Lisa's story

I have been on and off Centrelink since I was 16, I am now 32. Pretty much all the kids from my home town were eligible for Austudy, I come from a very socio-economically depressed area in NSW but I have moved to Perth now.

I am one of those people who are perpetually overqualified even though I want to work, and would take pretty much any job, employers look at my CV and go she’s not gonna last 5 minutes, so they don’t start me. I am working at the moment, and happy to have the income even though the jobs not in my professional field. I have a BA, Dip of Legal Studies and have nearly completed my law degree. I am a self-starter and have been ambitious about my studies, I was accepted in for a scholarship on the basis of my year 10 results for an essay, despite the fact I came from a town with a low socio-ecnomic background and have been poor all my life.

It is pretty degrading being poor and I have been conscious of stigma about this since I was young. Both my parents were skilled in their jobs although they did not have tertiary qualifications but ended up moving to an area where their jobs were restructured and they were left out of work. So we were on benefits from when I was a young age, and in the town where everyone pretty much knew everyone, we were considered lower than the Indigenous family because everyone considered us to be wilfully unemployed, but we weren’t.  So I felt that stigma with me, even when I moved to a bigger town, that everyone considered me welfare dependent when I was applying for benefits like Austudy, then Youth Allowance, and especaiily Newstart when I was a bit older.

Now  I am a bit older at 32, I feel I have left the prejudice behind a little as I have worked on  and off now for a few years, pay my taxes and do my bit to contribute when I can, so that I have a stronger sense of my rights. I came from a family with strong social justice background anyway, so now that I”ve been studying law and so on, and growing confident, I feel a stronger claim to be entitled to government support. It’s not as if I am intentionally unemployed at the moment, I am working 22 hours a week, plus doing my study part time, it’s not that I am idle.

I have survived for years on a really low income, on Austudy where I couldn’t get a job that fitted well around my study hours, and I was also unemployed for over 12 months.  Having no money is very erosive of your self-confidence; I’ve been in the situation where I’ve basically had to beg money for my rent and borrow money off my family. It’s not a pleasant way to live, it’s pretty much like starvation. Because of being on a low income I’m in a depressed part of Perth for the lower rents so I get to go to the Cetnrleink and employment service agencies who are used to working with people from around here and I can detect in their attitude and behaviour their used to working with people who are non-compliant all the time.

So when they deal with me, they kind of get a shock when they see my qualifications and the kind of work I am qualified for. I am lucky at the moment I have a very protective employment service case worker, she kind of shelters me from some of the issues with Centrelink when my work is intermittent. They haven’t all been like that, there was one that threatened to cut me off and blamed me for their administrative mistake. I won’t go back to them, once they treated me like that I have lost faith in them. It was like they were transferring blame for their own mistake onto me because they couldn’t fess up to making the mistake themselves.

Anyway it left me feeling very vulnerable, I mean you are vulnerable enough on the dole and at the mercy of one person’s decisions, their sword of Damascus, you feel so powerless, and grateful when they actually help you out, or get your benefits back for you if there’s been a mistake. I experienced this whole kind of power imbalance thing a lot back in my home town when talking to the Centrelink staff, and since my whole family was on welfare, they made us feel very shameful and at their mercy, like we really weren’t worthy of the benefits we were getting. It just made us feel very bad about ourselves, that added to the negative feelings and loss of confidence we already had about being unemployed, it is really awful.

These feelings are very strong and present for me about how this treatment is so incredibly humiliating, and you go into these service situations feeling like you have to submit. As I said my confidence has grown as I’ve matured, but it is always a struggle to overcome the anxiety that you are totally at their mercy.  It’s a feeling like there is a bowling ball in your stomach, dread and panic, about just being cut off and having nothing. I do stand my ground a bit more, but that anxiety is always there.

You never really know what you are in for with each worker either, it’s the luck of the draw if you get a helpful one, or if you get a bad one.  This happens both at employment services and Centrelink, it seems to be really random and subjective, sometimes they will show empathy and others you are just another job seeker.

Even so I have been able to establish a good relationship with a couple of case workers at the agency I am at now. I trust her and know that she will look after me, at the same time she knows I will do the job search and put in the job applications that she needs me to. Not at this agency but at another one I did feel pressured into taking a crap job that I didn’t really want, in a paper factory. Fortunately another job came up for me and I was able to exit that one without getting a non-payment penalty, they were really horrible people and had given me a hard time about spending like precisely 2.5 minutes  too long in the toilet or something.  Even so I was glad to be earning at the time since it gave me enough money to live on for a change.

Now mainly my problem is I am a square peg they are trying to fit in a round hole. Most of the jobs around here a blue collar factory jobs and the employers don’t even give me a look in. I am looking for professional jobs in the greater Perth region, but since I don’t have much professional work experience it’s really hard to get a break. I have heard this is a problem for a lot of new graduates, we are just overqualified for the workforce. As I said I am not a job snob, although ideally I would like to work in an area I have qualified for. Employers also knock me back because I don’t have a drivers license, there’s this attitude here in Perth you need a car to get around, but after the rural area I lived in NSW there’s public transport here you just cant get there.

My social justice values drive me to want to help make the world a better place. My view about employment services is that in a perfect world they would actually help people find the jobs they want to get, not just keep them active for the sake of it, and make them jump through ridiculous hoops just to keep their benefits. People on welfare are already humiliated enough, doing things like this for employment services just makes them feel even worse.