A single dad struggling to make ends meet on a full-time wage received no answers when he asked a panel of politicians how his son was supposed to find a job.
Widower Peter Carnegie laid bare the harsh reality of trying to survive the cost of living crisis while raising two sons on his own on ABC’s Q&A on Monday night.
His eldest son, 22, has never had a job because he needed to help care for his sick mum before she died of cancer in August 2024.
He’s now on Jobseeker, unable to find an employer who’s willing to give him a chance due to his blank resume.
‘How can the government help him get a job when it seems no one wants to even give him an interview?’ Mr Carnegie asked.
‘And how can I survive when I’m working full-time and on the family tax benefit and still struggling to not live beyond my means?’
Two senior politicians on the panel appeared to have no idea on how to directly answer the question.
Industry, science and technology minister Ed Husic expressed his condolences before he launched into a checklist of the Labor government’s achievements since winning the 2022 election.
Single dad Peter Carnegie is struggling to make ends meet following the death of his wife
Mr Husic boasted how Labor had lifted the price indexation for Jobseeker and worked to lower inflation before admitting that the results of this progress had not immediate.
‘I appreciate there’s a lot of things that we have to line up to make life easier, but we are starting that process,’ he said.
Mr Husic also spruiked the government’s free TAFE initiative which Mr Carnegie said wasn’t an option for his son.
He explained that his son had dyspraxia, a neurodevelopmental condition that affects fine and gross motor skills and makes it difficult to plan and coordinate movements, which greatly impacted his ability to attend school.
‘He tried to get into TAFE, he tried to get into school but couldn’t do it… so he struggles so much with school [and for him] it’s not an option,’ Mr Carnegie said.
‘When he was 16 or 17 he was catching a bus for an hour or an hour-and-a half to get to school and back so he was never able to get a part-time job or a casual job at weekend and now I need him more than ever because he takes his little brother to school and extra-curricular activities.’
Despite working full-time as an orderly/cleaner at Prince of Wales Hospital, Mr Carnegie admitted he would be unable to make ends meet if it wasn’t for his parents’ support.
Household expenses surpass his wage by up to $400 every week.
Ed Husic and Ted O’Brien had a lot of sympathy but offered few solutions for the single dad
‘My parents are helping me out big time,’ Mr Carnegie said.
‘But there are a lot of people in the same position as me as single parents.
‘If we were living in the place we were before, I’d be spending 70 per cent of my income on rent alone.
‘Then there is electricity, gas, food, patrol car insurance.
‘I’m lucky that I got a little bit of a payment from when my wife passed away but that’s very quickly dropping.’
He admitted he can’t even put money away for a bill, despite paying subsidised rent to his parents.
‘I’m paying like next to nothing in rent,’ Mr Carnegie said.
‘They could literally kick me out, not that my parents would ever kick me out, but the place we’re living in, they could charge $1200 to $1300 a week.
‘They’re losing like $800 a week, considering how much I’m paying.’
While ABC’s Q&A host Patricia Karvelas described the single dad’s story as ‘powerful’, some panelists struggled to answer the question at hand
Program host Patricia Karvelas thanked Mr Carnegie for sharing his ‘incredibly powerful’ story.
‘We find that we’re getting so many stories like yours,’ she said.
Shadow energy and climate change minister Ted O’Brien was another politician on the panel who had no specific advice for the single dad.
‘I don’t know how you’ve done it mate. I don’t know how I could do it, to be honest with you,’ he remarked.
Mr O’Brien went on to say that there ‘was not a single member of parliament’ who did not want to help Australians live better lives.
‘There are always going to be people, unfortunately you’re one of them, who is just doing it really tough, but there’s not just one solution,’ he said.
‘Having a strong economy is the means by which you can help out Australians when they’re doing it tough.’
Karvelas went on to reference a YouGov poll which revealed many Aussies felt stuck on the economic ladder.
Only 12 per cent felt they were better off than 12 months ago while a staggering 40 per cent said they felt worse off during the ongoing cost of living crisis.
Mr Husic said the best the Labor government could do for the time being was to ‘acknowledge the pressure that people are under due to the cost of living’.
‘That doesn’t surprise me in the sense that we’ve done a number of things in order to make life easier for people but we’ve had to do it in a way that focuses on inflation and the impact it has on inflation and interest rates,’ he said.
‘We’re seeing some big drops in inflation … and that’s giving people the first hope that we are able to turn the corner. But having said that, will that be felt straight away? Of course not.’
