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It was billed as the cost-of-living budget.
When Treasurer Jim Chalmers stepped up this week to unveil his government’s economic plan for the year ahead, he described a responsible budget that “helps people under pressure today”.
Among the top-line budget measures aimed at easing cost-of-living pressures are the reworked stage three tax cuts, a $300 energy bill rebate for each household, an increase to Commonwealth Rental Assistance payments and a freeze on co-payments for medicines on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS).
But how does that sit with everyday Australians, an estimated 3.3 million of whom are living below the poverty line?
We asked for your thoughts on how this budget measures up.
Among thousands of submissions, there’s an overwhelming sense of despair.
Some on the brink of survival said rental assistance was still not enough to get them off the street.
People living in public housing on disability support pensions shared how rising costs have forced them to forego medical treatment, while others desperate to reduce electricity bills are turning off their heating or showering just once a week.
Many explain they cannot afford to eat three meals a day. Some people are feeling so distressed that they have thoughts of suicide.
Others who are getting by reached out to the ABC wishing to donate their $300 energy rebate, or offering spare rooms to people who are homeless.
These are just some of their stories.
Homeless job seekers and pensioners feel they’re ‘slipping through the cracks’
Sally*, who is in her 50s, has been living out of her van for seven years, and describes the increase to rental assistance as utterly inadequate.
“I’m on the Job Seeker payment. I’ve been looking for work for quite a long time and trying to establish an online business. I’m only just barely scraping through managing to eat and live in my van,” she said.
“The increase on what is already an inadequate payment is not going to make any difference to my situation whatsoever.”
Rent assistance, which is an additional payment available for some people on government support, is calculated depending on living circumstances and how much you pay in rent.
For a single person like Sally, if you’re paying more than $146 per fortnight in rent, you’re entitled to 75 cents for every dollar over that amount. The maximum fortnightly payment for a single person living alone is $188.20, or $125.47 if they’re in a share house.
The increase announced this week means the maximum rate will go up by 10 per cent from September 20 this year — so about $12 to $19 a fortnight in Sally’s case, if she could find a rental.
In Perth, where Sally lives, the median weekly rent has exceeded $650 — $1,300 per fortnight. She estimates that moving into shared accommodation would cost around $200 per week — $400 per fortnight.
She currently budgets $100 a fortnight to keep her few possessions that don’t fit in the van in storage, on top of the rest of her day-to-day living costs.
“I’ve got zero capacity, even with a rent assistance payment, to meet $400 a fortnight [in rent],” she said.
“I’ve had to borrow money this fortnight to make ends meet, to pay for my motor vehicle insurance and to make sure I’ve got roadside assistance. Because if I don’t have those things, then I lose, literally, the only shelter that I’ve got.”
Tori Norton, 65, is on a disability support pension and renting with her rescue cat in regional New South Wales.
She spends roughly two-thirds of her $1,200 pension to rent an accessible property, which she requires for her disability.
She says the federal budget has left her feeling “angry and bitterly disappointed”.
If her rent increases, she said, even by 10 per cent, then she won’t be able to afford her groceries.
“It’s at the point where other friends of mine who are pensioners get so excited just when they can buy mince to make Bolognese,” Tori said.
“Honestly! This is what we discuss — how exciting it is when you can afford to make a Bolognese.”
She’s worried that soon she won’t be able to afford to care for her cat, Abby, who has been “such a blessing”.
Like Tori, Sally says she would have liked to have seen a significant increase to rent assistance, in conjunction with another increase to the Job Seeker payment, which is currently set at a maximum of $816.90 ($408.45 per week) for a single person over 55 in Sally’s situation.
This budget did include $41.2 million over five years to extend that higher rate to single JobSeekers who are able to work up to 14 hours a week, but welfare advocacy groups have said this falls well short of what is needed.
The Australian Council of Social Service described the decision not to increase Job Seeker and Youth Allowance base rates as “a gaping hole at the heart of this budget”.
