Recently, a well-dressed young woman accessing an Anglicare Victoria food relief centre unexpectedly burst into tears. She was humiliated, she said.
Despite being a single mother, she told our staff that she’d always worked. She’d always been proud to know that, with the help of her basic entitlements, her children would get what they really needed in life. But when the car had broken down a few weeks earlier, she’d been thrown off guard and was finally forced to come to us for assistance.
This past year has seen more than 42,000 people just like this young woman seek food relief from Anglicare Victoria. That’s an increase of more than 15% on last year and a record for the organisation.
Through many of our services, we’re seeing the emergence of a new class of working poor. Where in the past our emergency relief clients were typically unemployed or presented with some kind of disability or mental illness, we’re now seeing a new wave of clients who actually have a consistent income, but have somehow fallen behind. Converse to this growth in the working poor is an increase in Australia’s middle class millionaire. A recent study conducted by Boston Consulting Group reveals that middle class millionaires in Australia has grown by 2% totalling 10.1%, in just a few years.
The concerning class divide.
The growth of the working poor, yet the rise of the middle class, are the early signs for Australia that a section of our working community are now beginning to also fall off the peloton of prosperous mainstream Australia, and find themselves in poverty and increasingly reliant on welfare support to get through.
ACOSS reports that of the two and a half million Australians living in poverty (according to the OECD definition), or 13.8% of the nation’s population, 30% living in poverty come from households where the main form of income is wages.
Such a divide between rich and poor in Australia now threatens to be intergenerational on a large scale. An estimated 36.8% of children in sole parent households are living below the poverty line, and over 500,000 children live in homes where neither parent is working.
Many of those counted are not the long-term welfare recipients, addicts or ‘leaners’ we so often read about in the paper. They are single parents, families on the minimum wage and pensioners. Most importantly, they are people who’ve always managed, but recently, for reasons of under work, cost of living or social circumstance, they are now sliding backwards into poverty.
Swiss Banks may rank Australia as the world’s wealthiest country, but with this honour we also need to ensure that all who reside in it have the opportunity to benefit from such wealth. That is why tackling long term unemployment and in particular youth unemployment as a national priority will not only ensure opportunity flow to this part of the community, but will also avoid families getting sucked into the poverty quick sand of intergenerational poverty in parts of our Australian urban and regional communities.
Governments should take heed in focusing on policies that will lift this group into employment rather than leave them to further drift into poverty, and by that, establishing an intergenerational underclass Australia that just becomes harder to shift.
Paul McDonald
Chief Executive Officer
Anglicare Victoria
