Senator Ricky Muir Spoke Out About His Struggles Finding Work As A Kid, Knocked It Out Of The Damn Park
Australia's most unlikely politician is actually pretty good.
Australian Motoring Enthusiasts Party Senator Ricky Muir isn’t very well-known; besides being elected with a tiny 0.51 percent of the primary vote in Victoria, he’s mainly recognised for getting flustered in an interview with Channel Seven’s Sunday Night and that footage of him and some mates throwing kangaroo poo around. Those two nontroversies led to a general sense that he shouldn’t have been in the Senate in the first place, and not just because of his low vote; Muir’s background is that of a labourer instead of a professional politician, and he comes across as unpolished and nervous in speeches and interviews. To someone not paying much attention, it’d be easy to assume that Muir is simply out of his depth.
Now, though, Muir’s beginning to make his mark in a big way. Working with the Brotherhood of St Lawrence‘s youth employment campaign, My Chance, Our Future, Muir has opened up about his experiences trying to find work as a young guy who left school at 15. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald earlier today, Muir eloquently and passionately describes how hard it can be for young people to find work, particularly if they live in the country or aren’t keen on university.
“My hope is that my story will highlight how crushing it is to be young and unemployed in Australia,” Muir wrote. “When I left school in 1996, I was really desperate to find a job. I needed money to put food on the table and pay the rent, or I would have been out on the streets. I applied for many, many entry-level jobs – including abattoir work – near where I lived in Gippsland, but I couldn’t catch a break for a long time. It was soul-destroying. At times, tears were shed. I did not have the financial support of my parents who were facing their own challenges, so I had to rely on Centrelink payments for more than a year.”
“I definitely know what it’s like to build your way from nothing. I know the challenges that young people in similar situations today face. In country towns around Australia, it’s especially hard for young people because there isn’t the public transport to even get you to a job interview if you don’t have access to a car – or parents who will drive you.”
It’s difficult to imagine many professional politicians speaking like this, because most of them have never had this kind of life experience — Joe Hockey’s rhetoric about “the age of entitlement” springs to mind. Unlike most of the people who decide how welfare money should be spent, Muir actually knows how it feels to not be able to support yourself, and the complex mix of emotions that inspires in a person. He doesn’t have a stack of political staffer positions on his CV, but considering most people in government do, and what it turns some of them into, that’s not actually a bad thing.
Someone who’s spent more time worrying about how to pay the bills than insider political nonsense is such a rare thing in Australian politics, we’ve almost forgotten what it sounds like when they speak. Muir’s brought empathy and humanity back to a debate usually dominated by lazy stereotypes and political bickering, and reached out to a whole section of society that politics almost always ignores. With that alone, he’s more than proven his worth already.