Matthew's story

Centrelink is like being given rice when you need a meal. I mean it’s nothing, like you’re not starving but you’re malnutritioned.  Australia is a rich country but we are not very generous, we make our poor survive on next to nothing, there is no nurturing.

I come from a hard working family with a strong work ethic. I am tertiary educated, articulate and have lots of skills. But there has been childhood trauma and I have now come to realise after many years of not understanding it, that I have a mental health condition, and I need treatment.

My family taught me to be tough, to be resilient, and this has meant I have tried to keep myself going at times when I should have realised it wasn’t going to work out for me.  In youth work a field I’ve worked in a fair bit, they tell you resilience is a strength – however I don’t think it always is and I realise now sometimes people need help in other ways.

I’ve been on Newstart on and off for about a decade, and have applied for DSP, because of my mental health condition. This is a new thing, the DSP application, one day after I had lost another job I realised I had to do something to break out of this vicious circle I was in, where I’d keep a job for a bit, and then everything  would cycle out of control and I would lose it.

Applying for DSP has been difficult. Once I’d decided that was what I needed to do, I felt comfortable with the decision, even relieved, because it was like saying to myself it was OK that I could allow myself to do this. Getting help from a GP to get on it was hard though and I had a pretty bad time with one GP who told me I just needed to get a crap job and everything would be OK. I mean, where the hell did they get the idea from, seriously, some GPs have no idea.

Centrelink and that have no idea how hard it is to get through some of these processes.  Even for me who is educated and resilient, I find it challenging, there are so many services to navigate and none of them are connected up. I’m trying to get my mental health situation understood, which is a hard thing for me to come to terms with personally, and it’s like they’re asking a man with two broken legs to run a marathon. Except it’s not by legs that are broken it’s my brain that’s not working properly yet I am expected to use it for all this navigation and it’s really complex, it’s only my resilience that enables me to do it. I imagine there’s a lot of other people who just wouldn’t cope with it.

There is a huge power imbalance with the situation with Centrelink because you go in there and you know they have the power to pay you or not, so you’re just like a toy or something they can throw around, you are at their mercy. So I prefer to go in and just be straight and honest and tell them like it really is, it’s not up to me to try to change or manipulate the rules. Like I do know some people who’ve said you’ve got to go in and carry on that’s the only way you’ll get what you want but I prefer to keep my dignity.

Maintaining my dignity is important to me. I think there may be some people who go in and act up at Centrelink and so on but I am not one of them. I prefer they just hear my story from me, and usually I find because I am articulate, once they see and hear that they just seem to get confused about how to treat me.

I didn’t know there were places like Welfare Rights, or even resources I could use to research how to get on DSP, because that’s not like me to look into this, I will just take it as it comes.  It may not be that healthy I guess in the long run, because when this exemption I’ve got now runs out, I will be back at a JSA, although I think this time as Stream 4 so I don’t think they will be as hard on me as Stream 1 which I’ve been in before.

My way of coping with ES requirements has been to just to get a job. I k now I have 3 months in between to get my shit together, and then towards the end of the time I just apply for jobs like crazy, and usually end up with something that would be a bit better than what they’re likely to get me. I have been treated OK by the staff in these offices, and once or twice got some reasonable tips to help me, but I’ve never felt like they really having anyting to offer me, and even less the capacity to tailor services that actually fit my needs.

I didn’t get enough points on my DSP application and I am waiting to get another report from a psych, so I can go back and get a review of their decision because I know that if I keep going like this the vicious circle’s going to keep coming back again, and in some ways I  feel that’s inevitable because there’s no real safety-net for people like me, it’s all so hard.  

Like all these years I’ve been dealing with Centrelink and I’ve had this mental health problems, someone there could have had a look at what had been going on with my work record and the symptoms I was reporting like when I was losing it, and go whooa hang on a minute this guys at risk, and needs help. But that has never happened, and it was only when things got really bad a year or so ago, that I had to take responsibility for this and start my DSP application, even though as I said I wasn’t really feeling up to. So even this Stream 4 thing, I feel like I’ll end up doing it again, getting a job before I start getting hassled too much, and probably lose that one too…

It’s like there is this massive grey area, where loads of people, I think , with mental health stuff, are surviving in the mainstream, or trying to, where we don’t qualify for special treatment or even get identified as having needs, and we’re just kicked around through the system. I realise now there’s been a pattern to stuff that’s been happening to me, that’s almost like inescapable unless you go and check yourself in at a rehab centre of psych ward, and get some documentation that say yep you really are crazy or whatever.

I’m lucky that I’ve been able to realise some of this stuff for myself but there’s heap who don’t or can’t who are out there. I’ve an education that I can’t put to use because I have this trauma, and at the same time I don’t want to end up in a crap job, but my situation is that my mental health has been up and down for a long time and none of these services are working well for me. Like I said I have a strong work ethic, but I’m also a person with some qualifications and ambition one day to do something.

The way you get treated at Centrelink and places like that is so often dependent on the way they seem to see you. Like when they see my qualifications and so on, they treat me differently, instead of looking down at me, they look up at me, but in a sort of confused way, they don’t know how to categorise me. Generally I think they realise I am not a welfare cheat and that there’s been some bad shit going down for me.

I’ve learnt that the treatment you get from Centrelink varies a lot depending on how stressed they are and I deliberately avoid offices I know that are like that. They seem to be more relaxed in places where that are not so low income, if you get what I mean, where’s there’s not so much obvious hardship and stuff for them to deal with.  They just seem so under-resourced in those places, like they really need to put some more resources in those places where there’s more need.

They policies seem like very blunt tools when I know that people’s situations are a lot more complex than just saying Oh let’s keep Newstart so low they will have no choice but to get a job. Like that’s what I’ve been doing, just getting a job, and then it blows up in everyone’s face because that’s not the right treatment for the situation of that person. I never had the sense that any of these services are about customising anything for anyone’s needs, rather they’re like a processing machine that doesn’t really work that well. 

Newstart’s such a pittance I couldn’t survive without social and financial support from friends and family, I know I’m a hell of a lot luckier than a some people who don’t have that, and another thing I’m lucky about is that I’ve had some self-realisations while I’m still a bit younger, rather than being a ticking time bomb going off at 50 and losing everything, believe me I’ve met some like that with my youth work.