Our government is crawling in the dark on Newstart

It wasn't a pretty job, made worse by the fact the previous owner was supposed to have done it (a long story, let's move on).

Anyway, there we were, crawling, talking and swearing when we cracked our heads on the floor beams you forget are there until you hit one, ignoring the spider webs and fearing the worst each time we hauled out a bit of plastic or a pile of timber to find the ugliness hiding beneath. There was a huge amount of crap underneath that house, all destined for the skip bin outside.

If you've never crawled beneath a brick house, my suggestion would be: don't. Add it to the list of things you've never done, and won't, for good reason, like trying heroin, going on an overseas cosmetic surgery "holiday", taking up skateboarding in retirement, or applying for a federal government sports grant. They all end in tears.

Crawling round beneath a 1970s brick house that's been rented out since the 1970s fits into that category.

My son headed off into a particularly dark and ugly looking area that branched off behind the front staircase, while I headed north towards the back of the garage. The torch on my phone picked out every cobweb cluster and pile of discarded junk until there was a clearing, of sorts, and an area that had been dug out a little and paved.

The brick foundations walled this area in, and on each wall there were shelves. I sat in the dirt and dust on a raised area and sized it up. It looked for all the world like a kitchen area, down in the dark. The shelves had the kinds of items you're more likely to see in a kitchen or laundry, rather than a garage or a storage/rubbish area beneath a house.

I went back to where we'd entered the crawlspace from the garage, which the real estate agent confirmed had not been used to store a car for years.

I climbed back to where my son was, took him over to the paved area and he eventually agreed. It looked like someone, or maybe more than someone, had been living in the garage and beneath the house.

A next-door neighbour later confirmed it. People lived in the house, but at a certain point lights in the crawlspace and from the garage made it clear there were people living there as well, crouching in the paved area because you couldn't stand.

That's all we know. But it was troubling to think of people living in such a space in a relatively affluent area, where every second house has a swimming pool, and homes regularly fetch more than $1 million.

I thought of that on Thursday morning while reading my local council's submission to a federal parliamentary inquiry into the adequacy of the Newstart allowance, and related payments for Australia's unemployed.

My council is not known for being a hotbed of socialism or its latte-sipping, hemp-wearing, vegan revolutionaries. Most councillors seemed to campaign on fairly predictable pro-development platforms at the last election.

But there they were, as a collective along with the staff, arguing strongly for the Newstart allowance to be increased by $75 a week because too many people in my area are not really participating at all. They're not even surviving.

They're existing, because the money they receive from the government, while looking for work, is so low that even the most pro-development councillor could see that in the long run, that is not good for the individual on Newstart, or their families, or the broader community, whether that be this region or the whole country.

It's why the federal government seems to be one of the few bodies left in Australia resisting the idea that Newstart needs to increase substantially, and urgently. Even the Business Council of Australia has long called for Newstart to be increased.

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In its plan for a stronger Australia, released in April, 2019, the BCA said it had supported increasing Newstart since 2011 "because it is the right thing to do".

The BCA also called for a Productivity Commission inquiry into entrenched disadvantage "to find out why some Australians are just not getting ahead".

Presumably the BCA, hardly a rabble of ratbags and revolutionaries, doesn't subscribe to the "lifters and leaners" argument of a previous iteration of a federal Coalition government, and recognises there are systemic and structural issues that entrench disadvantage.

My local council has crunched the numbers in what is an excellent submission to the inquiry. While my NSW region is fairly average when compared with other parts of Australia, there are obvious pockets of real disadvantage where unemployment rates are extremely high, particularly for young people.

There are more than 60,000 people in my area living in households with weekly incomes of $500 or less. There are nearly 13,500 people receiving Newstart or Youth Allowance. The Newstart rate has not increased for 25 years.

It seems that many federal parliamentarians struggle to make ends meet on a base salary of $200,000, not to mention the add-ons and perks, or they wouldn't be caught out so often on benefit rorts. Their pay is regularly increased under a process that recognises cost-of-living rises. If the principle is fine for them, what are we to make of this determined refusal to increase Newstart, other than the realisation that we have a government blind to facts, deaf to reason and just plain dumb?

People lived in a dark and dirty crawlspace just up the road from me, and that can't have been by choice. As my local council pointed out, the federal government sets the Newstart rate, but it's at the local level where the effects of poverty are felt.