Friends and family are “scared I will starve to death": Welfare recipients tell government to raise the bloody rate
A new expert committee of single parents, JobSeeker recipients, and Disability Support Pensioners have detailed the hardship and abuses they’re suffering in the welfare system.
Today, AUWU’s Everyone Left Behind Committee (ELBC) has released a new report, demanding the federal government raise the rate of all income support payments above the Henderson Poverty Line in next week’s budget.
This comes in the wake of leading economists, prominent women leaders, and the government’s own EIAC committee recommending an immediate increase to JobSeeker and related payments.
This week, Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner also told the ABC that increasing JobSeeker “will stop homicides”, by supporting women to leave violent partners. The evidence is overwhelmingly clear: if Albanese and his Ministers refuse to raise the rate in this budget, more lives will be lost to violence and poverty. And the blood will be on their hands.
An early budget “sneak peek” indicates that the government won’t increase the base rates of welfare payments – instead choosing to tinker with energy bill relief or Commonwealth Rent Assistance (even though most welfare recipients are ineligible for it). Minor increases to supplementary payments would achieve four-fifths of fuck-all: only a raise to the base rate of payments will ensure no one is left behind.
The Everyone Left Behind report – featuring the only budget committee made up entirely of welfare recipients – paints a harrowing picture of what life is really like on the lowest unemployment payment in the OECD.
A single mum – dumped onto JobSeeker because her child turned 14 – revealed that she’s currently facing eviction from her home. If the government refuses to act, she said she will have to “search for a carpark I think will be safe enough for my daughter and I to park in at night to sleep.”
Another JobSeeker recipient said that she’s lost 4 kilograms “in the last 4 months alone”, because she can’t afford to buy enough food. And another shared that: “my nutrition is so bad that scurvy is a genuine concern” and “friends and family donate food to me because they’re scared I will starve to death.”
Members of the ELBC committee agreed it was a life-saver when the government doubled the rate of JobSeeker during the early Covid lock-downs.
“When the rate was raised temporarily in the first year of the pandemic, my depression went into remission for the first (and only) time,” a committee member said. “I was able to eat better. I bought a new fridge and a new mattress for my bed. And I saved a little for a rainy day.”
Another JobSeeker recipient said that doubling the rate enabled her to go “to an optometrist for the first time in years. This led to a diagnosis of proliferative diabetic retinopathy”.
However, since the payment was plunged back below the poverty line, she said “I’m losing my sight, due to not being able to meet my health requirements and other basic needs.”
The AUWU invites journalists to speak to these welfare recipients first-hand. Again, too much oxygen has been sucked up by “experts” who don’t have first-hand experiences of poverty, during this budget cycle.
Read the full ELBC report here: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6038638f91e2af2410f878c9/t/663ac0ec7626fd2920be3b7f/1715126513576/ELBC_ReportFinal.pdf
Media contact: Jeremy Poxon / 0404 089 575 / jeremy@auwu.org.au