and won’t even cover housing in some markets.

Stay safe my frens.

(Oh and the $2 Aldi “aero” peppermint is awesome. Get it if you can and you’re a mint chocolate fan. They have orange and original too, but only for a limited time)

 

(alas I neglected to list some other “helpful tips” people decide to give poor people, feel free to comment with your favourites below!)

I’m tired, sore and disappointed. Happy Budget Hangover day

This but it’s May 2024:

A couple of days ago we heard that there was gonna be some sort of increase to the useless rent assistance payment in this budget. That turned out to be 10% from September 20’s next indexation, up to $9/week depending on how much you already get, if you’re one of people who can actually access it. If my rent goes up less than $10/week at the end of the year (if I’m lucky enough to get a renewed lease hey) I’ll be shocked. Shocked.

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5000 people on JobSeeker who have assessed work capacity of <15 hours (and by all rights should be on DSP if the rules for that weren’t so restrictive) will get a slightly higher rate of Jobseeker, like the over 55s who have been on Jobseeker for 9 months or more. I guess it’s their substitute for not having a sickness benefit – so Cancer patients can afford to pay for parking at the hospital for treatment or something.

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No actual JobSeeker or other welfare increases, despite the hopes and prayers of the community sector and the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee. Thoughts and prayers that I beg them to at least persist with for the next 12 months, because Labor can’t be re-electable without a plan to bring welfare payments to the poverty line in their 2025 election promises.

The $300 energy bill subsidy for all is less than pensioners and families got this financial year (you might be getting some extra in Qld or WA from their state labor governments going to elections this year), and won’t be felt by those who don’t need it and $50 less subsidy a quarter WILL be felt by me. So Yeah. Not impressed. Also, straight to the billing company, quarter by quarter no chance of using it in one hit to catch up or to use for something else. (or someone else if you want to spend your subsidies and tax cuts on Andrew Leigh’s dream of a doubled charity sector by 2030).

Medicines are being capped at their current top rates ($7.70 for pensioners, $31.60 for everyone else) for a few years. So that’ll mean getting less behind, something I yelled about them doing sooner, and yay they’ve done it. Which is great, cos I’ve been having health concerns, and having to pay upfront for the GP isn’t going anywhere for most of us as most GPs haven’t returned to bulk billing, and the average gap in $44 a session now. My scans and blood tests were bulk billed last week, but still need $76 upfront for an appointment for follow-up  so I’m going on Friday, pension day!

I’ll leave you with the darling Catherine Caine, brains behind Nobody Deserves Poverty, and her budget reaction from last night.

Love yas. xo

Defining the “Essentials” of Living

Week two of the Poverty course, and the pre-lecture discussion this week is about what things we would consider to be everyday essentials for everyone. We’ve gone through some items from the Australian Living Standards Survey (ALSS), 2017, Poverty and Exclusion in Modern Australia (PEMA) Survey, 2010 and as a comparison the Hong Kong Measuring Poverty and Social Exclusion Questionnaire, 2011 and chosen whether they’re essential for everyone, whether we have them and if we don’t is it because we chose not to have them or can’t afford them.

Some items, like clothes dryers and dishwashers are generally seen as non-essential. However with the two weeks of rain we’ve had here on the east coast I could go a drier right now, and the dishwasher we somehow have in this rental cuts my dishwashing time so much, time and spoons I can allocate elsewhere. Not a luxury, not and essential for me, but nice to have.

Others have discussed whether home internet is essential, and I would argue it is for nearly everyone these days, how else would any of us be able to do an inline course after dark without it? But then, doing a course such as this one is a little luxury in itself. Being able to extend knowledge in a field you work in every day, to gain more insight, more theoretical and practical understanding of what you’re actually dealing with. I’ve many friends and comrades in the antipoverty movement who rely on their home or mobile internet to connect, to lobby, to seek help, to learn and further themselves and their causes. They may be able to make do with a phone only – I can’t just do phone if I want to read anything longer than a tweet, but to say that essential internet stuff can be dealt with on an hour booked time on a local library PC is really restrictive and doesn’t take into account what people need to do online to live these days.

Dental care is essential, but not available to many. Same with health care – the Hong Kong survey asked if being able to take a taxi to and from hospital was essential – here we would most likely have a friend or family member with a car to take us home, even if we were able to have an ambulance ride in – but whether that’s even an option varies by state, concessions and insurances.