“Maybe there could have been provisions for people who are actually living in the streets,” Sally said. “I don’t know. How do you balance everything out? It just feels like I’m one of the people that just keeps slipping through the cracks.”
Younger Australians say budget measures won’t make much of a dent
Melbourne law student Celia, 27, is completing her final year of a juris doctor and says the cost of living crisis will weigh her and her peers down for years to come.
While studying full-time and working in the legal sector part-time, Celia receives Youth Allowance to supplement her income and a scholarship contributes to her education, but she says it’s barely enough to cover rent and groceries each fortnight.
“I am able to pay rent, purchase bare minimum groceries, and pay for public transport, petrol, things of that nature. But like everything else has been cut out,” she said.
“I’m coming away with very little money, in comparison to the way that my HECS debt is increasing.”
And in the meantime, she’s about to reach the HECS-HELP loan limit, which means she’ll soon have to start paying for her degree outright.
The recent changes to HECS-HELP debt, which will see loan indexation calculated on whichever figure is lower out of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and the Wage Price Index (WPI), will save hundreds of dollars for an estimated three million Australians.
This will apply to Celia’s existing debt, which is around $100,000, but she says in the grand scheme it won’t make much of a dent.
“I’ll get about $5,000 back,” she said. “Unfortunately, that doesn’t really do anything for me, because each unit that I do at uni is about $5,000.”
Celia was pleased to see relief targeted towards other students to address placement poverty, but she feels that the rising cost of education and combined loan limits introduced under the Coalition in 2020 make the prospect of future students pursuing post-graduate studies “extremely grim”.
“I don’t think it really gets to the root of the problem, which is the fact that we are paying just ridiculous amounts of money for degrees that people my parents’ age didn’t have to pay for, that we kind of need to have … if we want to be a high-income earner,” she said.
People are choosing to skip medical treatment because they can’t afford it
Darren Miner lives with his partner in Oberon, New South Wales. They are both on the Disability Support Pension, and his partner also accesses the NDIS.
He says while they are fortunate to be in public housing and somewhat protected from the rental crisis, they really feel the pinch when it comes to medical costs.
“Our GP, fortunately, bulk-bills people on pensions. But we have both foregone specialist appointments just because of the cost,” he said.
“A number of them refuse to bulk-bill, even if you’re on a pension. But it’s also just the requirement to have the full fee, up front … For example, for me to see the lung specialist is $300. I get $250 back on Medicare. So I can afford that $50 gap, but I don’t have that $300 in the first place.”
Darren also deals with mental health issues, but is currently not receiving any treatment due to the costs.
“I can’t afford it, even under a mental health care plan, which only covers [an initial] 10 sessions per year … And good luck seeing a decent psychiatrist in the public health system,” he said.
Tori, who previously worked as a mental health nurse for 25 years, says she understands the nuance of setting up a system to provide this kind of care.
And while she was debt-free when she was working, she has been forced to take out a credit card to pay for health-related expenses.
“I was at an appointment the other day and I got teary because the specialist told me they were going to bulk-bill my appointment, which usually would have cost me over $600,” she said.
Both Tori and Darren say they will get some relief from the freeze for medicines listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. The maximum co-payment for concession card holders will be held at its current rate of $7.70 for five years.
While the budget did include $227.6 million over the next few years to address the disability employment program, Darren says this measure won’t help him much as a carer with limited hours available to work.
He says the biggest concern he has about the budget is the changes to the NDIS, which he believes will affect his partner’s plan.
In a bid to rein in the ballooning cost of the NDIS, there will be changes to address what the government calls “intra-plan inflation”, where participants can access top-up payments if the agreed plan is spent sooner than expected.
“It means if my partner goes over her allocated amount for a service, within her plan, that means she’ll miss out on services, and that can be for a long time if she is underfunded right from the get-go,” Darren said.
“She’s got $157 remaining in her care plan until September. That’s basically one hour, or half an hour worth of help. As it currently sits … if they go a little bit over they’re not going to cut services. But from what I’m reading in the budget, that’s going to stop.
“What if I end up hospitalised and she needs a week or two of help, and that money’s run out?”
Finding cheap housing is a struggle
Anne James, 83, has given up on waiting for a spot in social housing after she was advised it would take another five to 10 years for a place to free up.
She was renting a small unit in Wangaratta during the height of the COVID pandemic when her rent went up by $80 a fortnight — out of reach for her income as an aged pensioner.
“That is an impossible thing, for me to live like that. So since then, I did apply for housing commission. It’s nearly two years now, and when I inquired about it quite recently … they said it could be five to 10 years. I said, ‘Well, that’s a great joke, isn’t it?… I’ll be 94,” she said.
No longer able to afford her rent, Anne has been house-sitting for the past two years.
“I don’t want to do that forever. My children, they’ve got my stuff in storage and they would never see me on the street. But that is not the point. I have worked here 45 years, bringing up eight good Australians, and still I have trouble to get social housing. I am on the list, but there’s so many waiting, it’s impossible.”
Ally Oliver-Perham is a working parent living in Chewton Bushlands in regional Victoria.
“We can be pretty frugal at times. And so we’re able to budget well, but I have to say there have been moments where I’ve hesitated to fill the car up with petrol. That’s probably the main cost that we are really struggling with at the moment,” she said.
Ally says the rising cost of fuel means she and her partner can only budget for limited trips to Melbourne for work and to visit family and friends.
“You do hesitate, because you think, ‘well, this is going to affect my ability to buy the groceries I need down the track?'” she said.
Their other main financial pressure is childcare costs for their two-year-old daughter. Ally says she was hoping to see more action around childcare rebates in this budget.
“I try not to think about how much we’re spending on that, because it will impact my enjoyment with being at work and providing. But it’s certainly making us consider, do we go out? Do we go to that social event? Do we spend money on these more recreational things?”
Her family won’t have access to the $300 energy bill rebate as their property is off the grid.
“Obviously that’s a personal choice — we want to make a positive contribution to climate change and this is how we’re doing it. But there’s all these costs associated with that,” she said.
“I was curious about the fact that it wasn’t means tested … because I know it’s only $300, which is going to be really meaningful for someone who’s really struggling. But I don’t understand why some households who are quite well off are getting the same amount of money. I just thought that was a strange way of approaching this cost-of-living crisis.”
The energy bill rebate won’t help everyone
The energy bill relief measure has been criticised this week by welfare advocacy groups who point out that financially vulnerable Australians actually stand to be worse off under the policy in the long run.
This news was a worry for Darren and his partner, who both receive the Disability Support Pension, which increases twice a year in line with headline CPI or the Pensioner and Beneficiary Living Cost Index (whichever is higher).
The concern is that if the energy bill relief scheme lowers inflation, as the government predicts it will, that could mean their support payments rise by less.
“The budget leaves us worse off, overall,” Darren said.
“With the overall cost of living, especially in terms of food, especially in terms of medical, we are going backwards, not forwards.”
For Sally, living in her van, limited access to power is a barrier to generating income. She lives with chronic fatigue syndrome and other disabilities that make full-time work very difficult, so she’s been trying to establish an online business.
One of the budget’s key measures to support small businesses was a $325 energy relief rebate, but Sally can’t access it because she doesn’t have an electricity bill.
“Because my small business is online-based, it’s a no-brainer for me, I can do that. But I don’t have regular access to electricity supply to keep my devices running, which means that is an ongoing barrier to my success,” she said.
“I’ve tried working out of the libraries. But very often … I get sick, so I can’t work for a few days or a couple of weeks. I can’t work out of cafes because I don’t have the money to pay for the coffee all day. So I’ve looked at hot desks, that’s $80 a day. Everything is a barrier.
“I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place every way I turn. I don’t know what else to do.”
*Sally’s name has been changed to protect her privacy.
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