More Border people will fall below the poverty line this New Year's Day as coronavirus payments are cut again.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
And after charities saw the busiest Christmas period in years, they are expecting another rise come January 1 when the JobSeeker government support payment is slashed by $100.
The federal government will lower the JobSeeker unemployment supplement by $100 a fortnight on January 1 and the JobKeeper payment by $200 on January 4.
The new rates, which have been earmarked since the last payment cut in September, will be $150 a fortnight for JobSeeker and $1000 for JobKeeper and are effective until the end of March.
Albury Salvation Army major Irene Pleffer said they are continuing to see an increase in people seeking help.
"It was one of our busiest Christmases this year," she told The Border Mail.
"We saw a lot more new faces as well, which we were expecting considering the tough time we have had this year.
"But heading into the next payment cut we are definitely going to see more people fall into trouble and reach out for help.
"But we won't know the extent of that payment cut until next week or the week after.
"While it is only being cut by $100, that goes a long way to feeding a family and might be the only thing keeping food on the table."
IN OTHER NEWS:
While the payment cut was expected, Labor has warned the government now is not the time to cut payments to the country's most vulnerable.
"The government should reconsider it," Bill Shorten told Nine's Today Show on Tuesday.
"We are not out of the woods yet with this pandemic and the economic effects, they reverberating around the economy, especially in regional towns and suburbs where there is a lot of casual workers.
"For the less well off, we shouldn't be cutting their circumstances at this point in time."
Mr Shorten noted there are more than one million people on the unemployment queue and that number is likely to increase.
Albury-Wodonga Foodshare's Peter Matthews told The Border Mail at the time of the September payment cut that if the supplement was scrapped altogether, which is expected to happen on March 31, there will be an avalanche of people needing support.
"It pushes people below the poverty line," he said.
"It's not a living wage, it is not possible, if you have a family to pay rent, to pay all the costs of running a household, to pay school costs... it's impossible to survive on welfare with JobSeeker at the original level.
"Food becomes discretionary."
