‘Barely keeping my head above water’: how the cost of living crisis is making life on jobseeker harder

Naomi Thompson, 31, says she does it almost instinctively now. It started when she was a student living below the poverty line.

“Initially when things started getting tight, I would drink a lot of tea,” she says. “The milk would make me feel quite full. I could drink a thousand and one cups of water and it wouldn’t touch the sides. It has to be milk. I think it’s the protein.”

Despite the cost of living crisis, the new Labor government has had little to say about the rate of welfare payments so far; only noting it will consider the rate of benefits at every budget. Its public commentary on the issue often refers to the constraints of the federal budget.

The low rate of welfare payments are a budget problem for Thompson, too. These days, Thompson receives a jobseeker payment, but she’s not unemployed. She works casually, sometimes as much as 10 hours a week, as a kitchen attendant, only five hours short of the 15 hours Centrelink says she is able to do given her mental health concerns.

Thompson lives alone in a social housing unit in Orange, in regional New South Wales, but also cares for her father, who is a disability pensioner. And she volunteers at her local church.

On a good fortnight when she gets enough work her income gets to about the Henderson poverty line. She pays $150 a week in rent after moving into her first ever rental this year (she had to “scrounge” from her church to fill it with appliances and furniture). She notes she’s at least doing much better than many in the private market when it comes to rent. Still, sometimes she attends a local food bank.

“[My head is] like a computer stuck in a cycle, just going round and round and round, constantly calculating, checking, managing,” she says. “It’s so tiring. If I didn’t have to worry about that so much I would be freed up.”

Maybe she could find another job and work an extra five hours a week? That would boost her income slightly, though she would still be poor.

Thompson is looking for work anyway; she is required to do so to keep her Centrelink payments. “That means sending my resume to lots of jobs and mostly never hearing back from them,” she says.

She’s battled through a vocational course and a university degree despite severe mental health challenges in her 20s. Now she says she has an IT degree, tens of thousands in HELP debt, and no job in the industry.

Related: Employment minister urged to delay rollout of points-based system for jobseekers

Despite all of this, Thompson says “mostly I just feel guilty that I’m not doing more”. “It’s a terrible thing to say but that’s how I feel,” she says. “I think most people don’t really realise the level of guilt and shame when you are doing as much as you can but … somehow you’re not keeping up. That’s the thing I battle with.”

Thompson’s jobseeker payment will be increased to account for inflation in September, as always occurs twice a year, but only after a winter in which increasing grocery prices are expected to collide with mammoth rises to utility bills.

“I just look at the cost of living and think, how the hell is anyone supposed to make this work,” Thompson says.

Even before the cost of living crisis, stories of food insecurity among those on welfare are common, according to research. Estimates suggest between 4% and 13% of the Australian population are food insecure, while research commissioned by FoodBank has put the figure as high as 17%.

Thompson relies on tea in lieu of food; the price of coffee, tea and cocoa increased by 7.4% nationally over the past year, CPI data shows. Some types of meat, which Thompson has avoided for financial reasons for some time, have risen as much as 12%. But so too have vegetables, which she relies on for nutrition. She eats a lot of spinach “as the best source of iron other than meat”, but still “this has meant that in many years past I’ve had chronic anaemia and low iron”.

Thompson first started skipping meals when she was on the even more meagre youth allowance payment. She wonders how she survived at all on that payment, before answering the question herself. She started to skip meals.

But she says that at the height of the pandemic, when welfare payments were boosted, began to eat more and better food, and exercised more often. She was also able to pay to socialise with her friends.

“My psychologist was just so happy because she saw me go forward in leaps and bounds,” Thompson says. “The things she hadn’t been able to shift, suddenly they were shifting because I wasn’t worrying, I wasn’t stressing.”

She was also able to pay privately to see a sleep specialist, who recommended iron transfusions after diagnosing her with restless leg syndrome.

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While it didn’t help with that ailment – another prescription did – the transfusion “made a huge difference in my energy levels”. “I was so iron-deficient that I couldn’t donate blood because it was so low,” Thompson says.

Thompson is open about the fact she’s attempted to take her life twice. She’s in a better place now but says her mental health has deteriorated since the Covid-19 boost to benefits ended. “I don’t want to end up in a position where I’m looking at that happening again,” she says.

On weekends, Thompson will be at the hotel up the road from her home, cleaning tables and replacing the menus and coasters.

“The way I’ve worked it out is I’m maybe $200 ahead from if I wasn’t working,” she says.

“I guess I make ends meet, because that’s what you do. You just have to. [But] I worry constantly about the finances of things, I worry more about [that] than whether I’ve eaten today.

“It’s nice to have a little bit more with work, but it’s barely keeping my head above water, and with the cost of living it doesn’t feel like it’s making a difference. Now it feels significantly worse.”

• Do you have a story about living on welfare payments during the cost of living crisis? Email luke.henriques-gomes@theguardian.com

• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org