In August 2019 I decided to visit Victoria and stay in Melbourne’s CBD for a week.
Rattling tins, dirty cups, discoloured food cans, stained cardboard boxes, up-turned and dirt encrusted baseball caps, odour reeking beggars are on every street – Melbourne has it all for the uninitiated tourist!
Outside of supermarkets, eateries, ATMs, or in front of train stations and tourist attractions, beggars are in your face and under your feet; they are a bloody nuisance and everywhere.
Entry into many shops in the city is impeded by dishevelled and odour reeking layabout itinerants whose (for want of a better word) stench is enough to turn you off your lunch at the least, or at worst, make you lose consciousness from holding your breath as you run the gauntlet from the street into shops.
Drunk, half-soaked, drugged, or just stoned off their face, these pesky rascals are everywhere.
Melbourne’s beggars are more bothersome, persistent, harassing and annoying than those incorrigible hawkers, peddlers and chuggers at shopping centres who are in your face collecting for charities or trying to sell you something.
Many of these apparent ‘homeless’ individuals have hand scribbled signs on bits of cardboard conveying how financially poor and physically hard-up they supposedly are, yet often you can catch a glimpse of a roll of tobacco, a bottle of booze, or a mobile phone just sticking out of their bedding.
So, is begging a lifestyle choice?
For many, that would be a resounding yes – begging is a quick rich and lucrative enterprise!
The caches of money some of these itinerants amass is an affront to the average worker who, lacking any real motivation, struggles to get up some mornings in anticipation of spending wasted hours battling traffic snarls just to get to and from work each day and toil for 8 to 12 hours at a job that frankly many don’t like doing, but have to.
But he who works earns money to pay bills, to eat, to exist.
Begging in Melbourne appears to be a quasi-legal and flourishing industry just like prostitution once was in years gone by.
What some tourists witness as the sun sets, and workers find insulting as they begin their gruelling trip home, is seeing these so-called beggars, itinerants and lost souls meet and greet each other knowingly with glee as they share their mutual excitement about bountiful tax-free takings and gloat about how much booze and fags they can afford.
Some of these beggars are not vulnerable people at all, but organised syndicates of professional crooks who dupe Melburnians and unsuspecting tourists out of their hard-earned cash and send it to China.
And as prostitution was illegal, so too is begging. Or is it?
Albeit Australia might be on a slippery downward slide towards socio-economic chaos, it is not there – yet!
There is no excuse for anybody to be begging and soliciting others for monetary gain as each and every Australian is entitled to some form of financial support and/or assistance to survive.
Excuse the pun, but it beggars belief why the practise of begging is both tolerated and condoned by authorities?
Welcome to Melbourne!
Revisions:
Article originally published 18 September 2019. Revised: 30 November 2023; 16 January 2023; 4 January 2022.