The onset of the first blast of cold weather for Ballarat had many people shivering through a dark morning last week and anticipating with some gloom the approaching winter.
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But if the end of daylight savings and the approach of winter is cause for despondency, it is also worth sparing a thought for those who whose financial situation means the cold weather is a cause for real physical suffering.
What today’s revelations from the head of Anglicare show is that there are many people in Ballarat struggling to meet some of the most basic requirements and turning to charity with increasing regularity to meet the widening gap between family needs and a family budget.
Steadily rising energy costs are another strain on families. Whether the cause of this is production pressure, market demand or the dividend orientation of a privatised industry the effect on the hapless, shivering individual is the same; a once basic service is creeping into the realm of luxury.
More needs to be done to help those on society’s fringe who will struggle to meet even this most basic need.
Government subsidies are part of the answer but longer term sustainable solutions will bring more relief than handouts. Support for private energy conservation and generation are two practical areas that can have genuine long-term benefit even before the effects on the environment are considered. Unfortunately up to now these schemes have had little relevance for those who would potentially most benefit from them due to the incapacity to make an initial capital outlay. These do not have to be grand and complex schemes either.
It is a pity that genuinely good and simple ideas such as the roof insulation program appear to be permanently tainted by mismanagement. Few elected leaders have the political stomach or courage to continue pursuing a good idea when it wears the heavy baggage of popular distaste. The rapid electoral cycle condemns the long-term project.
Under the guise of fiscal responsibility, governments of all persuasions are making a subtle retreat from this prescient thinking and it is those who are lowest on the food chain that will end up enduring the consequent misery. But budget surpluses should not justify indifference.
Leaders should expose themselves “to feel what wretches feel” and the barren complexity of numbers might take on a new perspective.
A cold morning can still serve as valuable lesson in empathy.
