a bargain breakfast, page-10

Watso, I'm really disappointed to read your judgemental comments about the homeless. Many people in our supposedly affluent country live from week to week, just able to meet their mortgage/rent commitments, utilities, insurances etc. All it can take is for someone to be diagnosed with a serious illness, therefore forced to stop working, or any other of a myriad of events that can befall ordinary people, to be forced out of their home.

What options do they then have if they have no family or friends who can put them up? It's a pretty big ask for any other family to take in an individual, let alone a whole family, when perhaps they are struggling themselves.

The dole or sickness benefit is not much over $200 p.w. With rents in most places above that, how on earth do you think an unemployed or sick person is going to exist? They will not have enough to even pay the rent, let alone buy food, prescriptions, run a car etc.

It's common, it seems, for people who are under no financial stress, (but yet who find their amusement in going from supermarket to supermarket in pursuit of marked down food, now it seems perhaps even soup kitchens designed to help the absolutely poor) to condemn those in less favourable circumstances than themselves.

I'd suggest you go to the Centrelink website, have a look at what assistance is actually available to people out of work or ill, and give some serious thought to whether it's actually a survivable amount.

And please don't complain about your thread being sidetracked. You chose to attack what you describe as the 'pretend homeless'. No one is ever going to pretend to be homeless. People are there because of circumstances you obviously don't understand, such as mental illness and a huge variety of other genuine reasons.

Another suggestion for you: maybe, instead of glorying in all your bargains, spend that time volunteering with a community agency which supports the homeless and disadvantaged. It might help you to realise what the lives of some people are really like.