Speaking of insurance – home contents and comprehensive car insurance were on the questionnaire for Australia. I personally don’t have either, I flinched hard enough at the quote for greenslips to simply re-register my car. But are they essential? I’m sure other drivers would like to know the others on the road were insured. And if we lost our home to a fire we’d be starting from scratch. But to insure our wombled household goods? So hard to justify.

Other items and conditions, such as a house without mold, adequate heating or cooling, the means to afford those power bills, are all everyday discussion in my threads. All to be treasured when you have them and to push for others to have too. How could you argue they’re not essential but those in power still hesitate to mandate them.

I’ve had a busy morning, taking a  months recycling out to the point, starting some of my Antipoverty Centre duties and trying to finish these readings. The 6-8pm timeframe of lectures is rough, but I can make it through that. I’m a bit tired, the cool weather just makes me want to sleep more too. The rain makes juggling the dog’s begging to go out and the washing backing up hard. At least Maxi’s skin irritations have settled.

We’ll have our own committee #LeftBehindCommittee

With hookers and blackjack, because we don’t discriminate against sex workers and some of us are quite the card counters. I try to stick to gambling with virtual money, such as in Red Dead or GTA, as I’m sure I could fall down that addictive rabbit hold if I had the chance.

Oh, the Budget is coming up fast, 12 days to go!

Today, the Australian Unemployed Workers Union launched our response to the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee, since it both won’t have any current welfare recipients on it nor be listened to by the government anyway. It’s called the “Left Behind Committee” and we’d love to have your submission about what it’s like to “live” off welfare in this country and what you’d like to see in the Budget and upcoming “announceables” since there’s an election in 12 months too.

Post your submission to Twitter with the hashtag #LeftBehindCommittee, or if you want to send something longer email it to media@auwu.org.au (with “Left Behind Committee” as the subject-line). The union is going to collate and print the submissions and take them to Canberra.

Greg Jericho posted a piece this morning calling the government out for not WANTING to Raise the Rate of jobseeker. For choosing to not fund it, for choosing to fund other things, because budgets are all about choices and it’s certainly a choice to have called for JobSeeker to remain above the poverty line post-covid supplement while you were the opposition but continue to think that celebrating the $20/wk raise last year for the lowest payments as having done your job and being enough to take you through the the next election? A twenty dollar a week increase that was absorbed before it even came in 6 months later. You honestly can’t believe that the average person believes that people are better off now than when you got into office?

The call for Jobseeker to be 90% of the pension is weak, but I was hoping you’d decide to do it, and then you’d be left alone by many for awhile. I mean it would make a HUGE difference to people’s lives, even if it’s still leaving everyone who relies of welfare as their main income below the poverty line. Yep, even pensioners and the like. Even most single parent pensioners even when you take into account their other family benefits and rent assistance, they’re still likely to be below the poverty line, and then their kid turns 14 they’re thrown onto Jobseeker again, a suddenly slashing of a family’s income.

As a disability pensioner, I lay low. I resent that aged pensioners got ore wiggle room with how much they can earn before their pension reduces, even though I’m not working currently myself. Giving people options to try to go into the workforce is one thing that being on DSP is meant to bring, without the hovering disability employment services telling you you’re doing it wrong, or transitioning to more hours too slow, or taking too many days off for your disability. The slight amount of more money also allows for a bit less stress when dialing up or down work hours. But, the truth is, on the partner rate I’m getting $60/day instead of $80 since I simply have a partner. “Fortunately” he earns too little for me to lose any pension, but isn’t that a whole issue in itself, that disabled people lose benefits because the state sees their partners as their carers and keepers? The same applies for the aged pension, based off the 80s single income family, buying a house, retiring having 1 or certainly probably not 2 full time wages leading up to retirement. Those who don’t own their own home by then are screwed, continuing to rent while rent assistance comes in as an afterthought.

I’d be curious to see what would happen to partner and pension rates if the JobSeeker single allowance went up to that 90% figure, or about $72/day. Where would that partnered rate go to? Would it be like when the covid supplement came in and people were getting more on Jobseeker than DSP? Weird times that I hope happen and create chaos and make people think about what the hell we’re doing to people in the name of a budget surplus.