I began working when I was 13 years old, and with few exceptions I have worked my entire life. From starting at a bank I worked in finance, eventually managing budgets of more than $90 million. I share this to make clear that the desperate situation my family and I are in is not a result of laziness or an inability to budget. It is very simply because the parenting payment does not cover our essential living costs.
In 2022, I became ill and spent months in and out of the hospital. I was working as a contractor and had used my savings to move house and buy a car, so with no income and no savings my only option was to apply for JobSeeker.
When payments did start coming through it was a terrible shock to discover that no matter what I did there was simply no way of stretching the payment to cover even our most basic necessities,
There were the big expenses like replacing my car after the engine failed, my daughter waiting over a year to have her braces removed because I owed $2300 to the orthodontist or watching our family pet die a slow and painful death because I simply couldn’t cover the cost of euthanasia.
But the frightening reality is that we literally can’t afford daily essentials. Things like my diabetes medication, something that has already led to serious health complications and my hospitalisation, or the bus fare for my children to get to school – for a while, I kept them home on those days, but once their school contacted me about attendance, I began sending them and just hoping they wouldn’t end up with a fine I couldn’t pay.
It’s having to swap out chicken and veg with 2-minute noodles for dinner because I had to pay $16 to print my daughter’s homework. It’s having to replace my son’s school socks and then not being able to afford toilet paper when we unexpectedly ran out before payday. Can you imagine not being able to afford $6 for toilet paper?
These deeply humiliating and upsetting situations aren’t occasional; they are daily occurrences. I am constantly worried about my family’s expenses and how I am going to cover them.
But what truly terrifies me more than anything else is the toll that living on welfare has taken on my children’s emotional well-being. They experience food insecurity, are known at school as the “poor kids,” and are hesitant to tell me they’ve run out of school supplies or that their underwear doesn’t fit because, as much as I have tried to hide our situation from them, there is just no escaping the reality that we are living in abject poverty on Centrelink.