"Scumshine". If you live in Melbourne, you've heard this cruel and unfair nickname for the disadvantaged suburb of Sunshine.
No wonder the local council refused a filming permit for Struggle Street, the SBS documentary series about poverty in Australia. Producers are pushing ahead, disputing the need for permits in certain areas. In response, residents plan to disrupt shooting.
But here's the thing: Struggle Street is a decent opportunity – if we don't all stuff it up. And that's a tall order, given our fondness for inspiration porn, knee-jerk outrage and soft "awareness" over economic policy.
The first season of Struggle Street was good. It certainly didn't warrant the pre-emptive fury it attracted.
Its biggest flaw, however, was that it focused entirely on Mount Druitt in Sydney's west. An over-heated promo – with sounds and imagery evoking a car crash, and a gratuitous farting scene – stoked the worst fears of critics.
It became a "battlers of Mount Druitt versus the elites of SBS" story. Of course, this was a tabloid fiction, replete with references to the price of soy lattes. It was also a convenient distraction from Australia's growing wealth gap.
Yet again, media managed to ignore the issues – poverty, underfunded mental health services, housing affordability – and make this about ourselves.
Still, I have hope for the second season of Struggle Street.
I'm told it will place less emphasis on individual suburbs, so the important issues don't get overshadowed. (Producers are filming across different municipalities, in Queensland and Victoria.) Even better, I understand it will place its subjects' personal stories in the context of social and economic policies. For example, someone has a chronic illness: how do long waiting lists and unaffordable medications affect them?
SBS might also use its current affairs programs – including Insight, Dateline and The Feed – to probe these policy questions further.
Please, for the love of Lee Lin Chin, let's actually do this.
Let's explicitly link personal stories to the economic policies that directly shaped them. Let's have involved discussions on how to improve them. Then, let's take action. Rinse and repeat for best results.
There was a time when progressives opposed trickle-down economics. Now, we're all economic rationalists – or we just can't be stuffed with boring numbers and graphs. These days, the left has its hands full with trickle-down inspiration.
Here's a model flogging an unnecessary face cream. But wait – she is a Real Woman™! This academic once said Unapproved Things about gender – so we banned her from our university! Here's some people being nice to each other on prime time – they're an inspiration to us all!
We're so used to "solving" everything with a change.org petition – or just blaming the lads magazines and Alan Jones – that complex problems make our minds short-circuit.
At some point, we need to deal directly with policy. Not just be inspired, or outraged, or made "aware" in the vague hope our feelings magically result in better policies.
Brimbank City Council – which tried to block filming in Sunshine – is dealing one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the state, while promoting the area with initiatives such as "Sunshine Rising".
Maribyrnong City Council CEO Stephen Wall, who also rejected a filming permit, expressed his fear the show "will not present [the area] in favourable light, but depict it as place of disadvantage and poverty."
Unfortunately, Braybrook is disadvantaged. One of the most disadvantaged suburbs in the state, in fact. This is not to suggest everyone from Braybrook is the same. Give viewers some credit.
But is it more pressing to present the suburb "in a favourable light" – or address its youth unemployment rate of almost 30 per cent, well above the Greater Melbourne average of 12.3 per cent? Not to mention that Braybrook's social housing stock is ageing, and its residents are "isolated" from public transport.
You can be as stigma-free as you like. If you don't have enough money, decent shelter, or a way to get around, your life will be tough.
In fairness to Wall, I'd also worry if Struggle Street did nothing more than "tell the stories" of my residents.
Nobody just becomes homeless. Our wildly expensive housing and rents play a role. So does our overloaded emergency accommodation. Our strained public health system. Our poorly funded mental health "plans". The shift towards tenuous contract work. I could go on.
But often, these rate a passing mention in reporters' case studies. We're more interested in the grisly details: what's it like to fossick through a bin for dinner?
If we downplay structural failures, we can overplay personal agency. "What's this guy gonna do to get his life back on track?" we wonder, from the comfort of our lounge rooms.
For media, "shining a light" on things has always been the most interesting part of our jobs (and the easiest). But if we don't follow through with tough policy scrutiny – the part that actually leads to change – what's the point?
We can delude ourselves and say that programs such as The Briefcase make us better people, because we're inspired by the decent behaviour of the people in them. (And the contestants are astonishingly generous. However, if the show wants to style itself as a "social experiment", shouldn't it run control tests with families whose identities are shielded? Wouldn't a proper experiment test the effect of knowing that a million viewers will judge your decision?)
When I watched the first episode, I was dismayed. Mandy, who had both arms and both legs amputated in a life-threatening infection, didn't even have an accessible shower in her own home – or dextrous prosthetic limbs. Yet our public health system won't pay for these things, it seems.
Handing out briefcases full of $20 bills on commercial television does not strike me as a viable way to address the gaping holes in our disability system.
The irony is that Mandy wouldn't have needed to appear on the show had our healthcare policies not failed her. Of course, this is not discussed on The Briefcase. Instead, we look at her individual compassion and say: "If only our politicians created policies as kind-hearted as Mandy's actions, the world would be a better place."
I don't disagree. But having fuzzy feelings in front of the telly won't make this happen.
What, exactly, is the lesson of The Briefcase? That it's better to give than receive ... because someone might surprise you in return with wads of cash?
Life doesn't always work that way. Especially if you're a non-telegenic family, on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder, as we saw in the first season of Struggle Street. You can try as hard as you like. You can give as much as you can. Even then, life can be one cruel blow after another.
For many, this was too much to bear. Addicted to "inspiration porn" – which has spread from women's magazines to most mainstream outlets – we misinterpreted the lack of happy endings as exploitation.
All we wanted was This One Inspiring Narrative That Will Change Our Life. The plucky welfare mum who started a juice chain, perhaps. We kept asking: what uplifting lesson does this contain for me? If there was no inspiration to be found it must, ipso facto, be a Bad Thing.
In 2016, we're drowning in emotional stories.
Granted, they make us acknowledge that "something should be done". But without specific attention on policy and economics, that's often where they end. Or we divert our good intentions into gestures, such as buying Q&A guest Duncan Storrar a toaster. Even though Storrar wanted better economic policy, to help everyone in his position.
If you want better policy, you have to focus on policy.
Call me cynical, but poverty can't be solved by "reducing stigma" or "changing the narrative" alone.
If Struggle Street's new season is nothing more than a collection of deeply moving personal stories – allowing us to flaunt our compassion – we've failed. If it starts and ends with "raising awareness", it will achieve nothing more than making a lot of people sad and angry, generating a burst of futile social media posts declaring "we need to do more".
Fortunately, the signs are encouraging.
SBS appears to be approaching this new season with policy in mind. It has some of the finest current affairs programs in the country, and I hope it is not afraid to use them.
To the councils who find their suburbs depicted in the series: grab this chance! Agitate for better transport and public housing. Explain to us why these things are vital. Don't just "promote" your suburbs. Fix them. Fight for them.
To my media colleagues, I beg you: let's not make this another media versus media war. Would we be so tasteless as to shout over homeless people and make this about ourselves, again? (Don't answer that.)
And for everyone else: Struggle Street's second season won't air until 2017. Can we hold our judgments – and the rubbish truck blockades – until we've seen the first episode?
Email: mlallo@fairfaxmedia.com.au
