The government is being hammered on Robodebts and calls to raise the pitiful rate of Newstart... then RWNJs favourite breakfast TV show, Sunrise, runs a feature story this morning about "dole bludger" and "welfare fraud". 

It's so utterly predictable. Deflect and denigrate. 

Ten Daily

As the Ihumātao protests in New Zealand continue over high rates of Māori child removal and building on sacred land, PM Jacinta Arden has been accused of ignoring the issues in favour of building her profile on the world stage. 

More than 50% of children in NZ state care are Māori. 

The Guardian 

From 2011 to 2016, the homelessness rate in Australia increased 14%. In 2017-18 financial year, 288,000 clients sought assistance from specialist homelessness services. Every day in Australia, 236 requests for homelessness assistance go unfulfilled. There's no room for a positive spin - we need to focus on housing as a human right.

Australian Independent Media Network

As Isaac Asimov once sagely stated 

"The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

That was in 1980 and I think we can all agree it has gotten much worse. We see it in anti vaxxers, climate change deniers, the belief that Muslims are overtaking the West, even a million Facebook nostalgia pages reflecting how life was better when the Boomers were young, forgetting that sexism, racism, poverty and disease were even more a part of life then than now. Anyone is allowed to have an opinion on anything. Anyone can decide they have the right to have their opinion taken seriously. Andrew Bolt is an authority on climate change. Pauline Hanson gets media time for her opinions on Uluru. Soon I expect to see this:

Physicists controlling the quantum movements of beryllium atoms in electromagnetic fields. Pauline Hanson appearing on Sunrise tomorrow to discuss the developments, since she knows as much about quantum mechanics as she knows about anything else. https://t.co/Pd2ckMgJtJ

— Sikamikanico 👩🏻‍💻 (@Sikamikanico) July 23, 2019

This article from Tom Nichols, professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, looks at the phenomenon in more depth. I don't agree with his conclusion it's partially due to the entitlement of millennials - when everything really started to go downhill was when Baby Boomers discovered the comment section. But it's an interesting look at how we got here, and how we might get away.


The Federalist

The Conversation 

The actual rate of welfare fraud? 0.04% of welfare participants. That's 4 in 1000.

Australian Government 

Female prisoners - who are overwhelmingly victims of domestic violence - are being failed by the parole system, forced to stay in prison past their sentences as they don't have a place to stay. More failures of our housing and justice systems.

Independent Australia

Two of the disability commissioners are facing calls to stand down due to conflict of interest.

Barbara Bennett is the previous deputy secretary of the families and communities branch of the Department of Social Services, whilst John Ryan in his role at Family and Community Services was tasked with closing down large residential institutions for people with disability such as the Westmead and Rydalmere Centres in Sydney, the Riverside Centre in Orange and the Stockton Centre in Newcastle - not to mention he's a former Liberal party politician.

It's a basic principle of integrity that the people investigating policies shouldn't be the ones who made those policies.

They need to go. 

Pro Bono News

Bell Epoch isn't a personal blog. I already have one of those. This blog is for news and commentary on social issues. But I find myself at the centre of a social issue right now. I've got a Robodebt story, and this one's a doozy.

If you're not familiar, Robodebt is the government's practice of using data matching software to find discrepancies between information clients have provided to Centrelink to claim payments, and data from other government agencies such as the tax office and child support agencies. I hate to break your faith in the information technology capabilities of the government that can't even get the Census right, but Robodebt has come up with lots and lots of errors. Robodebt has the delightful habit of seeing a Newstart recipient has picked up a few weeks of work, deciding they must have earned that much every week all year, and slapping them with a debt for the government payments that Robodebt decided the person wasn't entitled to because the computer has decided they were working when they weren't.

Look, it's kind of fair that the government wants to get money people claimed when they weren't entitled to it back. The problem is Robodebt shoots first and asks questions later. Debts are automatically issued with no warning, no explanation, and little chance to challenge or appeal. And if Robodebt decided there's a debt, they can just help themselves to your money and good luck getting it back. 

In my case, I've been issued a debt no one can explain or justify, and only found out about when Centrelink helped themselves to my $2,500 tax return. 

Back in January, I got a letter telling me I had a $7,800 debt for overpayment of Family Tax benefit dating back to 2015. Wait, what? This was when I was freshly separated from my husband. I'd lost just about everything I owned, was at uni, not working, and had 25% care of my son. I was scraping by on Austudy and a partial family tax benefit and after paying rent, often had to choose between the train to uni and food. But I was scrupulously honest and accurate in what I told Centrelink. Now the government decided I had too much money back then? I called them. No one could tell me why there was a debt but they promised it would be appealed and someone could get back to me. 

So I left it there. I've had a lot of stuff going on this year, and it did kind of slip my mind. I'm working full time, not on Centrelink payments at all, and don't log into My Gov much cause I've no need to. Apparently Robodebts can be enforced to stop you leaving the country but I had no issues doing so in May. I got another letter at some stage saying I had a $300 debt, and figured my initial debt had been reviewed and reduced to that amount. Fine, I didn't know what the debt was but by now would probably have paid it to save myself dealing with them.

Fast forward to July. I completed my tax return, looked forward to a decent refund of $2,500, which was needed for...stuff. I don't earn a tonne of money, live pretty frugally (my American trip this year was done on the cheap...two star hotels, all public transport and walking, eating one meal a day plus apples and chips) and really needed my tax back, not to mention my beloved 16 year old cat needs thyroid treatment. I spent most of my monthly pay from work paying off some outstanding debts cause hey, tax refund coming soon right?

On the 17 July I got a My Gov letter telling me the original debt stood, now bumped up to $8000 with interest.

On the 18 July, the ATO processed my tax refund and transferred it all to Centrelink to pay off my debt.

So I've been calling. On 19 July the Centrelink debt team told me apparently, maybe, the debt was for overpayment of rent assistance. Wait, what? Where are you saying I falsely claimed rent assistance? I asked what addresses they had on file for me, and the guy on the phone read out my addresses and the dates I lived there - which was the completely accurate info I gave them at the time, along with my leases. Apparently though, they'd look into it, and if I gave them all my rental information again maybe the debt would be waived. Also just maybe I could get some of my tax refund back whilst it was being appealed. So I tracked down and uploaded all my rental info again, along with bills to support why I needed the money back. 

I also emailed several politicians, including my local member Tanya Plibersek. The only one I heard back from was Senator Rachel Siewert, the Greens Senator from WA, who has been doing great work campaigning against the shitty Robodebt system. Her office has been absolutely lovely, and will raise my case with a review officer.

And I started getting angry. How very dare they just announce a debt and take my money. Right at tax time - suspicious much? How can a stupid computer algorithm raise a debt and take my money with no chance for me to appeal first?

This Thursday 25 July I rang Centrelink again. The debt recovery team told me I'd have to speak to the families line. The families line weren't entirely sure why the debt had been raised, but they seemed to think it might be related to my child care percentage from 2015-2017. So now if I want to challenge the debt, I have to try and prove how often my son was in my care years ago, in the period immediately after the end of my marriage, when I was forced against my will to leave my son with his father. As the 2.5 hour call came to an end, they also told me my case wasn't being appealed from the call six days prior, but they'd raised an appeal now, and oh yeah, you can't get any money back in the meantime.

And that was where I lost it. 

I have to go back to the most painful time in my life - separated from my child, one of the worst things that can happen, a horror so raw I mostly block it from my mind - and try to prove the pitiful amount of time I got to spend with him, when I wish it had been all the time. 

I felt the life I had built for myself, working, budding as a stand up comedian, a lovely home, hope when I haven't had hope for so long - crumbling away. I had worked so hard for nothing. I was rewarded for having a go by the government making my money go away. 

I am broke until I get paid in two weeks - I'm not asking for anything and I'm not crowdfunding. I want my money back. The trouble is I can't even precisely challenge the debt because no one can tell me the data mismatch that triggered it. No one can tell me exactly what the debt is for. The government won't divulge the discrepancies in data matching they look for, for fear people will exploit it.

They're free to exploit us though. All of us. Robodebt is extortion. No other organisation can decide you have a debt, refuse to fully explain it, and steal your money leaving you scrambling to work out why let alone get it back.

