Yahoo Finance Joining the job queue: 'I never wanted to rely on Centrelink. It beats people down'
Bianca Martin, 32, Toowoomba. Student and retail worker
One Saturday afternoon I was closing the store where I worked and I got an email saying: ‘As of close of business, all the stores nationwide are not going to be operating due to Covid-19 restrictions.’ I was anticipating that, but as a casual I didn’t have any leave entitlements or anything.
The store sells homewares in the main mall in Toowoomba and I’d been working for about a year after moving from Melbourne to study at the University of Southern Queensland. I’ve worked in retail quite a lot, but also admin and the arts.
Casual work is always quite stressful because you can go from five hours one week to 40 hours the next. It’s always a bit difficult to plan around that so I was looking to move into full-time work, especially as I had finished my masters the year before.
Related: Joining the job queue: 'I feel increasing fear and desperation'
I was looking for stability this year – and this was supposed to be the time to sort it all out.
When we were told the store was temporarily shutting, I applied for jobseeker, mainly out of concern it would be closed for good. At the time things were looking quite grim and nobody really knew what was going to happen. All the panic buying was going on. About two weeks later we got told the store was shutting down permanently.
The jobseeker payment adds up to almost what I was earning from work. But if the payment is cut back to the old Newstart rate, I would cover my bare minimum bills and that would be it.
Lots of my friends have been on Newstart and I’ve seen how difficult it is to live on that. I’m not looking forward to the prospect of wondering if I need to skip a meal a day.
I’ve had a few meetings over the phone with my job services provider. They were very optimistic in the first meeting and it kind of makes you feel good. But at the next meeting I got upset when I felt like they were insinuating that I was trying to cheat the system.
Having not been on jobseeker before I didn’t know what mutual obligations were and asked what it meant that they had been suspended. They were like: “Why are you trying to weasel your way out of applying for jobs?”
I said: “No, I am just trying to understand what my requirements are because I’ve never done this before. This is my first fortnight on jobseeker – I don’t want to mess it up.”
Being out of work was quite tough at first because I don’t like having a lot of free time. I’ve always been studying or working. It was hard not to just sit at home, constantly reading the news and people’s bad opinions on Facebook. I did a lot of that unfortunately. And there are a lot of bad opinions!
The jobs market in Toowoomba is not amazing. Apparently it has some of the highest youth unemployment in Australia. There are a few jobs coming up but they are mostly specialised: there are a lot of nursing roles and a strange number of boilermaker roles.
I’ve seen maybe two retail roles since April and a few admin roles that I’ve been applying for. When the job closes on Seek, it lets you know how many people applied and it’s several hundreds for each job. You don’t have much hope they are going to read your resume, let alone get any further.
I’m not that optimistic that I’ll end up in a job in the next few months – maybe that’s just realistic. But I like to think I will be back in work by the end of the year.
I’m actively applying for jobs and am returning to study in a few weeks, doing a certificate in disability support. In some ways I’ve used this time to kind of rethink my life plan. Hopefully I’ll be returning to a high needs area.
But there is also still so much that I just can’t control so I’ve been trying not to think too far ahead. All I can do is apply for jobs and save money while I’m getting extra from the lifted jobseeker payment, just in case it does go back to the bare minimum. At least then I will have a little bit of a cushion.
Anyway, I’m a very pragmatic person and I squirrel money away just in case something happens. I had never wanted to rely on Centrelink because I’ve seen the way it beats people down. It’s not a very good life to have to live.
Compared with others, I feel like I’m privileged enough that I won’t end up in a really bad situation. My worse case scenario is that I have to break my lease on my apartment and leave Toowoomba to go live with my mother, assuming she’ll take me in. I would have to check with her, but I feel confident she would.
A lot of people don’t have that.
