"What would 100 very poor people tell us about our society? They don’t have to be identified by name, but enough of their story should be told so we would know about them. Maybe it would tell us something about our government and ourselves."

Getting back to this question, I bet if you did a "longitudinal" study of the 100 most poor people, leaving aside for a moment how you define them, you'd find that at various points along their life path, they had to make a decision and take a fork in the road. Often, their decisions would have been made with incomplete information and with the stigma of some past failure in the back of their mind. Their decision would have been made knowing, from previous exerience, what blockages for them there were out there in society and what their own personal weaknesses were. I guess that people in poverty take a certain decision to shield their weaknesses from painful exposure because poverty seems like the easiest way out, when what would be best for them is some support to take the next step on the road to their rehabilitation - normally the slow scenic route rather than climbing up a sheer cliff face. Half the time, external moral support is needed just to give the person the courage to have a go. Some of the time, helping these people is futile because they don't want to change (better to leave them alone), but sometimes it makes all the difference. Sometimes, if you get to them early enough, all they need is a psychological boost when they're feeling low.

The bottom line is that if everyone in society did a little bit more to help - the "many hands make light work" approach - the positive momentum could one day snowball until the problem of poverty in all its forms was gotten rid of. A little pollyanna-ish? Not if society at large focussed on it.

Thanks for the question, David.

RobP I can confirm your latest comment. In the early days of privitization of the labour market I was CEO of a company that specialised in placing the long term unemployed. In personal interviews I discovered that offering these people a job meant exposing them to a great risk. The government recognizes that when you are long term unemployed you need a more robust safety net - you do not have the cash reserves to cover the costs of things we tend to take for granted. You now offer them a job. Because they are long term unemployed the employer offers them a short term trial - the problem for me was that I knew that some employers were simply taken advantage of the financial incentives offered to take on long term unemployed; once the incentives finished so did the job. This meant that instead of being regarded as long term unemployed they were back at the end of the queue financially worse off and even more difficult to employ for their CV would now seem to indicate that they were difficult to employ.
Over the 3 years I was doing this we had over 5,000 people on our books. Of these about half a dozen were genuine dole bludgers. The majority were just as you described people in a situation where they could not identify how they could lift themselves out of poverty.

Foxy “The inability to afford minimal standards”

Problem: a “standard” is like a “bar” which people hurdle over…

how high or how low the standard might be depends on who sets it.

Ultimately a “standard” is just another subjective measure which will vary with situation and circumstances.

I guess the “Australian Standard” bar is set somewhere above the “Sub-Saharan Standard” –

Yet I suspect a real “minimum” will be common and consistent across continents.

And people survive in Sub-Sahara Africa.



Oh MaryE you need to improve your presentation style if you expect anyone to bother to read what you write.

I got half way through that block of tightly written drivel and fell into a coma of disinterest (even though it was about me).




ASymeonakis “Are you sure that you are not poor in social sensitivity and understanding?”

Define them and I will tell you

“Are you sure you are not poor in social solidarity and social support?”

Define them and I will tell you

Are you sure that you are not poor in understanding the social and economic, political privileges?
Are you sure you are not poor in understanding the social, economic and political discriminations and barriers?

I am unsure what “wealth” there is to be found in such “gifts”

Do you know persons with high IQ, maturity, responsibility or productivity stack on the bottom and other with very low IQ, lazy, immature or irrisponsible jumped on the top?

Yes

But the lazy, irresponsible ones do not jump much

“Did you ever interested to see how the system of equal opportunities work?”

Yes, But equal opportunity does not result in equal outcomes.

“Did you ever interested to see how many barries there are who control the trafic to rich or poor, succes or fail?”

I overcame them

“Did you see professors to clean the floors and IDIOTS TO BE MANAGERS?”

All the time

“This world is not fair and logical at all.”


So what…

we all have to make the most of it

It is whats called "life"

make your own way... no one will make it for you

Pelican “what I think he misses sometimes is the fact that things can happen to people that are out of their control - even for a short time.”

