No matter how you twist them the facts about poverty in the lucky country just keep shaming us.
You can see the tip of the iceberg on the streets of our capital cities and regional centres where you will come across people whose lives are exposed to the elements and to the eyes of all who pass by.
We are even seeing new divisions emerging among low-income households! Fourteen years ago the unemployment benefit was 91 per cent of the single pension. Now it is only 65 per cent.
Peter Whiteford, of the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of NSW projects a fall to a miserable 33 per cent. He notes that, after you take out the costs of the cheapest capital city accommodation your average single Newstart benefit recipient was left to survive on $16.50 a day.
Australia spends less on transfer payments than the average of the wealthier nations in the OECD.
Data released this week and prepared by the St Vincent de Paul Society's Victorian Policy and Research Manager, Gavin Dufty, on relative price changes, has shown that people on low incomes are being forced to make such devastating choices as whether to go the doctor or buy food. As he puts it: 'to survive today you've got to compromise the future'.
The research shows that the price of essentials such as electricity and rent has gone through the roof over the past six years while discretionary items such as entertainment and holidays have increased only a little or, in the case of high street fashion, have actually gotten cheaper.
Two months ago I received an email from a young man in Queensland. He was writing to thank Vinnies for the stance it takes on the side of people who are demonised for being unemployed. He told me his story. Here are some bits of it:
I rent a single bedroom unit for $200 per week.
Around five weeks ago I was retrenched from my job of four years. I do not own a car and do not have sufficient funds to purchase a car. Public transport being what it is around here makes finding work very hard. In fact one job I applied for that I got an interview for I had to knock back as I realised I could not get to the place of employment via public transport.
With Centrelink payments and rent assistance I would get around $295 per week. I need power ... and a phone, and I use the internet to help find work ... so without even thinking about food, clothes, transport etc. ... I have around $40 a week to live on ...
Now I'm in a situation where I can't afford to live here so I am thinking of going back to Tasmania to live with my mother ... because the Government in its wisdom doesn't pay a single person enough to exist on their own, I find I have to move to a state with less job prospects ...
I am currently on Newstart sickness benefits for anxiety and depression brought on by my situation. I don't know what to do ... keep going I guess ... that's all you can do...
Keep going. Yes. That's all any of us can do.
There are those who will say: Mate, you can turn this around if you want to. It's a matter of choice. They are wrong.
I don't blame people for thinking this way. Sometimes it is all they know. They hear the relentless message that people are to blame for their own marginalisation. It follows that to support someone in this situation you are 'enabling' them to keep doing the wrong thing.
But social security payments are not the end of the story. Neither are they the beginning. We are in the situation we are in because of a gradually increasing transfer of wealth and resources away from the commons and towards the private few.
In the 17th Century an anonymous English wit penned the following piece of doggerel:
The Law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the Common,
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the Common from under the goose.
Then, as now, the common wealth and common good are systematically purloined. Then, as now, it is far easier to construct a method of individual punishment in place of a vision of social justice.
The 2011 Bishops' Social Justice Statement Building Bridges, Not Walls: Prisons and the justice system points out that between 1984 and 2008, while rates of crime either stayed steady or fell, the number of Australians in prison per 100,000 people almost doubled. The majority of Australian prisoners come from the most disadvantaged sections of the community.
Aboriginal imprisonment rates have jumped by more than 50 per cent over the past ten years, with an Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report showing that members of the First Peoples now account for over a quarter of the prison population in Australia.
It is a dangerous thing to denounce the causes of oppression. It is also dangerously counter-cultural to announce that another kind of world is possible. But, as the martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero put it so beautifully:
Even when they call us mad,
when they call us subversives and communists
and all the other epithets they put on us,
we know we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes,
which have turned everything upside down.
We are called by our common humanity to struggle for a just society; for the sacredness of those on the margins, and their liberation from the structures that exclude them; for a 'turning upside down', to use the revolutionary principle of the Beatitudes. There is nothing more beautiful or more human than this struggle. Anti-poverty week is a time to revisit this imperative.
Dr John Falzon is an advocate with a deep interest in philosophy, society, politics and poetry. He is the St Vincent de Paul Society National Council Chief Executive and a member of the Australian Social Inclusion Board.