Living on Newstart for a few years teaches you a lot. It teaches you the massive variety of meals you can lust after while making instant noodles for the tenth time in a fortnight. It teaches you exactly how many weeks you can avoid paying a bill before your phone, internet or gas gets cut off. It teaches you how to repair a computer with household items, so you can report your job applications and non-existent earnings for the month. But most of all, it teaches you that the vast majority of people either don’t understand or don’t care about how utterly terrifying and depressing your life constantly is.
The Labor party’s ‘review’, as announced at their conference this weekend, is a pretty textbook example. ACOSS and Anglicare have both released reports this year alone calling for welfare rates to be dramatically raised. The evidence for a dramatic increase is abundant. But, they apparently need 18 months to review the system. I’m not denying the entire system needs reviewing — employment agencies are wasteful, harmful, and inefficient; Work for the Dole has killed people, and Centrelink’s systems and bureaucracy have become our new cultural shorthand for complete ineptitude through years of governmental neglect.
But — that 18 months, if they are elected, is 18 more months of crap for me and hundreds of thousands of other people. I’ve been looking for long-term, stable work that I can do with my disabilities, and with my terrible mental health directly exacerbated by the current welfare regime, for most of my adult life. While I’d love to say I’ll have it by then, I really sincerely doubt that.
The statistic I see cited a lot from welfare advocates is one job per 18 jobseekers. Thing is, that’s any job. CEO. Doctor. Engineer. Not many of those jobs are the old ‘get a retail job’, or ‘get a job in a warehouse’ which gets thrown around every time I mention my difficulty finding work. Very, very few of those jobs are suitable for the thousands of disabled people who are ineligible for the nearly as unsurvivable Disability Support Pension, those of us with little formal education, those of us with little work experience, those of us who are gender, sexual, racial, linguistic, or any other kind of minority and are at the whim of hiring managers and business owners. There’s no such thing as workplace discrimination if you’re never hired. Just the umpteenth rejection because you’re ‘not the right cultural fit for our brand’.
‘Train in an in-demand field’ comes up a lot. But even with the Andrew’s government’s ‘free’ TAFE courses, the admin and enrolment fees still required would take me months to save up for — with no guarantee of employment at the end. And I’ve done this already. I have Certificate II in Automotive — a field which is apparently in demand, and has a skills shortage. I’ve had this qualification, which I’ve kept active through volunteer work and as an enthusiast, for 3 years. But, can’t do an apprenticeship because I can’t work full time, and for the maybe 40 applications for automotive retail and trade assistant jobs I’ve done over the last year, I’ve gotten a total of 2 non-automated responses. One was an interview where I was never called back, and another was a guy who called to interview me and hung up after learning I was, in his words, ‘some fucking tranny’.
Whenever I bring up that I’d just like to be able to do something where I’m guaranteed a job at the end, no one seems to even understand. Why should my ability to survive be at the whim of a corporation or small business owner? I can’t afford to start my own business, as much as that would be pretty preferable at this point.
I’d love to see the LNP’s supposed jobs and growth. All I see is no jobs and living on the same income I did three years ago. I’d love to see Labor’s ‘review’ of Newstart, but honestly, I really doubt I’ll make it. I’ve been suicidal and depressed through most of this process and my living situation has only ever made things worse. But instead of help, instead of enough money to survive and help to find suitable work, I get robodebt. I get lectures about ‘just getting a job’. I get automated rejection letters by the hundreds.
I just want to live like the rest of you, we all do. The dole bludger is a myth, because living like this is not fucking easy. And we need help. Now. Not after 18 months of a Labor government, not with the LNP whip of starvation, forced relocation and underpaid traineeships in fast food service. I want to work for a legal wage. No one will let me. And everyone seems to either not understand, surely I can just get a job then. Or not care. Because they’ve got theirs.