This weekend I popped into a local shop and saw a card from Second Bite inviting me to donate $2 and provide eight healthy meals to people in Australia doing it tough.
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Many of us, I included, see little things like this sitting on the counter and think ‘oh, that’s a good idea… but not today.’ This time, I said yes – I thought it was too important not to.
The little card I was handed told me that two million people in Australia struggle to put food on the table and I had little trouble believing it. Homelessness is becoming a serious issue in our local area, with the Australian Bureau of Statistics conservatively estimating that we have 800 people without a home in the local area alone, and this is a major barrier to being able to eat well, or even at all.
There are many factors driving this including family violence, housing affordability and availability, relationship breakdowns, mental health issues and of course, unemployment. Parts of Lavington and North Albury are experiencing a 17-20 per cent unemployment rate, and with the downturn in the manufacturing industry, more jobs are being lost across the Border and outlying regions. It’s so easy to believe that this isn’t ‘our problem’ because ‘we’ have food on our table and a roof over our heads, but I think many of us are unaware of how easy it is to find ourselves in this very situation.
In 2010, my husband and I had a two-year-old son and we received an eviction notification for our rented home in Muswellbrook. The mining industry had caused a housing crisis to erupt in the Hunter Valley and there were 20 plus applicants for every house that was put up for rent. Our landlord’s son was coming to town to work in the mines and they wanted the house for him so we were left without a roof. With a small child and a dog, we were low on the applicant list and had spent weeks and weeks applying for everything without any luck.
My husband had a good paying job in the mining industry, so unemployment wasn’t our issue, but without somewhere to live, with a small child and a dog, the prospect of homelessness suddenly became real. If my sister-in-law had not moved to town temporarily a few months earlier, we would have been living in our car. With a toddler. And a dog.
The lady who handed me the Second Bite card said that she didn’t understand how people can become homeless when there is government assistance available. But the Newstart Allowance puts recipients below the poverty line – it is simply not enough to survive on.
In fact, the Australian Council of Social Services has found that unemployment is the greatest indicator of poverty over any other single factor. It is too easy to step from unemployed to homelessness.
I told her that 12 per cent of our nation’s children live in poverty. One thousand people walked through the doors of the homeless support and crisis accommodation agency on the Border over the last year. Unemployment and youth disengagement is growing. She said that she had no idea and felt like she had learned something new.
We all need to open our eyes to the reality of poverty and its effects on our community.
Homelessness is not someone else’s problem, it is our collective responsibility and we need to humanise the experience to understand that if we are in a position to help, we need to step up to the plate. Batter up.