City of Sydney Council steps in to help stretched food relief programs

BY JUSTIN COOPER.

City of Sydney Council is looking to provide financial assistance to food relief programs as services reach capacity and many call for additional support for services throughout the Sydney Metropolitan area.

During a council meeting earlier this week, Lord Mayor Clover Moore introduced an urgent motion to seek “emergency financial support” for food relief organisations across Sydney who are facing increasing demand.

“In a country as prosperous as ours it is shameful that so many people are going hungry,” she told the council.

With demand doubling over the past year, Moore noted that First Nations people are particularly impacted, and increased numbers of low-income workers are requesting aid.

“Demand for free food is now far higher than in Covid… As people struggle to pay their bills amid the cost-of-living crisis, they forgo food in order to pay for housing, health and heating,” says Moore.

Speaking from personal experience, Kristen O’Connell from the Antipoverty Centre told City Hub, “it’s extremely clear that there is no capacity for people on the lower end of the income scale to absorb more cost of living increases, so instead we are going without even more essentials than we were already, before these extreme price increases began to take off in the last year or so.”

The motion before City of Sydney Council passed unanimously. It has seen praise across the metropolitan area, with calls for other government levels to also extend their support, but some believe it doesn’t go far enough.

O’Connell said that her personal engagement with organisations that deliver food relief programs, on behalf of the Antipoverty Centre, have focused on encouraging these groups to address “structural issues” and the “urgency and necessity of raising income support payments”.

“It’s good that they’ve provided some money to these services but there are problems and inadequacies with those services,” O’Connell said.

Barriers to access O’Connell cited included shame, stigma, paternalism and a lack of knowledge that some food relief programs even exist.

Regarding the direction of funding, the specifics of which the City of Sydney Council has not yet outlined, O’Connell expressed a note of caution.

“If we’re going to be providing direct funding to food relief organisations, we need to require that funding is not used for conditional or means-tested programs,” she said.

“People should not have to produce paperwork to prove their eligibility to access these services. The most important indicator of whether someone needs support is when they seek that support. The fact that someone turns up to a food bank should be enough to show that they need access to it.”

Push for food relief support in the Inner West 

Following the motion, Independent Inner West Councillor Pauline Lockie said she was “pleased” about council being able to support Sydney food relief organisations on social media.

Last week, Cr Lockie introduced a similar motion along with Councillor Dylan Griffiths, which requested the Inner West Council provide $50,000 in direct funds to anti-poverty organisations. This funding was voted down with the Labor majority voting against, saying it was not considered a part of “public services” within their budget. Inner West Council has opted to hold a fundraiser instead.

City Hub spoke with Cr Lockie who expressed the need for all levels of government to properly address the current crisis and reinforce support for food relief programs.

“During the pandemic, we saw the best example of how governments at all levels worked together to address food insecurity,” said Cr Lockie, pointing out increased income support from federal governments and funding for organisations between state and local governments, including the Inner West Council at the time.

“But food relief organisations in the Inner West and across Sydney are now telling us the problem is worse than it’s ever been… Yet those government supports have disappeared,” she explains.

“This is absolutely our issue, and our people who are suffering, and we urgently need Labor governments at all levels to stop buck-passing and support people in our community who are doing it hardest,” said Cr Lockie.

“We can’t turn our back on the most vulnerable members of our community simply because the global health emergency has been declared over.”

O’Connell expressed shock and disappointment over the Inner West Council’s decision, stating  “it is perverse for governments to take public money and use it for advertising in some way when they could use the resources they have to help people directly.”

“It’s wasteful and it means they are outsourcing their responsibility to private individuals.”

Demands expected to increase

Fuelling concerns that stretched organisations are reaching capacity limits, many anti-poverty organisations are anticipating further increases with inflation expected to rise and cost-of-living remaining persistently high.

Lockie explained that 4 in 5 residents at Addison (Addi) Road Community Organisation’s Marrickville food pantry, who are unable to pay for their groceries, were from the Inner West. Addi Road and food insecurity services from the ​​Rev Bill Crews Foundation have seen massive increases from the Inner West Community.

OzHarvest has seen significant increases in services and food needed to supply, with the organisation serving 2,000 people per week and now distributing up to 46,000 kilos of food a month. This is 25% more people attending than during Covid, and almost double the weight of distributions in the past.

First Nations Response, an Aboriginal community-controlled organisation, has received a 100% increase in requests and are now supporting over 250 families and elders each week.