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Pedestrian.tv
Pedestrian.tv
National
Aleksandra Bliszczyk

Anti-Poverty Advocates Say Albanese’s Childhood Rhetoric Is ‘Cruel’ When He Won’t Raise JobSeeker

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has made no secret of where he’s come from. “It says a lot about our great country that a son of a single mum who was a disability pensioner, who grew up in public housing down the road in Camperdown, can stand before you tonight as Australia’s prime minister,” he said in his election victory speech
no interest in raising JobSeekerAlbanese said in AprilKristin O’Connell“Public housing was at its peak in Australia in 1966,” Dr David Kelly of RMIT’s Centre for Urban Research told PEDESTRIAN.TV. “Around 8 per cent of all dwellings in Australia were public. Accessibility was at its highest, there was the most amount of stock and the stock was all brand new and it was being maintained really well.”“Right now we’re at the lowest point in history of public housing in Australia where access is actually quite hard, tenure has become less stable … and all the properties built in the ’60s and ’70s are coming to the end of their life because they’ve been under-maintained.”less than 3 per centNational Housing Finance and Investment Corporation report in 2020Shane Oliver PEDESTRIAN.TV housing affordability relative to wages was the real problem for low-income earners today.“That’s where the hardship is. If you’re a middle-income earner your quality of life today is arguably a lot higher than in the ’60s but if you’re a low-income earner on welfare it’s a lot more difficult that it was,” he said.He said while the cost of most goods and services including food, electronics, cars and healthcare had dropped relative to wages since the ’60s, expectations had also changed. “Once you get over the hurdle of getting housing then you could still have a reasonably high quality of life [in the ’60s], whereas today because public housing is restricted to people of acute need, you might find you’ve got a lower living standard.”housing stress, rental stress or mortgage stress face waiting periods of up to a decade for public housing — a property that is likely in poor condition or could soon become defunct — and he said the likelihood of getting a place as a single, childless person was “quite low”. MaryanneElleryshe inherited it from her parents“The disability pension at [the time Albanese was in primary school] was higher than the poverty line,” she said.relative poverty line in Australia was $450 a week in 2018Energy SupplementWork for the Dole program“If I earn $90 in a week my pension starts to go down, but my pension’s below the poverty line,” O’Connell said. “It used to enable people to find work opportunities [but] the current welfare system is a poverty machine and it’s trapping people in it. We cannot escape.” to position himself as a voice for disadvantaged people.

The post Anti-Poverty Advocates Say Albanese’s Childhood Rhetoric Is ‘Cruel’ When He Won’t Raise JobSeeker appeared first on PEDESTRIAN.TV .

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