Right now I'm waiting. Waiting for the appeal, waiting for my complaint to be responded to*, waiting in hope Senator Siewert's office can get somewhere I haven't been able to. And I'm at an advantage here. I have a degree in social policy and a decent knowledge of the political system. What of the people who don't have that particular bureaucratic literacy? Robodebt targets the vulnerable, and worse; it targets those who have been on government payments and gone on to working, stealing what they earned away.

Sometimes I feel like I'll end up like this guy. I don't want to. I don't want any of this. I just want my money back. People have mentioned legal action, class actions; I'm not thinking that far ahead. I'm so heartsick sometimes I'm battling one hour at a time, and even if I get my money back it's been so utterly shitty.

* If you have received a Robodebt, do make a formal complaint. The government has used the low rate of complaints to prove "the system is working". Thousands of complaints might get their thumb off the scale a bit. 

The government is funding $10 million towards Specialist Family Violence Services, including couples counselling. It's an absolutely terrible idea. As Hayley Foster, CEO of Women's Safety NSW, wrote to the minister of families and human services: “Couples counselling in the context of domestic and family violence is contraindicated for victim safety and is not recommended by any representative specialist domestic and family violence service peak body, practitioner group, or research organisation nationally"

But they're going ahead anyway. 

Women's Agenda

People with mental illness are told to "just talk! Get help!"

It doesn't work like that. Enough awareness has been raised - we need action.

The Guardian

We are finally starting to see that after years and billions of dollars spent on expensive, pointless fixes to Aboriginal health, welfare and equality divides, governments might actually be...asking Aboriginal people themselves about the policies that affect their communities.

The Northern Territory is now working with the Aboriginal Justice Unit to establish an Aboriginal Justice Agreement to tackle the Territory's Indigenous incarceration rates and racial divides in policing.


ABC News

As a non Indigenous person, it's generally my belief and practice not to opinionate on Indigenous issues other than to amplify Aboriginal voices. My answer to What Should Be Done is, don't ask white commentators. Ask Aboriginal people.

Eureka Street

The for profit nursing home industry continues to surprise and delight. Turns out, the average daily food spend for residents in aged care homes is $6.08 - less than that spent on prisoners. That's $6.08 per day for all meals, beverages and snacks. And this is the average. That would mean many homes are spending less - leading to horrific situations like the reports of maggots and rodents in food preparation areas at nursing homes. Even when things are clean, six bucks a day isn't enough to feed a person - so it's no wonder 50% of nursing home residents are malnourished.

 It's time to nationalise the residential aged care industry.

The Mandarin

"Newstart is only meant as a short term payment in between jobs" - that not true, or much comfort, for people on Newstart, especially for the growing numbers of older people on Newstart for extended periods due to diminishing employment prospects.

The Guardian

Excellent article arguing that Australia needs a Green New Deal of its own to counteract the problems of inequality, unstable employment and environmental recklessness plaguing this country. It is long past time for centrism. We need to state what we need and fight for it

Junkee

Sorry to have to shock you like this, but Scott Morrison was lying when he described Australia's welfare safety net as one of the best in the world. In fact, our unemployment support payments are among the lowest.

The Guardian

Australia has an excess of housing, but many are forced to live in crowded, unhealthy and dangerous rental property due to high rents and unstable employment.

The Conversation

If you think your credit card is bad, imagine paying 400% monthly interest along with a 'same day deposit fee', a 'financial supply fee', a 'lender fee', a 'dishonour fee', a 'dishonour letter fee', and three separate iterations of the 'account keeping fee'.

Payday lenders prey on the most financially disadvantaged and vulnerable by offering very small, low doc loans to those who can't get finance anywhere else at very, very high (and often undisclosed) interest rates. Hopefully investigation by ASIC will curtail or shut the practice altogether.

ABC News

After involuntarily* watching Little Miss Sunshine, I thought the problem with "uplifting" movies is they give a false impression of how easily disadvantaged people can band together and overcome their troubles.

But the media are suckers for this stuff. Lovely stories of how the poor, sick and disabled can just get up the gumption and solve the problems created by massive societal barriers and inequality to lighten anyone's heart and remind those still suffering that it's all their own fault.

Can we - and I can't overstate this - fucking not?

