Poverty and suicide: What is Preventable?

Please Note: This report goes in depth on sensitive topics that can be potentially upsetting and triggering to read. Please proceed with caution if you are struggling. This submission includes direct quotes from people who have been harmed in employment services and through trying to navigate welfare and social services systems. Some of this may be confronting for those with similar experiences. You can find a list of support services at the bottom of this page.

Antipoverty Centre response to the Advice on the National Suicide Prevention Strategy consultation draft – November 2024

This submission is to the Advice on the National Suicide Prevention Strategy consultation draft.
and ‘Critical enabler 2: Embedded lived experience’. While this consultation is focused specifically on suicide, we reject the implicit message that death should be the threshold at which government is compelled to act. Poverty-related suicide deaths are the tip of the iceberg beneath which lie the welfare system’s unfathomable depth of widespread,
unnecessary misery. Decades of making budget savings off the backs of the poorest people in the community and ratcheting up punishment for those who dare to seek help have left us trapped in a carefully calibrated poverty machine. For many of us there is little hope of escape.