In year 9, a curious young Tim Costello asked his teacher if poverty was a natural phenomena – as inevitable as the tide going out or the sun rising. It was a good question then, he says, and one everyone should think about now.
“It’s not natural,” he says. “It’s a policy.”
Costello is sitting on the small dunes on Frankston beach, his large brick home behind him, hairy spinifex around him, the bay flat as glass, stretching out before him.
The answer he found in year 9 has focused his life. The now 69-year-old has spent over three decades on the frontline of Australia’s worsening poverty problem. Along the way he has travelled the world, to warzones and natural disasters, served as mayor of St Kilda, written several books and been listed as a national living treasure.
People often confuse him with his brother, former treasurer Peter Costello. Before our walk, two people ask me if I’m going to see “the Liberal one or the churchy one”. Costello is arguably Australia’s most famous Baptist minister, best known for his work as the CEO of World Vision for 13 years.
He is now Australia’s most prominent advocate for gambling reform.
“Welcome to Franga,” he says, arms wide as he enters the atrium where we were waiting for him.
He grabs his hat, and we take off. As we’re out of the gate I mention what a nice spot it is, right on the beach, a small canal behind.
Initially, Costello says, his wife Merridie said “no way” to moving here. “And I know, when a wife says no like that, that is the end of it.”
Costello chuckles. After they saw the house, he remembers, he went to speak at an event for bikies. Right as he was about to talk, murmurs went around the room – one of the group’s members, a man with young kids, was in hospital. A few minutes later the texts came in: he had died.
“So I changed my speech, and I spoke to their grief, and I tried to help,” he says.
When he got back in the car, Merridie looked at him. She told him they would buy the house by the beach. Life was too precious and too short and she didn’t want to waste any of it. In the six years they have lived here Costello has swum every day he was home – his wife has not got in once.
“She is fond of a cocktail on the deck though,” he says.
Costello can go from talking to bikies, to rough sleepers, to the prime minister, all in one day. The day before our walk he was playing tennis with some of Melbourne’s richest surgeons. Later, he is flying to Hobart to campaign against a backflip by the Tasmanian premier, Jeremy Rockliff, to introduce a mandatory pre-commitment card for pokie users.
But as a young man, it could have a been a lot different.
“That question, is poverty natural or poverty created, led me to think law was a good idea,” he says. “It’s about justice I thought.”
Costello graduated from Monash’s law school in 1978, then worked as corporate lawyer in a firm in Melbourne’s affluent eastern suburbs. They asked him if he wanted to be partner, a dream for many graduates. But his heart was somewhere else.
“I discovered within three years the law was more about business,” he says.
So Costello went off to study theology in Switzerland in 1981 and after four years he came home and took a job at St Kilda Baptist Church, with a congregation of less than 10 people.
“They couldn’t pay me, so I opened a law practice in the church to pay my way.”
He admits it’s not the way most would have gone about it. But a marriage of his two great loves – faith and justice – were changing his world.
“My first client was a sex worker,” he says. “She walked in, she said, ‘Can you represent me?’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’ When’s the case on?’ I was reaching for my diary and she looked at a watch, ‘In 10 minutes.’”
As Costello talks he takes you with him – he tells this story with humour, at himself for being so young and unprepared. But there is a bigger message.
His first client had a swollen eye from injecting heroin and had lived on and off the streets for years. After he helped her avoid jail time, Costello stood beside her on the street and realised he felt a wave of judgment towards her.
On the crowded street, the woman threw her arms around Costello and asked to take him to lunch.
Over lunch he realised he knew little about life – he had grown up in a safe home in the eastern suburbs, free from oppression, discrimination and poverty.
“All my judgments were just demolished,” he says.
In 1992 he took on another female client; a married mother with three kids who ended up in prison for four years.
She had never even had a traffic fine, but she had stolen $60,000 from her employer after developing an addiction to poker machines. This was a watershed moment for Costello – pokies had just been introduced in Victoria. There were no protections or consumer warnings, and very little understanding of how addictive they were.
“I visited her in the women’s prison, and I thought, how does a middle-aged woman with three kids, married, who’s never had any trouble with crime in her life, end up in jail for four years?” he says.