Fair.org

* I was in a psych ward, they'd taken my phone, and it was that or read a Jodi Picoult book. If I wasn't already depressed, I was when I saw the media selection. 

An excellent essay from Amy Quire on Australia's exhausting practice of letting white people decide what's racist:

Meanjin

We mostly have those fine upstanding stalwarts of neoliberalism, Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, to blame.

The Guardian

Single father Phillip Herron posted a tearful selfie moments before taking his own life after being left heavily in debt with pay day loans and threatened with
eviction whilst waiting for Universal Credit - the UK benefit payment which, like with Australia's fine Centrelink, causes recipients great suffering whilst waiting for payment, with the added cruelty of being paid on a monthly basis only.

A month is forever when you're down to your last few bucks.

A spokesman for the Department of Work and Pensions stated "Suicide is a very complex issue, so it would be wrong to link it solely to someone’s benefit claim."

What a cop out.

Universal credit was introduced in 2010 as part of British austerity measures. 

The UK spent £67 on the Royal Family last year.

Metro

Centrelink's "couples rule" ties women financially to their abusers. It's a holdover from the early days of the single mother's benefit, when only the "good" single mothers who remained chaste and pure were deemed worthy of payment. The bad mothers with boyfriends got squat. Single parents can still lose their benefits if a nosy neighbour decides to dob you in for having a partner stay over. At least they've one move in a progressive direction - the rule now applies to same sex partners too. Yay, I guess.

The Mandarin

Eureka Street 

Whenever the necessity to raise the rate of Newstart is discussed, a line frequently heard is "Newstart is only intended to be a temporary payment while you're in between jobs. It's not meant to fund a long term lifestyle". 

Leaving aside that people in between jobs don't get temporary reduced rates of rent, transport, bills or food, this line ignores the realities of Newstart recipients today. Through no fault of their own many people remain stuck on Newstart for years, due to the extreme difficulty of applying for the disability support pension or simply the bleak prospects for older job seekers. 

This article is from The Sydney Morning Herald, 21 July 2019.

No lights, no linen: How Alex survived for six years on Newstart

I have known Alex Phillips for 18 months. Most Tuesdays I’ve met up with him at the Olive Way drop-in centre in Sydney Road, Brunswick. A small engraved name badge tells people I’m a volunteer. This discreet delineation answers the question in people's eyes – the 'what are you doing here?' question. People who live the life of hard knocks can easily tell I’m not one of them, but they talk to me anyway.

Alex stands out and always will because one of his legs is so wrangled out of shape. His right knee is permanently bent and his leg elbows out to one side from his hip. Once I went with him to an orthopaedic surgeon to get a letter of support because he’d been refused a Disability Support Pension. The verdict that his leg was "irreversibly and permanently deformed" did not dismay Alex; he had known this for a long time already.

I was curious about Alex – he was direct in eye contact and forthright in conversation. By arrangement and with gravitas he told me the story of his childhood, full of warmth for his foster mother. He brought in a collection of small black and white and faded colour photos which he held between finger and thumb with the care of a curator.

Minnie Florence Phillips was the woman who put her hand up to care for Alex. You can see this care in him now – the polite inquiring after others, the attention to possible and intended meanings, the earnest explanations. When I write up his story for the Olive Way newsletter, he corrects me: “I wouldn’t say it was hard. I was very lucky, I had a good mum.”

Later he reiterates: “I had a very good upbringing."

When I first met Alex, he was living independently in a one-bedroom flat he’d been in for eight years. Alex has worked for most of his life with a bung leg. Early on he did outdoor work, later he was a patrolman driving between locations checking on building security. After 13 years at a mattress factory, at age 44 he was made redundant. In 2012 he went on Newstart.

Newstart for single unemployed adults is $555.70 each fortnight, or just under $40 a day. Both Labor’s Jenny Macklin and then-Liberal Julia Banks once declared they could manage on the Newstart allowance. Neither of them were put to the test and Macklin later apologised. In May 2018 John Howard went on the record saying he believes the freeze on Newstart has gone on too long. Scott Morrison has no plans to increase it.

Alex’s experience may be instructive.

