This morning I woke up at around 5am. In my head I calculated my income over the next few months. Then I calculated my outgoings. My semi-conscious spreadsheet spread out between the sheets. Hmm, more out than in. That’s never good. I went back and did it again. Same result. I started to feel that dreaded dull thump of panic rising. That immobilising sense of dread. I work out what I will pay first. What I will extend. What I can do to ensure future me can pay the costs of past me.
The sun’s not even up and I’m in fiscal meltdown. I love the smell of overwhelm in the morning. And compared to most, I’m fine.
Then a text from one of the kids. They live relatively independently on minimum income. They need a little cash to tide them over until pay day. Or to get to work. Or to buy food. Young people are doing it tough. The generation most likely to never own their own home, be coerced into university, and then kick off their adult lives already in debt. There’s no greater way to keep people oppressed than with the invisible yoke of debt. The cruelty of poverty. It’s hard to rise up when you can barely stand.
We are in a cost-of-living crisis. Basically, we are all paying more for food and household items, healthcare, insurance and transport. Stats show that household disposable income fell by 4.3% last year. It was the biggest decline since the 1980s. And it’s people on low incomes who suffer most. Of course they do. We’ve been abandoning and punishing the poor for years. And then when they fail to thrive, we blame them. Very often they are carrying the burden of going backwards financially and accumulating punitive fines for late payments, no payments and late lodgements. We fall into holes we cannot dig ourselves out of. We work harder. We work longer. We dig deeper.
If you want to live life outside the debt hole you have to be rich.
According to the ATO, 66 millionaires earning almost a billion dollars put together paid no tax last year. That’s because they had highly-skilled accountants. These accountants got their clients out of $400 million worth of tax (just over half of what we need here for flood money). They paid their accountants an average of $219, 000. And this was tax deductible. Data from the ATO also showed that these wealthy tax dodgers made an average of $14.5 million each last year. We celebrate people like this. But their profits come at a cost. It’s called poverty.
In Australia, 3.3 million people live below the poverty line. That’s around $500 per week for a single adult and $1,130 for a family with two adults and two children. Jobseeker places people at around $269 per week below the poverty line. It sucks being poor. When my eldest two kids were small I felt the sting. I’ve lined up at Vinnies for food and groceries. Begged for rent relief. I needed vouchers to pay my power bills. There were ten years when I didn’t buy a single new thing.
Poverty comes with stigma. People who struggle to get by feel like failures. They feel like their failure is personal. But it’s not. It’s systemic. The system isn’t broken. It’s working as it was designed. A pyramid scheme that funnels wealth from the bottom to the top. Trickle down? No, that was the sales pitch. When it comes to wealth distribution the model is, reach to the bottom and suck it up. It’s a giant extractive mouth sucking on a capitalist straw. Sucking up natural resources, labour, equity. That’s the feeling you get in the night. Your wellbeing and your children’s future being drained as you sleep.
Depression, anxiety and suicide are on the increase. Maybe the solution isn’t more psychologists. Maybe people are tired of being given the tools to accept being powerless. Maybe they need power.
Give people somewhere secure to live. A sense of belonging. Something to eat. Something to look forward to. Here’s a radical idea. I think you’ll find it in the Christian bible: share.
Perhaps in the eyes of economists the cost-of-living crisis isn’t a crisis at all. Perhaps in the endgame it’s just the cost of capitalism.
Change it.
– Mandy Nolan
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
