Remembering the time I was a 'bottom feeder'

Musings on politics, poverty, tax cuts, hungry kids, UBI and avoiding impending doom

Go make yourself a tea, because I am feeling ranty…

New Zealand’s National Party leader Christopher Luxon recently used the words ‘bottom feeders’ to describe poor people who weren’t playing by the rules when it comes to their state housing - as in, not paying rent.

Here is the definition of ‘bottom feeder’
noun

1. INFORMAL•NORTH AMERICAN

   a member of a group of very low social status who survives by any means possible

Furthermore, if we interrogate the definition of ‘very low social status’ we get this: ‘Low-socioeconomic status (SES) households have little income or wealth to buffer against the negative impacts of an adverse health event among adult household members.’

By definition, then, ‘bottom feeders’ are people that can barely even get by and survive, let alone have money for ‘shit happens’.

The thing is, shit does happen. Shit like global pandemics and wars that have a flow-on effect around the world. These are scary times, and although I’m grateful to be in the privileged position of not being scared for my family, I worry for others. Property prices may be flatlining somewhat, but that’s irrelevant given how overvalued the market already was and the current interest rates. The pandemic saw the price of food soar as global supply chains were impacted. Now food prices have risen yet again (Ukraine is one of the world’s largest food bowls, which perhaps goes some way towards describing Putin’s desire to control it), and the Russian invasion has seen increases in the cost of fertiliser, animal feed and fuel, which affect farmers and are in turn passed on to consumers.

I fear that the National Party is out of touch with the harsh realities that many people are currently facing, which is odd considering that the party zoomed in on the ‘cost of living crisis’ in their campaigning.

ASB has estimated that basic living costs will rise by $150 a week. That’s $7,800 a year and $7,000 more than the typical earner in New Zealand could save under National's proposed tax cuts, where they will only get $800 in their pocket. Under their tax cut policy, someone earning $45,000 would only get about $112 back in tax cuts. That’s $2.15 per week. No, it won’t buy you a loaf of bread or a bottle of milk. You’d eat better being a bottom feeder in prison than a bottom feeder living below the poverty line, but I digress.

So, what do we do? Surprise, surprise… along comes the suggestion of tinkering around the edges with taxes.

When Christopher Luxon promises to raise income tax thresholds to ‘help Kiwis deal with the "cost of living crisis"'' in his first major speech, I fumed a little. I’m not a finance expert, but I don’t see how it will help those who need it the most.

As the cost of living increases, more people will fall into poverty. Being poor means living with the constant fear that if shit happens (a car breaks down, an unexpected bill, someone gets sick, or there’s a global pandemic and a war that impacts the cost of living), you are screwed. Poverty is systemic. Shifting out of it is complex and requires financial capital, education or connections - the things that people entrenched in poverty often do not have.

Our low-wage earners service the gas stations and fill the supermarket shelves; they are often ‘essential workers’. It would pay to keep that in mind while we hand-wring about an impending worldwide economic crisis. Some might say that not earning a living wage is still barely liveable, and others might say it is the equivalent of modern slavery. After all, slavery is ‘a condition of having to work very hard without proper remuneration or appreciation.’ A fairly accurate description of a minimum wage in one of the world’s most expensive countries to live in.

In my experience, the creative industries have a history of expecting people to work for next to nothing. ‘Experience’ doesn’t count for much when shit happens. Twenty years ago, when I got an ad agency job, based on the long hours I was working, I earned $7 an hour. Although the money was enough to get by, it wasn’t enough for shit happens. And then… shit did happen. My advertising agency position was made redundant two weeks before Christmas and just after my relationship had ended and I had to find a new place to live.

You feel a special kind of shame when you queue up at a WINZ office clutching your printed bank statements to prove you are as penniless as you claim. If you haven’t had to do that, it’s difficult to imagine. So let me fill you in with some of the realities of being a poor student or on the benefit.

As a student, I was a waitress at a ‘fancy pub’. I’d run from university lectures to the cafe to start my shift. If I was lucky, I’d get 50 cents in tips; with tipping not the custom here. Unfortunately, it was unreliable work. If the cafe was quiet for whatever reason, part-timers like myself would be sent away to worry about how the heck we’d cover rent that week.

