What’s your connection to Hobsons Bay?
We’ve been in the Hobsons Bay area for 17 years. I was actually the Uniting Church Minister in Williamstown and then I retired into Altona Meadows.
What do you like about Altona Meadows?
I love the multicultural aspect to it. I love meeting other people in different cultures. I love being close to the sea and we actually back onto Laverton Creek, so I love that aspect of it.
What would you change?
I guess, sometimes, the traffic on the freeway.
You help provide support to disadvantaged individuals and families through Laverton Community Integrated Services. Do you see an increased need for emergency relief around the New Year period?
Our biggest need is actually after Christmas because we find a lot of people spend money on credit cards and then of course they get behind in their payments. So, January is heavy. And February is even worse because often they’ve got their credit cards maxed out and then they’ve got to get things for the kids for school. Their pensions just don’t make the grade for that.
Do you see a lot of disadvantage in the Hobsons Bay area?
Yes. The sort of examples we have are people who are homeless and of course with Centrelink you’ve got to be able to give them an address. Unless they’ve got a friend or someone, it’s very hard to maintain it (Centrelink payments). A client I’ve seen a few times, he came in and I said, oh, you’re growing a beard? And his comment was, ‘oh yes’. I said, you don’t sound very encouraging about it and he said, ‘I’m not really’. And I said, so why are you growing it? And he said, ‘because I can’t afford the blades’.
What do you hope for?
I would like somehow to try and help to break the back of this poverty cycle that we see so many people in. A lot of them who are in poverty have come out of families in poverty, it’s just a cycle. I have no silver bullet but I’d love to see something that we could break this poverty somehow. And that’s particularly with asylum seekers because we see a few asylum seekers who come through as well and of course they only get a proportion of the welfare benefits.
