Life feels so short. Every day passes in a blink. I worry about wasted moments; about not spending my time ‘properly’; about regretting a life not lived to the fullest.
How much of this is the result of economic pressures? The need to earn money, collect a wage. Stability needs money.
For much of my life I haven’t been good at earning money. I was lucky to have been born into a time and a place and a family in which that hardly seemed to matter.
My parents didn’t demand that I worked as a teenager, nor did they express too much displeasure at my bouts of joblessness during university.
That’s not because they solely funded my life. The welfare gave me Youth Allowance while I studied. I also took the dole for a year immediately after uni to go and write my novel. Eight years after graduation and I still haven’t written my novel. Eight years.
I might still be on the dole if Services Australia hadn’t nudged me into the workforce. The kicker was mutual obligations, a set of “tasks and activities you agree to do” as a condition of your welfare payments.
When I was doing this, in 2017, you had to fill out a form detailing the jobs you applied for each week (or fortnight?). You had to apply for some number of jobs, say 20. And you brought that form with you to an appointment with a ‘employment services provider’.
These ‘employment services providers’ – mine was called Max Employment – were there to sit down, check the list of jobs you applied for, maybe talk about your resume or career or training or whatever, then keep an eye on you while you sat at their desktop computers and used Internet Explorer to apply for jobs on Seek.
These parasitic businesses started popping up around the Centrelink offices in Elizabeth and Salisbury as a means of enforcing the welfare system’s deliberate hostility. See, the government doesn’t want people on the dole but has, to its credit, maintained some sense of obligation to at least give people something to help them not starve.
But even the small amounts of money the governmeny hands out always have to be conditional. Max and its ilk were there to enforce those conditions, for a price, of course. As businesses go, they’re about as unproductive as you could imagine: merely standing between you and a minor act of wealth redistribution.
Max’s offices were near the arid Elizabeth train station. Large crows, fattened from the scraps of the nearby Maccas, cast their shadows over cracked clay earth. An immense rack of probably stolen bicycles sat for sale out front of the nearby Cash Converters.
The office was expansive and open plan. Employee desks took up about two thirds of the building with room for maybe a dozen computers at which us peasants could do our pro forma job applications.
There would have been maybe 20 staff in that office on a busy day, living their best corporate Aussie life keeping the poors busy with their tasks and activities to keep collecting $200 a week.
Every time I had to go down there and supplicate for my meagre payment, it struck me how the staff and I were two sides of the same coin. We both collected our government money as part of the welfare system.
Who’re the real wasters? Dole collectors or the median-income office workers and handsomely compensated middle managers who contribute absolutely nothing to the economy except by the taxes paid on their nice government tenders for administering a deliberately hostile and punitive welfare system?
After a length of time, I think it was a year but it might only have been 6 months, your obligations increase and you go on a ‘work for the dole’ program. In my case, this was out at some small scale community courtyard type construction site near a Coles depot. The first and only time I saw this site, one of the Max managers drove me and a handful of fellow Losers out there. The nearest train public transport was the train station a good 30min walk away. It was the height of summer so hot weather policy bought me time to have my Radio Adelaide volunteer work recognised by the welfare and soon after Sama got me a job as a journalist at the Adelaide Hills Weekender Herald.
I guess the system worked. I weaned myself off the government teat, so to speak, and went out into the workforce. Sama got a job in Sydney and I followed, jobless, ready to put all my job application practice to the test.