Tiffany Simpson says she can not remember the last time she ate three meals in one day.
"I'll, you know, have something small for dinner, or something like that," said the 47-year-old single mother, who lives in the New South Wales Southern Highlands.
"You run on thin air. It's exhausting."
But worse than her own hunger is the knowledge that her children – including her 13 and 14-year-old — are regularly going without food.
"It is an absolutely horrible feeling," she told 7.30.
"I wouldn't wish it upon anybody."
Ms Simpson has cut down on meat, dairy and fresh produce in favour of more processed food. None of it has been enough to make her Jobseeker and family tax benefits last the fortnight.
Ms Simpson said she would like to see politicians try to survive on the payments she receives.
"It's not the cost of living," she said. "It's the cost of survival. Because that's all you're doing. It's not living."
Charities stretched
Demand for food relief charities has surged in schools.
"We're sitting at about 1.5 million servings of breakfasts over the last 12 months to schools," said Adam Loftus, Foodbank's NSW/ACT programs manager.
"That's going up all the time. It's gone up 50 per cent on last year, and it just keeps increasing."
A 2022 survey by Foodbank found food insecurity across Australia had increased over the year before, even before more recent inflation hikes.
Households with children were more likely to suffer. An estimated 1.3 million children had lived in a household experiencing severe food insecurity in the previous 12 months – and single-parent households were especially vulnerable.
Perth single mother Mischa regularly skips meals, seeks help from charities such as Foodbank and St Vincent de Paul, and scours Facebook pages for other offers of food.
"I feel really guilty," she said.
"Sometimes we have to have cereal for dinner, toast, yeah, just really basic stuff like that."
Mischa works part-time in a pharmacy and receives a parenting payment plus family tax benefits, but said it's not enough to feed her three boys, aged 15, nine and six.
"They have come home and said that they're still hungry and [asked] if I could put more in their lunch box, but I just don't have anything else to put in there."
Children hiding hunger, not going to school
Sharon Bessell, a professor at the Australian National University researching poverty in families, says hunger among children is likely under-reported and that children often hide their need.
"They know that their mum's hungry too," she said.
"And so here we have children as young as seven, eight, nine, not telling anyone that they're hungry because they don't want to see their mum skipping meals for them."
A nine-year-old boy told researchers: "It's tough when the bread is mouldy, but there's no other food."
An 11-year-old girl said: "When there's no lunch, I stay on my own. I don't want them [other children] to know I don't have lunch."
Elizabeth Vale Primary School in Adelaide dips into school funds and relies on three different charities to provide a breakfast program, fruit bowls, sandwiches at lunch and food boxes to be sent home.
Principal Julie Murphy said that parents had previously kept their children at home at the end of a pay cycle because there was no food for their lunch boxes.
"We worked really hard to make sure that's not a reason not to come to school," Ms Murphy said.
"But sometimes parents are feeling embarrassed or don't want to ask for help."
The principal has backed calls from the South Australian Children's Commissioner, Helen Connolly, to roll out a free school lunch program.
"The rest of the world seems to have kind of taken the run on this and has been feeding children for decades," Ms Connnolly said.
"Maybe it's time for Australia to start looking at what it would take to actually give children their main meal of the day at school for all children."
Calls to increase JobSeeker
Forty-two per cent of Foodbank's survey participants nominated "reduced/low income or government benefits" as the main reason behind severe food insecurity.
Professor Bessell said there was a clear link between children living in poverty and the level of government welfare payments, such as JobSeeker.
"It is unjust for little children to be hungry," she said.
"We need to collectively say we do not want this injustice to continue."
The Coalition government temporarily doubled JobSeeker during COVID-19, boosting it by $550 a fortnight, before winding the pandemic supplement back.
The rate was permanently increased by $50 a fortnight in 2021.
But the federal Labor government has not committed to any further lift beyond the usual rate rises that track inflation.
Social Services Minister Amanda Rishworth told 7.30 in a statement the government provides $50 million a year in emergency relief, which includes food vouchers, to more than 190 community organisations.
"An additional $1.4 million per year is provided to Foodbank, OzHarvest and SecondBite, specifically to provide Emergency Relief organisations with access to a cost-effective supply of food items," Ms Rishworth said.
In December, Labor announced the formation of an economic inclusion advisory committee, which is reviewing welfare system payments and is due to release its recommendations to the government next month.
Ms Simpson said it was "disgraceful" that one of the wealthiest countries in the world had an ongoing problem with hunger.
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