This is a speech given by myself, Phoebe Autumn, at the Sweltering Cities: Is Perth a Heat-Safe City? event held at the City of Melville Ecohub on the evening of April 14, 2025.
It’s been hot lately. Don’t know if you didn’t notice.
It’s oppressive and never-ending.
The sun gives life, it’s one of the reasons we’re here on this Earth.
And yet for me, and many like me, it’s debilitating.
It saps energy, kills motivation, and reduces me to a mattress-dwelling lump. Sweating it out until the relief of sundown and the relief of a mid-20 degree heat.
I’m a disabled trans woman, I’m stuck on JobSeeker, and that means Mutual Obligations, that’s pointless appointments, sometimes out in the worst heat of Summer. My old provider – smack-bang in the middle of an industrial and commercial area in Cockburn, with big hot, black roads, and not a crosswalk in sight. That’s where I found myself on my birthday in 2023, late February, on the tail end of a shocking, but now all-too-common, Summer heatwave.
If I don’t show up, they can suspend my payments. The privatisation of welfare abuse. They can do phone appointments, but it’s a courtesy they extend only when they’re feeling generous. This exceptionally hot day they didn’t bother. I wasted half an hour there, talking about work I can’t physically do, for jobs I’ll never be offered, and even if I was the best candidate, there’s always one with less baggage, but it’s a routine I’m used to – in another dehumanising day being blamed for my own poverty.
So there I was, standing at a bus stop, in the middle of nowhere, in the worst heat of the day, no relief, no shelter, nothing, until the bus comes. I made my way home, hydrated, rested. My joints ached. I couldn’t do anything. This one “innocuous” appointment ended up wasting three days.
Am I in the worst position?
No, my disabled brothers and I managed to keep the family home when my father died, we have a small mortgage, having been forced through the family court by the other so-called parent. This also means we’re responsible for the upkeep, we’re responsible for what utilities we use, we’re the ones who can’t afford air conditioning. I looked into it, we’d have help if we were parents or elderly, but there’s nothing. Near as I can tell, there’s no one even to do the work for us to see what we can get, what we can get help with, and whether we qualify for financial assistance.
Were services like the NDIS not under assault, but accessible and available, you’d think it would be as easy as asking someone to come to your property, identify your family’s needs, assign some professionals and the work would be completed, efficiency and quality products guaranteed. But instead our support is under attack. Our needs are unmet as a matter of policy. Instead of air conditioning, solar and batteries – we have a leaking roof and a small army of cheap electric fans and heaters.
The government does fund some people though, people to means test us out of support, to discourage relationships on welfare payments, to cut our welfare, it funds people to punish us for not being traditionally productive. It’s a societal blame, a stigma, that because we’re not the ideal people they’d prefer to rule over, that we deserve any abuses we get. Our economy, much like our destabilised climate, is not made for us. It is not fit for us. The undignified.
Thank you for your time.