Life on JobKeeper: writing on a basic income

Confronted with a global pandemic, writer Lea McInerney experiences the freedom to create while receiving regular government payments.

Writer Lea McInerney.

In September 2020, two months into Melbourne’s second lockdown, I was doing my allotted hour of physical activity when a pleasant feeling that wasn’t just feel-good-exercise-chemicals flowed through me. A surprising thought followed: “I’m really happy.” I’d just had another weekday of the same routine: get up, eat breakfast, go to my desk, write more of the story I’m working on, knock off after six or seven hours, go for a walk, cook dinner, eat, chat, read, bed. Then the next day, start over again, same routine, same rhythm. On weekends, I’d scale things back a bit and do an hour or two of writing, go shopping for groceries and clean up around home. As I walked around the park that day feeling happy, I looked at the other masked walkers and wondered how they were getting on. Had their pre-Covid work selves changed dramatically like mine? In March 2020, when the first lockdown began, had they too been worried – even terrified – about how they were going to survive? Had their bodies, like mine, been tight with anxiety? Then when JobKeeper and Jobseeker with its Covid supplement were announced and they realised they were eligible, did they notice, like me, that the tight feeling vanished, just like that? Did they also think to themselves, okay I’ve got six months where I can actually not worry about money? I’ve got the rent, bills and groceries covered, and we’ll be right for now.

Melbourne’s second lockdown would eventually last 111 days. My paid work didn’t have a hope of resuming during that time yet I noticed a lightness in myself rising up from this new reality of mine. I had time and freedom to do creative work that I usually squeezed in around the edges of my day job. I could now spend several days a week on a project I’d started, working with an 83-year-old gentleman to write a book about his life. In the park that day as I walked the paths and cut across the grass in places, I actually had a spring in my step and, probably, a stupid grin on my face, if anyone could have seen it under my mask. What was its source? On the one hand, an absence of worry about money. On the other, the presence of truly satisfying work. I have enough, I thought. I actually said those three words aloud. I have enough to live on and be able to do work that I love.

Back in February 2020, Vince Copley, a senior Ngadjuri man, had asked me to work with him on his life story, which he wanted to document for his children and other family. I’d first met Vince four years before when I interviewed him for some research I was doing. At the time he and his wife Brenda lived in Adelaide and they’d welcomed me into their home, cups of tea and big plates of scones and jam and cream laid out on their dining table. The country-town girl in me warmed instantly to their hospitality. We had a great chat that first visit and they said to drop in next time I was over from Melbourne. I did, and then Vince and I started talking by phone. As well as the research I’d originally approached him about, we were both interested in related subjects. Gradually we became good friends. He told me lots of stories from his life.

JobKeeper gave me a lived experience of a different way of being, of how it feels to lose your income but not sink into poverty, of how it feels when you’re not driven to make money at any cost. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Damian Shaw

Then a health problem of Vince’s got worse. With a heightened sense of his time on this earth being short, and aware that not just his immediate family were interested in his life, he asked me if I’d work with him on turning his story into a book. Although nervous about how I’d fit it in, I got back to him with a quietly determined yes.

But Covid lockdowns were beginning to be talked about. I packed up and headed home to Melbourne earlier than planned, and Vince and I switched to telephone interviews, fitted around my other work. I’m a freelance trainer and workshop facilitator, a job I’ve been doing for 20-plus years. In those first few weeks of lockdown, thousands of dollars of work I had booked in for the months ahead disappeared. I’d been travelling for work for years, between three Australian states and New Zealand. Now I couldn’t go. I managed to switch one training course to online, and it worked okay, but it wasn’t possible with the others.

That federal government action of providing what equates to a basic income transformed what otherwise would have been a very bleak time. JobKeeper gave me a lived experience of a different way of being, of how it feels to lose your income but not sink into poverty, of how it feels when you’re not driven to make money at any cost. JobKeeper freed me up to work on a story that deserves to be told and heard, even if ultimately its audience may be just a handful of people who appreciate its offerings. JobKeeper, and Jobseeker with its Covid supplement, was Australia’s mini-experiment in having a universal basic income (UBI) – a payment to everyone that covers the basics: housing, food, bills. I now understand at a visceral level what UBI can offer, to me individually and to society as a whole. No one lives in poverty. No one is forced to do work without the proper skills or potential. No one panics and takes a job they’re not suited to so they can fund the thing they’d really love to do, the thing that draws on their natural gifts and talents.

The paid work I do is useful work. It’s practical. It makes some people’s working lives easier, more productive even. But it’s something many others can also do – and do well. The creative work I’m doing to write Vince’s book with him is something few others could do, at that point in time anyway. It’s also unlikely to earn me much income. Its value to society is intangible, perhaps impossible to measure. But the book I wrote during lockdown has turned out better than either Vince or I expected, in large part because I was able to immerse myself and concentrate on it so deeply. JobKeeper and the topped up Jobseeker offered me and many others a lived experience of what UBI could do for the country. Prevent poverty, nurture creativity, value people for what they can contribute, tangible and intangible. Here in 2021, I hope we’re closer to designing an economic system that has no illusions about what it can and should do for all of us, not just a few. I hope it’s there in the after times, now not far away.

 This is an edited extract from Life on JobKeeper, published in Griffith Review 73: Hey, Utopia! (August 3)