Just stay positive

This week's posts are being sourced and moderated by the Antipoverty Centre (@antipovertycent) to spark thinking and discussion about poverty in Australia during Anti-Poverty Week. In today’s article, Melissa Fisher explains why welfare recipients don’t need a course in ‘resilience’ . Melissa is an Adelaide based artist relying on income support through JobSeeker due to disability.

I've been thinking lately about how the poverty machine keeps whirring as people are fed into it, and how we're still blamed for it. This last fortnight has made me angry frustrated and anything but positive.

I first got told that I would have to do a course in resilience by my employment worker with an email and a text message. For four days, I would have to listen to someone with none of my life experience lecture me on being positive and resilient, as if these are the things stopping me from gaining employment.

None of our chronic health conditions or disabilities are taken into consideration as a barrier to work, but somehow it's our attitude that's the problem. Like somehow - if I'm positive - my skin will suddenly cure itself.

The truth is that those on welfare payments are the most resilient people I know. It takes a special kind of resilience to get up each day not knowing if you can afford to eat or take medication. It takes a huge amount of resilience to be unwell and have to just wait it out because you can't afford to see your doctor.

To deal with a system that's determined to punish you and still get up everyday and face it is the most resilient thing we can do.

Choosing between buying bread or milk because you can't afford both is stressful, and it’s a choice most of us are making. Weighing up the way you can use milk vs the way you can use bread to get the most from it is something that most people don't have to think about. Those of us on payments have to think about all too often.

Being required to attend resilience training is just another way to blame us for our poverty. It implies that it's us who need to do better, that it's us that somehow are weak and sad, and if only we were strong and happy then we will be okay. Hearing from some of my other course-captured comrades (say that 3 times fast) when they talk about what they've been through and hearing their trauma makes it clear how strong these people are. We overcome things like addiction, grief, domestic violence, and having disabilities or illness on top of it, and yet we're all still standing. All the while, we’re expected to sit and listen to a much younger person with none of these experiences showing us pictures of celebrities who have failed but are now successful, implying we’re still at the failure level and purposefully ignoring how these celebrities had help.

These activities never mention the constant stress we are under with housing, food, and health all being insecure, just waiting for  the next thing to go wrong. (I’m writing this shaking as I've just opened a letter from Housing SA telling me I've got until the 3rd of November to get all my yard work completely done, or I breach my tenancy). The stress of being in poverty doesn't end, and yet somehow we’re seen as the ones who lack strength and character. Sometimes I think employment services just do this because if we're busy blaming ourselves and feeling shame, then we won't start to look at the systems that are in place to keep poverty profitable. And believe me, it is.

It's Anti-Poverty week. So far, from major organisations who get funding to help us, I've seen things like “spread awareness and pray”. No amount of praying is going to make the government suddenly grow a conscience, and no amount of praying is going to feed people. No amount of positivity or resilience is going to cure us from trauma, disability or chronic illness. You know what helps with that? Therapy we can't afford. Medical care that we've been priced out of. Food we go without.

This year for Anti-Poverty week, I don't want to see platitudes and prayers I want our politicians - who we elected - to stand up and grow a conscience, and lift people out of poverty. They’ve tried and failed with the punishment method for way to long. It’s time we did things differently. It's time people were treated like people and not numbers in the poverty machine. It's time our government stood for the vulnerable instead of donors and the wealthy.

Instead of politicians forgetting they have power, and doing CEO sleepouts, food drives or asking for sleeping bags to be donated, they could simply raise the rate of income support and start eradicating poverty. Instead, I'm sure we will get another year of mentions that it’s Anti-Poverty week without any real action taken to address it.

Content moderator: Antipoverty Centre