The very first article I wrote for Eureka Street reflected on the interaction between attitudes to poverty and public policies around it. It was published in 2003. It rose out of an unsettling encounter with a level of privation that I thought did not exist in my adopted country.
I had gone to a house in the northern suburbs to collect a cat. A colleague at a mentoring program had told me one of her case-families had kittens they'd be glad to give away. And so we found ourselves, in a house with only an armchair and a mattress for furniture, surrounded by five unkempt kids, speaking to a woman with a shy, weary face.
We selected a male tabby and gave the kids a box of chocolates. The eldest boy carried the kitten for us as we walked to our car. 'You'll take care of him, right?' he asked, his gaze direct and serious, the question tugging inexplicably deep. It wasn't until we drove away that it sunk in — where I had just been. I felt the weight of it.
I had worked in areas of disadvantage in my native Philippines, as a student volunteer and as a staff member at a social research institute. It was completely unnerving to recognise poverty in a quiet suburban street in Australia.
Until then, I'd thought everyone was fine. That in fact everything was great — universal healthcare, employment assistance, family benefits, subsidies for tertiary study. I had driven past street after street of brick houses, assuming there were well-fed, well-clothed families in all of them.
I discovered instead that there was a layer of Australian society that was largely invisible. If the poor ever appeared in media discussions, loaded terms were used: 'dole bludger', 'welfare dependent', 'undeserving' — all of which signified blame. I struggled to reconcile this negativity with the kid who had just given me a kitten, probably one of the few things he could call his own.
It is disheartening to see that negative attitudes toward poverty remain unchanged and continue to shape public policy.
When I wrote that article, there were an estimated 1.5 million Australians living in poverty. The Australian Council of Social Service reported recently that there are now more than