Derek doesn’t laugh right away when I ask if he’s voting in the upcoming federal election. He just shakes his head. ‘They don't give two shits about us,’ he says, exhaling smoke into the autumn air outside the Salvation Army on Bourke Street, in Melbourne’s CBD. ‘Why would I waste my time?’
Inside, the lunch queue snakes toward the serving tables, where trays of hot meals are handed out to people for whom voting is the least of their concerns. The men and women I speak to here — underemployed, homeless, struggling with mental health or addiction — are the people Donald Horne once called ‘ordinary Australians.’ In The Lucky Country, he wrote that the nation was ‘run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.’
But luck is relative. And for the people who come to 69 Bourke Street for a free meal, a food voucher, conversation, or a little help navigating bureaucratic mazes (despite proving themselves adaptable and resilient time and again, as life has subjected them to repeated indignities), it often feels like they’ve been left out of Australia’s good fortune entirely.
Ask them what they think of their elected leaders, the politicians courting votes and their responses are, at best, bitterly amused. More often, they swear.
Take Richard. He hasn’t held a job in three years. Homelessness and addiction are just two of the struggles that define his daily life, and at this moment, holding down steady work might not be realistic. But he wants the chance to try. I asked him if he believed any candidate or party represented him or would change his life for the better. His response is unprintable.
They know that policies aren’t written with them in mind. That campaign events aren’t held in shelters. That meet-and-greets don’t take place in food queues. They know they are not the target audience for the policy launches and budget splashes, the corporate fundraisers. They know they don’t count.
And many don’t bother to vote, not necessarily out of apathy, but out of the belief that their participation is meaningless. Even if they’re registered, the fines for not voting are as futile an exercise as consigning homeless people ‘to their homes’ was during the pandemic; the government can’t extract money from people who have none. There are a few artistically gifted homeless folks who tell me they’ve mastered the depiction of the phallus, in a time-honoured tradition of donkey voting.
Derek tells me he doesn’t trust ‘any of the rich pricks’. Derek isn’t originally a Melbourne person; he came in from the bush decades ago when a parent died and he stayed, fleetingly, with relatives. ‘The thing is,’ Derek says, ‘none of these politicians, the feds or the state mob, even the locals, know what life is like for normal people. They’re happy at the trough getting their snouts wet, but we don’t see them unless there are TV cameras.’
'It is easy, in the final months and weeks before an election, to believe that democracy is working as it should, with leaders debating, policies being scrutinised, promises being made. But talk to those at the very bottom of society’s ladder and you’ll hear a different story.'
And like many others, he wants just one thing: a home. ‘A safe place,’ he says. ‘But I know I won’t get one before I die.’
Housing is the crisis no politician has the will to solve.
The Labor government’s widely touted $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund promises to build 40,000 social and affordable homes over five years, which includes domestic and family violence accommodation, and specialist homelessness services. But it comes with caveats, legislative tidal surges, and the kind of political manoeuvring that makes immediate relief impossible.
The Opposition’s plan is even flimsier: they blame the crisis on immigration, claiming that by cutting migration, they’ll "free up" 40,000 homes in the first year and over 100,000 in five. It is worth pointing out that this is not a costed plan to tackle endemic homelessness, family violence and a terminally over-inflated real estate market; it’s a deflection, an exercise in blame and rebranding of scarcity as an immigration problem, rather than an affordability and supply issue dating back decades.
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Esther, once a homeowner, is now living on the streets after a divorce left her without a home, without her kids, and unable to afford rent. According to Esther, the biggest problem in this country is the housing crisis. ‘The last time anyone went near negative gearing, he got clobbered at the vote and he got rolled,’ she says, recalling then-Labor leader Bill Shorten’s ill-fated attempt to curb property speculation. ‘We may be invisible to politicians, but we are not naïve. We know that most of the time they are scrambling to stay in power, and homeless people aren’t a lobby group. We have no muscle’.
But she hasn’t heard any answers addressing her needs, from any politician.
Haylee, a single mother, lives in the outer ’burbs but brings her kids in sometimes to catch up with cousins in the city. She tells me the support for single parents is inadequate, as she almost spends more time fighting Centrelink than she does raising her kids. ‘‘The system is designed to frustrate us into disappearing,’ she says. ‘The amount of paperwork I’ve had to wade through just to get my existing support is ridiculous’. She doesn’t see that changing, regardless of who sits in the PM’s mansion.
Mental health is another crisis where funding never quite meets rhetoric. And the truth is that tackling poor mental health has never been a big vote winner for any Australian politician.
To be fair, the current national government has pledged to make it ‘easier for Australians who need a psychologist to get in to see one’ as part of a new $361-million-dollar national early intervention service and free mental health services through 61 Medicare Mental Health Centres.
The Opposition, not to be outdone, has countered with a promise of $9 billion into healthcare, including $500 million specifically for mental health support.
These figures look impressive on paper, but those sleeping rough on our streets, crying in confrontations with ambulance and police officers, are clear reminders of the gap between campaign promises and funded mental health services. Those in the grips of untreated trauma, addiction, and psychosis know better than to expect transformative change.
Jonno, one of the regulars at the drop-in centre, struggles with the English language and with his temper. There are deep-seated traumas in his past, as with so many folks here. He has a case worker, but there is inadequate funding and access to address those traumas. ‘They talk about “better access”,’ he says, referring to the government’s mental health pledges. ‘But you can’t access something that’s full, or too far away, or costs too much.’
For too many, the chasm between political promises and lived reality is wide.
But we can see signs of hope for people in crisis. The government announced last month that one million Australians will receive a ‘modest financial boost’ through indexation of Centrelink payments, including youth allowance, Austudy, disability support pensions and carer allowances. In absolute terms, these adjustments are necessary. But to the people relying on them, they are mere tinkering, rather than true systemic reform.
None of these policy pledges will change life overnight for Derek, Haylee, Esther, Richard, or Jonno. But I’m not suggesting that disadvantaged Australians have nothing to offer but despair; that is not fair to them, nor to Australia. But survival leaves little room for political engagement. Their daily pursuit of ‘enough’ — enough food, enough shelter, enough stability — does not afford the luxury of advocacy. And those who might speak for them are often drowned out of public discourse, their voices lost beneath the noise of the culture wars, manufactured outrage, and the argy bargy of political party turbulence.
Any goodness can be recognised as positive steps, and any policy that helps those who most need help can be commended. But it is not realistic to expect our most disadvantaged citizens to sit up, beaming and applauding when they receive scraps from the tables of their masters. You are much more likely to hear laughter and curses.
It is easy, in the final months and weeks before an election, to believe that democracy is working as it should, with leaders debating, policies being scrutinised, promises being made. But talk to those at the very bottom of society’s ladder and you’ll hear a different story. Politics is not for them. Campaigns are not about them. The country functions as though they do not exist. And for those with nothing left to give, democracy feels like an inside joke; one in which they are not the audience, but the punchline.
*All names have been changed.
Barry Gittins is a Melbourne writer.