Reflecting on my ‘rite of passage’ as a low wage ‘student’
* Wrote a cheque for a box of Tampax, knowing I didn’t have that money in the bank at that time.
* Budget was $20 a week for food. For a treat dinner, I made ‘pizza’ with a spoonful of canned tomatoes on a piece of bread, one slice of shaved ham torn, a quarter of a tomato chopped into tiny bits and a sprinkle of the luxurious stuff - grated cheese. Food was MUCH cheaper 20 years ago too.
* Ignored a UTI until I was pissing blood every five minutes because going to the GP was out of the budget at that time.

Reflecting on my period on the unemployment benefit
*Ate one meal a day. It consisted of the cheapest ‘frozen chicken burger patties’, and one slice each of bread, tomato and cheese. Those patties were riddled with ground-up chicken bones that stuck in your teeth. The mere memory makes me retch.
*Borrowed money to put petrol in my car to drive to job interviews. No, public transport wasn’t cheaper, and it never ran on time. Would you hire someone who showed up late to a job interview?
*Got a kidney infection. Was delirious with a 40-degree fever. By day two, I was crawling to the toilet because I was too weak to walk. I called a taxi; I don’t remember paying for it. The doctor immediately called an ambulance. After five nights in hospital (yay - 3 meals a day and NO ground-up chicken bones), I received a bill for $55 for the doctor and $80 for the ambulance and cried my eyes out because I couldn’t pay it. I think I got WINZ to cover it, and then I had to pay them back at $8 a week as it was over and above the benefit.

My point in sharing these is that poverty can be experienced when you are studying (a noble pursuit to hopefully become a - and I quote Luxon again here - ‘high calibre’ individual), working for a low income in unreliable work, OR someone potentially trapped in a cycle of hopelessness and poverty.

I was so fortunate that my experience was momentary, not systemic, generational poverty. I was one of the lucky ones for whom my experience was character building, not character destroying. However, I felt so ashamed about my situation that I kept it a secret. I learned a lot in that time about not judging people. I’m grateful for this experience and feel I am better for it.

During the time I was on the benefit, nobody would hire me in retail where I was applying for work because I was overqualified. Potential employers told me, ‘You’ll leave the second you can get a writing role.’ And they weren’t wrong.

So I launched my copywriting business. I can’t remember how I managed to build a website, but I did. WINZ my plan put me into Mika Haka’s ‘development course for young creatives’. I have fond memories of those in that course. One was a young girl who wanted to be a makeup artist (years later - when I was a magazine editor - I saw her working for MAC Cosmetics at Fashion Week, and my heart burst with joy for her). One guy wanted to make hip-hop (his music was very, very good). Another was an enormously talented woodcarver. One guy had severe epilepsy and painted fantastic art using (you will not believe this, but it’s true) kebab skewers. He probably couldn’t afford paintbrushes. If you’d dismissed us as ‘bottom feeders’, you’d have missed out on seeing the potential of all our creative talents. We can’t all grow up to be white businessmen. Creatives and artists are behind the books you read, the films you love, the music you tune into and the art you put on your walls. And sadly, yet continually, creatively talented people are undervalued and underappreciated.

To begin the day, Mika would turn on a stereo and play flamboyant stage music, ‘Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl…’ and we’d dance around, following Mika’s choreography. It sounds bonkers. But it got us out of our depressive headspaces (as movement often does). Then Mika would teach us about setting up our own business, basic accounting and how to craft an elevator pitch. We’d practice telling people about ourselves until it reached a point where talking about our creative talents would flow with relative confidence.

I think we all left there with a weight-lifted that we were not bottom-feeding pieces of shit. We just wanted a shot at doing what we loved. We just needed a little hope.

And that brings me back to Luxon again. “We don’t just do bottom-feeding and just focus on the bottom,” he said. Instead, “we focus on people who want to be positive and ambitious, aspirational and confident”.

