Built for Inequity

How Australia’s quiet architecture of policy and profit sustains disadvantage

The greatest issue facing Australian society today is growing inequity. It is the thread that pulls at every other challenge we face. From climate disaster to pandemic to recession — ensuring that when crisis comes, those with the least are hit the hardest, and the gap between wealth and struggle widens further. The end result is a slow fraying of trust — in institutions, democracy itself, and in the sense that we’re all part of the same story. It creates a space where frustration hardens into alienation, and people lean toward the extreme just to be seen and heard and it inhibits our collective ability to deal with existential threats.

It starts with the queue. In Melbourne, inequity has a shape you can see.

At dawn, it stretches down Swanston Street and along Grey Street in St Kilda, where the Sacred Heart Mission opens its doors each morning. Outside the Magpie Nest Café on Bourke Street and by Federation Square, people gather quietly, waiting for the first meal of the day. The air carries the scent of toast, coffee and that early morning city smell that’s hard to name — a mix of exhaust fumes, concrete dust and damp, the sound of a city waking while others wait for the day to begin.

Volunteers move quietly across the city, like a gentle wave of compassion; from The Big Umbrella to Sikh givers, between familiar faces, greeting people by name, passing bowls of food and cups of tea with practiced care. The lines move slowly, measured not by impatience but by the small exchanges that remind people they’re still seen, still welcome.

These acts of care often unfold in the shadows and wind tunnels of corporate towers, where glass and steel reflect the impenetrable light of wealth while those serving and being served give and receive in its shade.

In Melbourne, as in many cities, generosity takes place out of sight, beneath the glow of buildings that remind us that prosperity is meant to be visible while disadvantage must remain unseen — our quiet, persistent shame. If you choose to look, this is where the city’s inequity becomes visible and then becomes glaring: in the stillness of those waiting, in the quiet kindness of those who serve, and in the brittle balance between compassion and neglect.

It all reminds us, Australia’s great myth is that of the fair go; a promise that has now never felt further from the truth. Watching those morning queues, it’s clear that the idea of fairness has shifted from practice to slogan. These lines, foodbank queues, housing lists, call centre waits — run like track marks across the body of the nation, visible proof of where the pressure has been applied and where the pain resides. They reveal something else: that fairness has become conditional, almost a luxury; a waiting game defined by circumstance. The promise is still spoken, but it no longer reaches fewer and fewer. When nothing eventuates they tell us to keep dreaming and dreaming.

According to recent research from ACOSS, more than one in seven Australians now live below the poverty line. One in six children. That’s 3.7 million people — entire suburbs quietly doing their best to hold on. After the removal of COVID supports, rents soared while wages, as they have for much of the past 15 years, stayed still. The report calls it a rise in the depth of poverty. A careful phrase that conceals what it really means — the narrowing of opportunity, through the daily desperate effort to stay afloat. The all consuming effort to live one day to the next.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s (AIHW) latest study places a number beside that struggle. At the margin where one bill is the difference between a roof at the street.

People who’ve needed homelessness support have a median age of death of fifty-five. The country likes to boast of its longevity, but not this. Fifty-five years; nearly three decades short of the national average, a full generation of life lost. The chance to grow into lived and experience and pass it on, gone. It’s an age that should still hold plans and possibility, yet too often it marks an early ending, a quiet disappearance from a society that measures its success in averages while ignoring the lives that fall beneath the line.

Their early demise become part of the brutal art of economics; one less payment, one less person to account for — a cold efficiency that lays bare the system’s quiet preference for numbers over lives.

These are not new statistics, only newly accepted ones. They show what happens when inequality ceases to shock, when it becomes part of the background hum of the city. The distance between survival and dignity grows wider each year, and those who fall into it slip from view.

Behind these numbers lies a system that has been gamed to sustain the imbalance. Tax settings reward those who already have property, while rental assistance lags behind market reality. Wages stagnate as profits climb. Social security payments, meant as a safety net, have become a tightrope that leaves people one unexpected complication away from crisis. There used to be a catch for most, but public housing stock has dwindled for decades, replaced by short-term fixes for the benefit of private profit.

In our cities, these choices manifest in rising towers of investment apartments that sit half-empty while community housing lists stretch for years. What is often called “affordable housing” has become a misnomer; a market product priced beyond the reach of those it claims to serve, slowly encroaching on the space where genuine community housing once stood.

In years past, cranes sitting majestically in the skyline signified growth; now they signify exclusion as well, construction that has lost sight of its purpose — to provide homes and jobs, not just investments.

Photo by Chris McLay

Each policy decision, each frozen payment or foregone increase, accumulates into a quiet architecture of inequity, built one overlooked person at a time.

Both ACOSS and the Institute of Health and Welfare point to ways forward, not as quick fixes but as deliberate acts of restoration. ACOSS calls for an increase in income support to lift people above the poverty line, a permanent boost to Commonwealth Rent Assistance, and large-scale investment in social housing.

However, recent analysis from the ABC and the e61 Institute adds a further, striking dimension: that it may be cheaper to end poverty than to maintain it.

During the pandemic, when welfare payments were doubled, hardship fell sharply, and so did many of the social costs that stalk it. Economists estimate that poverty carries a price tag running into tens of billions each year in health care, justice, and lost productivity.

In New South Wales alone, the cost of child poverty has been measured at $60 billion annually. A staggering number but one based on evidence that leads to a plain conclusion: reducing poverty is not only a moral imperative but an economic one. It saves money, strengthens communities, and restores possibility to lives too often reduced to survival.

If we can afford inequity, we can afford to fix it. What’s missing is not the means, but the will. The AIHW underscores the need for housing-first models: secure homes as the foundation for wellbeing, not the pay off for surviving without one.

These reports remind us that inequality is not an accident of fate but the outcome of deliberate design — and therefore it can be redesigned. Fairness can be renewed through policies that put human security at the centre: income that sustains, housing recognised as a right, and systems that see people before they count them.

But the heart of this work is not in the reports or in the language of reform. It’s in the people who gather each morning beneath Melbourne’s lights. Volunteers who remember names, who pass a cup of tea across a counter with warmth. It’s in the quiet dignity of those who keep showing up, day after day, despite a city that too often looks past them.

The numbers show how far we’ve drifted, but the people remind us what still holds. Many of them have roofs over their heads, yet live chained to the line of poverty — working, paying, surviving — with no real prospect of moving forward. They are held there by decisions made in boardrooms and cabinets that choose profit over people, preserving a system where disadvantage is policy, not accident. It also stifles innovation, when people are consumed by survival, they have no space to imagine, to create, or to solve the very problems that hold us back as a nation.

Their endurance is not quiet grace but proof of resilience forced by necessity. They expose a truth we prefer to ignore: that inequity is not only visible on the streets, but in the kitchens, offices, and pay slips of those just getting by. They are chained to the poverty line not by twisted fate, but by policy decisions that keep them there; deliberate choices that trade dignity for economic expedience.

The measure of a nation lies not in how much it builds, earns or appeases superpowers, but in whether it frees its people from the grind of just getting by. Whether it can make space for everyone to live with purpose, dignity, and the chance to dream beyond survival.