“I’ve been fighting for pokies reform and gambling reform ever since.”
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As we walk around the river by his house, Rob, a neighbour, yells out to say hi. Another woman, Vivienne, stops to introduce herself and says she is a big fan. Costello tells stories about his grandchildren, about what people said when they first moved to Frankston, a suburb known for crime and disadvantage. He laughs off the naysayers.
“Look at this, we could be in Europe,” he says.
He is not wrong – the little canal has jetties backing on to it. If it wasn’t for the swamp gums on its banks, it could be mistaken for the French countryside.
Costello grew up in a home where curiosity was encouraged, the son of two teachers, who talked politics, world events and religion around the dinner table.
“I thought all families did that, but I realised they don’t,” he says.
He met Merridie when he was 17, she 16 – they took the same train line to school.
“We broke off seven times over the next six or seven years,” he says. A shy little smile forms, before he pauses. “She broke it off every time. She said she didn’t want to marry someone … less intelligent than her.”
He laughs and admits she was right. Costello holds humility and humour in the same breath.
“Every time I had to win her back.” They married in their mid-20s, and 45 years later have three children and five grandchildren.
After our walk we sit on his deck, a cuppa in hand, both staring out to the bay. Costello says after everything he has seen, every natural disaster and warzone he visited while working for World Vision, he just wanted to sit somewhere where there was a horizon. There are tears in his eyes.
“For 17 years I went to just about every disaster happening on the planet. Earthquakes, volcanoes, wars and tsunamis,” he says. “You live with the guilt you never quite did enough.”
He says there are occasions, sometimes, when he is speaking publicly, or moments where he is with his family, when out of nowhere he will start to cry.
“You realise you build a fence around your emotions, you do compartmentalise to keep going, but the fences leak,” he says.
“I think I have largely healed, but you never quite heal.”
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Costello has been asked to run for parliament several times. He was approached in 1994 to run as a candidate for the Democrats, but he would have been running against his brother, Peter, then treasurer in John Howard’s rightwing Coalition government. Merridie, “always more emotionally connected”, advised against it, he says.
“It would have certainly intensified the difficulty of family relations,” he says. “In the end, I worked out that politics is my great temptation, but not my vocation.”
He has been asked several times again – he won’t say by who. While Costello is never far from politics or power, he believes he can get more done outside the tent.
“I’m actually called to something else,” he says. “I can talk to both sides of politics. I have probably had as much influence as I might have had if I was in there. Whether it’s vindicated or not, I felt it was the right decision.”
It’s some of his brother’s policies, including tax breaks for property investors, that he would wind back if he could.
Costello wants to see reform of capital gains tax, negative gearing and introduce a wealth tax from death duties (he points out Australia is one of the few nations without one).
Despite different political views, the Costello brothers and their sister are close. In a few weeks, they’ll all spend Christmas together.
More fundamentally, he is concerned the social fabric of our multicultural society is fraying. He pauses. For the first time, he seems very serious.
“Social cohesion is really fraying,” he says.
Multiculturalism cuts against the last 10,000 years of human history, he says – “It is a unique, novel experience to actually embrace multiculturalism.” But while the First Fleet had a devastating impact on this country’s original custodians, he argues that in modern times immigration has built a better society.
Now, however, “You’ll have Andrew Bolt and others every third week saying multiculturalism has failed.
“I think the challenge is to actually say immigration has built a very prosperous Australian society. We have to rise above this.”
Costello is worried about the trajectory of the world. We are living in chaotic times, where the challenges can feel overwhelming. He says the inequality gap is widening in Australia. The rich are getting richer. He worries about the warming planet, about the rise of leaders like Donald Trump. The war in Ukraine, the death toll in Palestine.
But he is not without hope.
“Right at the moment, I’m trying to distinguish between grief and despair,” he says. “I’m in grief. I don’t want to go to despair.
“I do want to grieve and say this is real. We’re taking steps back. I fear for my grandchildren. But if I give in to despair, that’s much worse. That’s not fair to my grandchildren, the next generation.”