Where do I even start to unpack this? Is a child born negative, unambitious, inspirational and lacking in confidence? No. That is learned behaviour when they discover that they will have little chance of ever getting ahead. Every child is born with the confidence that if their wobbly feet and unbalanced body make them fall flat on their face a thousand times, they will STILL keep trying to walk. But the reality that ‘things are not all equal’ seems to dawn on children by about eight or nine years old. Have you ever met a child without hope in their eyes? A child that already has seen enough unfairness to know the world isn’t going to help them step up? It is one of the saddest things in the world to see.

I believe that everyone has hope at some stage. But whether or not they continue to feel positive, aspirational and confident after being continually let down is the question. After years of being broken by the struggle to find work without the right education, clothe their kids, or serving boiled sausage water as soup because there’s no money for food, just maybe at some point, there’s no hope anymore.

Slight segue… Remember the National party was adamant that low decile schools should not feed kids a free lunch, even though children being fed lunch in schools happens in almost every other country in the world. Perhaps the National Party members believe that poor kids learn to be aspirational by watching other kids eat their lunch. I beg to differ.

To have hope, one needs to see a light at the end of the tunnel, that there is a possibility for improvement, to have some small seed of an idea of what a ‘good life’ even looks like. How does a child that has known nothing but generational poverty grow up with aspiration for more? Do they have any idea what ‘more’ is?

I struggle to find hope when I look at New Zealand and the world. So, what do I hope for?

I hope our politicians will one day take seriously the impending doom of global warming that we ALL face. (Granted, the bunker-building billionaires won’t face it AS much.)

I hope that maybe NZ will top the world in educational standards and environmental R&D - not domestic violence, sexual abuse and child poverty.

I hope that every child has an equal chance at education so that they uncover their talents and have a chance to use them.

According to the World Giving Index, New Zealand is the third most charitable country in the world. I suppose we need to be given our exorbitant cost of living but isn’t it time we made a diligent effort to stop requiring so much charity and instead lift people out of poverty? Now is the time for new thinking, not the same-old political football of taxes.

For starters, I think progress will come when we stop blaming people for the situations that they find themselves in and take a long hard (historical) look at how they got there. How WE as a country got *here*. Because *here* is not good enough.

The ‘American dream’ tells us that success is the result of individual responsibility and hard work. But it’s just that - a dream. Many structural forces contribute to poverty, including disparities in access to the internet, transport, education, child and health care, affordable housing and quality jobs. Years of historical racial discrimination also play a part.

Another politician recently weighing in on benefits is New Zealand’s ACT Party leader, David Seymour, who claims that Labour’s top-up of benefits during this ‘cost of living crisis’ will make people welfare-dependent. He’s wrong. The system (and everything I mentioned above) makes people welfare-dependent. Nobody living on the bones of their arse is enjoying it.

If we do what we’ve always done, we will get what we’ve always got. And look where we are…

As I see it, what we need is a complete overhaul of our political system. The Opportunities Party calls it a rebalancing of the system. Their UBI (Universal Basic Income) is going to sound unpalatable to people like Luxon and Seymour. But there are a number of reasons I have become an advocate for it.

• For the ‘have nots’ it removes the red tape and BS around getting needed financial support and lowers the government’s administrative burden.

• For those that don’t need it, it can be passed on to those that do.

• It’s money that flows straight back into the economy. Spending creates a thriving economy and keeps the nice-to-have stuff (like hospitality and retail) going.

• Automation means that many low-paying jobs won’t even exist in the future. Those workers will need money to retrain; yet their current income simply doesn’t allow for savings to do so.

• A UBI helps to support creative endeavours. I don’t want to live in a world without the arts. Do you?

• Under TOP, children would be entitled to a lower UBI, meaning it can give them access to the things they need, such as additional training and resources. Children will be less likely to be penalised for their parent’s financial situation.

• As prime caregivers, women tend to be the ones that have to stay home and look after children or elderly parents. A UBI would give them options to pay for care or pay them for the unpaid work they do.
  
  A UBI doesn’t disincentivise most people to work because it’s not enough to live off. But it would be enough to make positive changes.
  

• Take a look at how you would fare under TOP’s UBI using the UBI calculator:

Is there a cost of living crisis? Yes. It has been simmering for years and is now boiling over. Are tax cuts going to help get or keep most Kiwis out of the crap? Nope, that’s just wishful delusional and uninspired thinking.

P.S. And we just need to tax property properly!