This is how Alex managed on Newstart for six years. In order to maintain the $288 per week rent on his one-bedroom flat, and pay for utilities and food, he turned off his fridge and heating. He lived on two-minute noodles, 65-cent cans of baked beans, packet soups and bread. He couldn’t afford margarine. He came to Olive Way for lunch three days a week. He showered at the Salvos to save on water and heating and rather than use his washing machine for bed linen, he slept on his couch in an overcoat.

His bad leg was playing up as he grew older but the only time he went to the pharmacy was when he had the flu. He’s had the flu three times in three years. A Myki travel card and mobile phone were necessities to keep up with Newstart job-hunting requirements. Even with the addition of rental assistance which brought his fortnightly payment to $695, rent took more than 90 per cent of his income. He did not turn on the lights in his flat but used the torch in his mobile phone.

To reach the tram stop, Alex held on to the fence posts down the street. Sometimes he’d keep his balance by walking with one foot in the gutter to even up the height of his legs and keep him more stable against the camber of the footpath. He caught the tram every day and got to know the drivers. As well as the Salvos and Olive Way, he went to numerous appointments necessitated by Newstart job-hunting and skills-learning requirements.

When he had to move out of his flat, a tram driver who’d become a friend offered to mind his washing machine and fridge until he found another place to rent. This man and his wife also invited Alex to share Christmas with them.

Patronising remarks by the staff at the disability employment support centre sparked a steely kind of outrage in him. But when they told him they’d easily found work for a double amputee, he became anxious and angry. He was so used to accommodating Newstart requirements that he began worrying that amputation was being proposed. When the demerit point system was invoked, the threat of having Newstart cut back put a darkness across Alex’s face I had not seen before.

By the time Alex’s Disability Support Pension (DSP) assessment review came up, he was homeless. His landlord wanted to renovate and Alex had to move out. He was fearful about what sleeping rough might mean for the arthritis in his damaged leg. Initially he set up in a neighbour’s garage with no bathroom facilities. Then, in a rare stroke of good fortune, he got a room in a housing facility for homeless men. He could shower, eat, sleep and stay warm. His face was shining.

Last week, Melbourne Lord Mayor Sally Capp was interviewed on ABC radio after the new Federal Assistant Housing Minister, Luke Howarth, had publicly downplayed the problem of affordable housing for people on low incomes. He was "putting a positive spin" on it. Capp said that her office received more letters about people sleeping rough in the CBD than anything else. These letters weren’t asking for law and order, she said. They were asking: “How can we help?”

There are programs that offer unfiltered on-the-ground information for politicians and senior decision makers in industry. For those who are open to acknowledging their lack of experience with the day-to-day realities of poverty, Financial Counselling Australia offer A Day in the Life. With permission from callers, these visitors get to listen in to the details and stories of financial stress. It is sobering information, and it is often clear that the circumstances have not arisen due to carelessness or poor choices.

When the internal Centrelink review dismissed his DSP application a second time, Alex was ready. He went to see his local MP, Adam Bandt, who was moved to speak in Parliament about Alex’s situation. It is possible that without Bandt’s intervention, Alex would still be waiting to have his appeal heard.

His case came up at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) early this year. He had prepared himself with advice from Social Security Rights Victoria and evidence the GP and physiotherapist at his local community health centre had helped him collect.

Alex carried a carefully tended plastic shopping bag of documentation. When he met refusal and bureaucratic blocks, he had a way of reporting his situation that reminded me of TV courtroom dramas. Often, he would say that he was going to “get to the bottom of the truth”.

The AAT ruled that Alex met the criteria for a DSP. He is no longer living on Newstart. The pension is set at $1063 per fortnight and he is free from the requirement to attend pointless job interviews where employers would lose interest as soon as they saw his disability.

Alex still comes to Olive Way most weeks - he likes the company and the atmosphere, he offers a welcome to people. On my first day there he asked me what I’d be doing in the afternoon. I said that after I finished work, I’d be preparing a big cook-up for a family dinner.

During the slight pause that followed, I realised this was not something that would be happening at his place. Alex said: “Well, if you’re close to your family, you’ve gotta respect that.”

His wish for me had all the overtones of polite generosity that I imagine Minnie Phillips had taught him.

Even as Labor continues its bizarre lurch to the right under Anthony Albanese, it's time for them to stop playing politics with the lives of the most vulnerable Australians and support an increase to Newstart.

