Australian Vinnies ask ‘Why are the Poor Treated Like Criminals’

“The poor are still being demonized and shamed”, said St Vincent de Paul Society Acting President, John Meahan today, responding to the latest set of breaching regulations.
“Breaching has little to do with compassion but a lot to do with short-term savings for the Department of Family and Community Services”, he said. “The focus is not on people, be they homeless, living with a mental illness or otherwise excluded from the labour market. Rather, the focus is on coercion and control.”

The St Vincent de Paul Society last year recommended in its Two Australias report that breaching be confined solely to those who were seeking to criminally defraud the Commonwealth.

“What we have seen, however” said Mr Meahan, “is a wholesale scapegoating and punishment of the vulnerable. What justice is there in taking $240 million from the most defenceless people in our society to fund other government programmes?”

“No matter how big the stick”, he added, “not one new job is going to be created by the punishment of suspending their income support payments.”

“The breaching system doesn’t need tweaking. It needs scrapping. In its place we need to see a whole of government strategy, involving all three levels of government in a coordinated approach to addressing regional development and government intervention to create new jobs with decent wages and conditions.”

“As we have continuously argued”, said Mr Meahan, “if there are 700,000 plus unemployed people at any one time and only 100,000 or so jobs (many of which don’t fit the location or skills of the unemployed), then breaching is nothing more than a means of penalizing people for failing to get a job that doesn’t exist.”

“The fault”, he continued, “does not lie with the individual. It lies with the inability of the market to reach and sustain acceptable levels of economic participation for disadvantaged Australians. Hence, despite the world record growth in Australia announced last week, few additional full-time jobs have emerged. This is why we are continuing to see a growth in the gap between rich and poor.”

The St Vincent de Paul Society welcomes the recent strong economic growth figures and notes that it is incumbent on all governments to embark on a long-term strategy to ensure that the prosperity is shared by all.

Mr Meahan affirmed: “We should be treating the source of the problem, rather than punishing those who bear the brunt of the burden in their daily struggle to survive.”

John Meahan (08) 9337 3392 (h) / 0409 113085
Terry McCarthy (02) 6281 1673 (h) / 0410 590506
John Wicks (02) 6286 1442 (h)
John Falzon (02) 9572 6044 / 0421 332247