Investigation
Price of being poor
What happens when getting ahead doesn’t actually get you ahead?
By April burton
1 september 2026
There is something slightly strange about the way we talk about poverty. We tend to make it sound simple.
Get a job. Pay your bills. Save some money. Buy a house. Be independent.
It’s a neat little sequence.
Except, for some people, life doesn’t seem to have received the memo. Tori is one of them. She lives in public housing in Colac with her 11-year-old son and their dog.
She’s been there for almost ten years. She first entered transitional housing through the Salvation Army in 2016. The following year, she moved into what she describes as her “forever home.”
Forever is an interesting word.
Because almost a decade later, Tori is still trying to work out whether the home is a stepping stone, or somewhere she’s expected to remain.
And this is where her story gets uncomfortable. Because Tori isn’t unemployed. She’s working.
Forever is an interesting word. Because almost a decade later, Tori is still there.
Tori, Colac
The job
Tori works casually. At the moment, she might get two shifts a week. If she doesn’t work, she doesn’t get paid.
Simple enough.
Except nothing else about the situation is particularly simple.
She has a child. A car. A dog. Bills. Groceries. Petrol.
The ordinary expenses of an ordinary household. The sort of expenses most of us don’t think twice about until the money isn’t there. And Tori says the expectation is that people receiving government assistance should engage with employment services and move towards work.
She has.
And she actually likes working. It makes her feel independent. It gives her confidence.
It makes the idea of eventually owning a home feel slightly less ridiculous.
For a moment, it can feel like the beginning of something. Then the paperwork catches up.
The Rent
Tori says her rent was around $137 a week.
Then her income changed.
Her rent increased to around $235 a week.
It’s one of those numbers that doesn’t look particularly dramatic written on a page.
$98.
That’s the difference.
But numbers behave differently when you’re already living close to the edge.
For Tori, that $98 isn’t abstract.
It’s groceries.
Petrol.
A power bill.
A car repair.
A trip to see family.
Money put aside for Christmas.
It’s the tiny amount of breathing room between getting through the fortnight and wondering what happens if something goes wrong.
And things do go wrong.
Cars break.
Children need things.
Bills arrive with remarkably poor timing.
Life, generally speaking, has very little respect for a household budget.
It’s the tiny amount of breathing room between coping and not coping.
The kitchen table
You can imagine the scene.
A kitchen table.
A bank account.
A calculator.
Bills.
A child somewhere in the background.
And a woman trying to make the numbers behave.
Tori says she can sometimes get herself to a point where she has around $50 or $60 left per fortnight.
That’s not spending money.
That’s the buffer.
The Christmas money.
The emergency money.
The maybe we’ll actually do something nice this month money.
Then the rent changes.
And suddenly that little bit of breathing room is gone.
This is the part of poverty that doesn’t photograph particularly well.
There isn’t necessarily a dramatic scene.
No one is standing in the rain.
It’s just someone sitting down and quietly deciding which part of their life they can afford to remove.
No one is sleeping under a bridge.
It’s just someone sitting down and quietly deciding which part of their life they can afford to remove.
The beach
For Tori, one of those things has been the beach.
They used to make regular trips.
Now petrol costs have made those trips harder.
Family who live about an hour away are also harder to visit.
An hour isn’t very far.
Until you’re paying for every kilometre.
Then an hour can become a luxury.
And that’s one of the peculiar things about poverty.
It doesn’t just take away things you need.
It starts taking away things you want.
The spontaneous trip.
The family visit.
The day out.
The holiday.
The little things that make life feel like something more than a sequence of bills.
Eventually your world becomes smaller.
Not because you don’t want to go anywhere.
Because going somewhere costs money.
Eventually your world becomes smaller. Not because you don’t want to go anywhere. Because going somewhere costs money.
The car
Then there was the car.
Tori received approximately $1,300 through her family tax payment.
It could have been useful.
Perhaps some savings.
Perhaps catching up on bills.
Perhaps Christmas.
Perhaps, finally, a little bit of breathing room.
Then the car needed urgent repairs.
Around $1,200 went to the mechanic.
This is where the phrase “disposable income” becomes almost comical.
There wasn’t really anything disposable about it.
The money simply moved from one emergency to another.
And the car stayed on the road.
Which is important.
Because in a regional town, a car isn’t always optional.
It can be the difference between getting to work and not getting to work.
Between taking your child somewhere and staying home.
Between seeing your family and not seeing them.
Between independence and being stuck.
The strange incentive
And this is the part of Tori’s story that made me stop.
Because we’re constantly told that employment is the pathway out of poverty.
And Tori doesn’t disagree.
She wants to work.
She says working makes her feel better about herself.
It gives her a sense of independence.
It makes her believe that perhaps one day she could own something of her own.
But she says there is a point where the extra income begins to be offset by other changes.
Centrelink payments change.
Housing becomes aware of changes in income.
Rent increases.
Suddenly, the extra money doesn’t necessarily feel like extra money.
And you start wondering about the logic of the whole thing.
Not because you don’t understand that people who earn more can be expected to contribute more.