That is where you are very, very wrong

I have known

Job loss(es), heart attacks, bypass surgery, death of parents, divorce …..

the usual stuff, which many folk experience

by needing to deal with such issues, they become the steps which help us to grow as individuals ….

My life, like many peoples, has been a process of forward momentum, interdispered with sudden and sometimes unexpected backward steps...

Where I can I am insured (house insurance, life cover, income protection etc), where I am not I have to manage / deal the consequences and accept the help of my network friends and those who know and love me.

But we come back to how “high” a support standard should be set…

Support sufficient to finance a 5 bedroom mansion in Toorak or Vaucluse?

or

Support just sufficient to ensure people eat today?

Or

Something in between

and for the something in between.....

“support is necessary from governments, private individuals and charities in various combinations.”

How government spends tax payers money is subject to the electorates scrutiny.


How private individuals spend their private resources is up to them


Charities fall in between.. they are subject to public scrutiny against fraud etc


The danger with addressing those three support sources in one single statement is to assume the levels of scrutiny and public accountability is common; whereas, obviously, it is not.

I would set the "support bar" at below "subsistence" level (well below the minimum wage), where the opportunity to be "economically self-supporting" was seen as an upward step.

I would abandon maternity allowances and all the other bling-bling stupidities.

for old aged pensions, such funding needs a life time..

we cannot abandon those who came before us because we changed the rules but we do need to wean the commnunity off the idea of "government pensions as a safety net"... over say 4 decades.

The responsibility for the 100 poorest people in Australia whoever they are rests firmly with the three East Coast State Governments. Tasmania is too cold, I think because I saw very few homeless in Hobart.

There is no doubt that the over regulation of the boarding houses in Sydney by the Sydney Council and State Government caused them to close throwing their residents on the streets. There is no doubt the creation of a State Judicial Power, in the name of a State Government in all of those States after they got the Australia Act 1986 has made the access to justice outside the possibility of any homeless person. There is no doubt the monopoly enjoyed by the legal profession, from magistrate to High Court, in providing Judges, means that compassion has died.

There is no doubt that many criminal corporations like Visy are able to buy justice, while thousands sleep rough every night, winter and summer. There is no doubt there is plenty of money in Australia, and it is unevenly distributed. The creation of a State Judicial Power is illegal, and the only reason States are not being called to account is the unwillingness of the Commonwealth and Australian Federal Police to enforce Commonwealth Laws against them.

Until we restore the justice system we had between 1900 and 1953, and give everyone fair free and unfettered access to justice, not just Law, then we will continue to see sights that make us feel guilty. The States are parasites. In a country of 21 million people we don’t need them. They were abolished in practical terms in 1995, by Paul Keating’s government but Howard loved them, with their Labor Governments he could denigrate and they kept him in power lots longer than he should have been.

I know that some think I am a nutter, but I have researched the reasons for poverty and it is the Australia Act 1986. It creates nine separate Churches in Australia with Church and State merged in Judges and Magistrates. When a Justice and jury ruled, there was only one Commonwealth Sovereign power

RobP, I wonder if this is really true:
"I guess that people in poverty take a certain decision to shield their weaknesses from painful exposure because poverty seems like the easiest way out..."
I think we are all aware to some degree of "the flow". Some of us just like to drift along, go with 'the flow', no stress, no hassles. Over achievers I think are striking out (in the swimming sense) all the time, sometimes against the flow, sometimes trying to beat the flow; sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but always battling.
We all make decisions based on limited data, and I think we -at least the honest ones- can look back on our lives and think "Thank God I chose..." or "why on earth did I choose..."
Some people decide not to make decisions; and strangely that doesn't automatically commit them to poverty.
It may just commit them to well paid bureaucracy.
I strongly believe that 'fortune favours the prepared mind'; but I also believe very few people if any have ever succeeded entirely by their own devices. I think every honest person can look back and see how their lives were affected by others, for good or ill.
In other words, I agree with the bulk of your post, and with Baygon's.