The Guardian

Australian investment in public housing is woefully inadequate. Yet amongst the residents of Australia's 400,000 public housing residents is a rate of suicide far higher than the general population.

The Stringer

I don't agree with all of this - where was Obama's love when he was ordering drone strikes at civilian targets - but interesting points to consider. I'm definitely an advocate of people on opposite sides of the political spectrum actually meeting as people.

Salon

             

When frontline workers insist domestic abuse is a national emergency, this is what they are talking about.

We call it a national emergency, but we don’t treat it like one. 

The Saturday Paper 

Pro Bono Australia 

Music festival attendees forced to strip and display their genitals by police at music festivals - on the basis of drug sniffer dogs proven to be often inaccurate.

Humiliating, degrading, an unnecessary use of police resources in pursuit of the failed and deadly war on drugs.

Buzzfeed 

Meet NT Judge Greg Borchers. 

He's already been sanctioned for comments including telling the traumatised 13 year old son of a murdered woman that he was taking advantage of his mother's death to play truant and commit petty crime, and that "the community can't afford you". 

But it seems to have only riled him up. 

Today this fine specimen of the legal fraternity has been reported as comparing an Indigenous offender to a "primitive person", telling an Indigenous mother she probably got drunk on pension day and “abandoned your kids in that great Indigenous fashion”, and pondering that “One day we might read some literature, some important anthropological literature, we might learn something about what’s called Indigenous laissez-faire parenting and I invite you to do so, not that it will help your practice in any way, but it might get you to understand why it is that people abandon their children on such a regular basis.”

Even in the NT and even with the racism that goes on in this country, this guy is something else. And what he should be made very soon is something else without a job. 

 The Guardian

I guess it's... good he's speaking out?

I mean he seems to get some of the issues, sort of. 

SBS News

As Homer Simpson famously stated, the machinery of capitalism is oiled with the blood of the workers. Well it seems the food of celebrity chef George Calombaris is flavoured with the blood, sweat and tears of the 500 workers he underpaid a total of $7.8 million in his restaurants.

Of course, Mr Calombaris is so very, very sorry about all this, and has promised to repay...$200,000. I'm sure that is great comfort to the hospitality workers dudded out of their pay and superannuation whilst Calombaris continues to enjoy the privileges of his celebrity lifestyle including a luxury estate in Toorak. What are the chances he'll lose any of this to repay his debt?

But he should. Let's make Calombaris repay every cent he owes. There shouldn't be one rule for the wealthy and another for the rest of us. If it's good enough for people on Robodebt it's good enough for him. Have the tax office audit his income and assets. Force him to prove what he earns and how he's going to repay what he owes. Have debt collectors call him. And if he wants to speak to someone about this, make him wait on hold for 2.5 hours to speak to an operator.

It's only fair.

ABC News

Over 55s represent the largest group of people on Newstart, and they spend an average of 188 weeks on the payment.

For many older people the only way off Newstart is when they qualify for the ages pension - beginning their retirement already in poverty.

The New Daily

3000 homes were damaged in Townsville's flood disaster last February. Now Centrelink has reneged on their promise to stop chasing Robodebts.

The Guardian

Champion activist Asher Wolf wants "please offer me a seat" badges for those who struggle using public transport due to invisible disability. I've often wish for this myself. Bring it to Australia!

Yahoo News

The government's disastrous Robodebt scheme is driving people to despair as these automated debts which are nearly impossible to challenge are outsourced to private debt collectors, who harass victims over debts they can't disprove. Punishing the poor the order of the day in Scott Morrison's Australia.

9 News

Three years after the launch of the NDIS, the number of people aged under 65 living in aged care facilities hasn't fallen. It is appalling that people with disability are left with no other options for their support than these facilities not suited too their needs.

ABC News

The prison was warned that the man was suicidal days before his death. It marks the 46th Aboriginal death in custody in ten years.

The Guardian

Fran Connelley shares stories from a recent trip to central Queensland that highlight some of the NDIS-related challenges people with disabilities and service providers are facing in regional and rural Australia.

"For every good news story about the NDIS out here, there are at least six horror stories"

Pro Bono Australia