To my dear member of parliament,
I am very concerned by your government’s move to drug testing for welfare recipients. In 2003 when I graduated from university, I was on Newstart allowance for six months while I looked for work and I found dealing with Centrelink alienating and dehumanising. The attitude of the system toward welfare recipients already feels so harsh. I wasn’t on any drugs but the addition of testing would have increased my sense of disillusionment with a state which treated me with suspicion and heavy-handedness.
I can’t believe this measure comes the same week Tony Abbott admits to being too drunk to vote in a crucial bill. It feels to me that your government risks seeming hypocritical. I’m not convinced this measure is actually concerned with helping people with addiction problems – if this is your real concern, increase funding for addiction services.
Yours sincerely, Nathan Hobby.
I didn’t remind my MP of the fact that he was caught drink-driving without a licence two years ago. I don’t know why this testing measure bothers me so much, but it seems just a little fascist and also yet another move of a government which despises the underclass. There are no jobs for people to be getting at the moment. There are actually so many activities / classes of people who receive subsidies or concessions from the government – as someone tweeted, why aren’t the negative gearers being tested for drugs?
Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 
Well said, Nathan! Fascistic is just the right word.
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Did you see the ABC report about this on The Link? I was stunned to see how many jobs require testing, everything from construction work to the public service.
But Nathan, I think there are other dehumanising issues with Centrelink…. I’d never had to deal with them until I was Power of Attorney for my father when he was in aged care. You may not realise this but even if your income is such that you get no subsidy towards your aged care, you still have to go through Centrelink in order to get a place. Even though my father was a self-funded retiree I had to go through the whole rigmarole when I brought him down from Qld to Melbourne – and getting through on the phone was a *nightmare*.
Well, I could handle it. I was retired, I had a desk to sit at while I waited on the phone for hours at a time, over 4-5 days. I read books, I played Solitaire, I did Sudoku, The Spouse brought me coffee, and I could afford the phone costs. But for young people paying for their phone by the minute, unemployed or homeless people, people with language difficulties or intellectual disability, rural people who can’t get to a Centrelink office or an elderly person trying to do it themselves, trying to get through on the phone is dreadful. You wait and wait, you get put through to the wrong department, you get given the wrong info, you have to tell your story multiple times, you get cut off. I am on my MP’s case about doing something about it: both parties are equally keen to operate the system with minimum staff and as a matter of equity and a fair go for the people Centrelink is supposed to help, something must be done to fix it.
Because it’s inhumane…
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Oh Lisa that sounds dreadful! It’s like people’s time is worth nothing. I missed the ABC report on testing – I must check it out.
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…and people with addictions will still have a habit to fund, waiting for the increase in violent crime and burglary. This is not a government that cares about people, it is a government that cares about money above all else😡
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Exactly!
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