That’s not particularly controversial.
The uncomfortable question is what happens when the increase is large enough to make working worthwhile—
but small enough that you still can’t actually get ahead.
Where is that line?
And who decided where it sits?
Where is that line? And who decided where it sits?
“affordable”
The phrase “affordable housing” comes up a lot.
It’s one of those phrases that sounds reassuring.
Affordable.
Manageable.
Safe.
But affordable to whom?
Tori’s argument isn’t that she should never pay more rent.
It’s that the system should allow people to build towards something.
She wants to work.
She wants to save.
She wants to own a home.
She wants land.
She wants her son to grow up knowing that his mother’s circumstances weren’t necessarily his future.
And yet she says every time the numbers change, the dream seems to move a little further away.
That’s what frustrates her.
Not simply being poor.
The feeling that getting out of poverty is always just beyond reach.
The food bank
Then there is food.
Tori talks about using food assistance.
She describes it as humiliating.
There’s something particularly uncomfortable about needing help to feed your family while simultaneously trying to convince yourself you’re independent.
You can be grateful for the people providing the food.
You can know that you need it.
And still feel ashamed.
That’s the emotional contradiction of poverty.
You can be doing your absolute best and still feel like you’ve failed.
And perhaps that’s why some people don’t talk about it.
They’d rather say they’re fine.
They’d rather skip a meal.
They’d rather put something back at the supermarket.
They’d rather tell their children there isn’t enough petrol to go somewhere.
Anything rather than admit:
We need help.
The What does home actually mean?
Tori technically has one.
Four walls.
A roof.
A place for her son to sleep.
A dog.
A kitchen.
A front door.
So is she housed?
Yes.
Is she secure?
That’s a more complicated question.
Because housing security isn’t simply about whether you have a key.
It’s about whether you can afford the life happening inside the house.
Whether you can keep the electricity connected.
Keep the car running.
Feed your family.
Handle an unexpected bill.
Take your child somewhere.
Visit your parents.
Save for Christmas.
Imagine next year without immediately calculating what it will cost.
A house can protect you from the weather.
But it can’t protect you from financial anxiety.
“I don’t want a handout”
Tori is very clear about something.
She doesn’t want to remain dependent forever.
She doesn’t want a handout.
She wants a hand up.
There’s a difference.
She wants the system to help her get to the point where she doesn’t need the system.
She wants to work her way towards owning a home.
She wants to save.
She wants to give her son opportunities.
She wants to be able to say yes sometimes.
And perhaps that’s what makes her story more complicated than the usual argument about welfare.
She isn’t asking:
“How much can I get?”
She’s asking:
“How do I get out?”
The child in the middle
And then there is her son.
Eleven years old.
Old enough to notice when money is tight.
Too young to understand why.
He didn’t choose public housing.
He didn’t choose casual employment.
He didn’t choose the rental system.
He didn’t choose petrol prices.
He didn’t choose whether Mum gets two shifts or none.
But he lives with the consequences.
And Tori is conscious of that.
She wants him to dream.
She wants him to understand that circumstances can change.
She wants him to know that difficult doesn’t mean impossible.
And perhaps that explains some of the anger in her story.
Because beneath the frustration about rent and Centrelink and food banks is something much more basic.
She wants her child to have a future.
Not an extravagant one.
Just one with choices.
“mostly spite”
When Tori talks about what keeps her going, her answer is unexpectedly funny.
“Mostly spite.”
It’s almost a joke.
But then you listen to everything around it.
The bills.
The rent.
The casual shifts.
The car.
The food.
The isolation.
The constant calculations.
And suddenly the joke becomes something else.
It’s defiance.
She refuses to disappear.
She refuses to believe that poverty should determine the size of her dreams.
She refuses to let her circumstances become an identity.
And she wants her children to understand that too.
hard truth: colac’s housing crisis
Tori’s story is not the whole story.
It is one doorway into a much bigger investigation.
Because homelessness doesn’t always begin with sleeping on the street.
Sometimes it begins with rent that becomes impossible.
A relationship breakdown.
Domestic violence.
A job that disappears.
A car that breaks down.
A family that can’t afford to move.
A teenager who has nowhere safe to go.
An older person whose rent consumes their pension.
A working family who earns too much for one form of assistance but nowhere near enough to enter the private market.
A person sleeping on someone’s couch who doesn’t technically count as homeless.
Housing insecurity has a lot of faces.
And we’re going to look at them.
We’re going to speak to people experiencing homelessness.
People in public and social housing.
People sleeping in cars.
Single parents.
Young people.
Older residents.
Workers.
Landlords.
Real estate agents.
Housing organisations.
Support services.
And the people responsible for the policies that determine what happens when someone can’t afford to keep a roof over their head.
We’re going to ask what housing actually costs in Colac.
Not just the rent.
The petrol.
The groceries.
The childcare.
The electricity.
The car.
The isolation.
The stress.
The shame.
The opportunities you stop taking because you can’t afford them.
Because a house isn’t just four walls.
It’s the foundation underneath someone’s entire life.
And when that foundation becomes unstable—
everything else starts moving.
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