Jules Schiller: Listening to you and some of these callers there’s a sense of dehumanisation about these experiences that is difficult to comprehend if you haven’t been through it.

Mark Mordue: “Oh yeah, look, honestly Julian, it’s impossible to understand if you haven’t experienced it and what it does to you. And you’re right, you can hear the emotion in my voice – and I could feel it before [when I spoke]. You end up getting angry about sounding angry because you get so bent and twisted by the way you’re treated and what happens to you. Listening to those other callers I could really feel for them. Most of the job providers are the most sad-arse places going. If you can remember how it was when the internet first arrived and every failing laundromat and corner shop whacked in half a dozen computers and a printer and reframed themselves as an ‘internet cafe’, that’s what the job providers are like: all these half-baked businesses with highly unskilled, very under-trained people who have your life in their hands and don’t much care about it.”

#antipovertyweek #raisetherate

Host Jules Schiller of ABC Radio Adelaide’s Drive program Interviewed Addison Road Community Organisation’s Mark Mordue and took callers on air to get people talking about Newstart, unemployment and the job provider system last Monday, 16 October 2019. You can hear the conversation in full here: