IIn Year 9, a curious young man, Tim Costello, asked his teacher if poverty was an inevitable natural phenomenon, like the ebb of the tide or the rising of the sun. He says it was a good question then, and it’s one everyone should be thinking about now.
“It’s not natural,” he says. “It’s policy.”
Costello sits on a small sand dune on Frankston Beach, with a large brick house behind him, hairy spinifex all around him, and a glass-flat bay stretching out in front of him. .
The answer he found in his ninth year has become the focus of his life. Now 69, he has spent more than 30 years on the front lines of Australia’s worsening poverty problem. Along the way, he traveled the world, visited conflict zones and natural disasters, served as Mayor of St Kilda, wrote several books, and was listed as a Living Treasure of the Human Nation.
People often confuse him with his brother, former treasurer Peter Costello. Before the walk, two people asked me whether I was going to the Liberals or the Church. Mr Costello is perhaps Australia’s best-known Baptist minister, best known for his 13-year stint as CEO of World Vision.
He is currently Australia’s most prominent gambling reform advocate.
“Welcome to Franga,” he said with open arms and entered the atrium where we were waiting.
He grabbed his hat and we took it off. As we walked out the gate, I told him what a wonderful place it was. It’s right on the beach and there’s a small canal behind it.
Costello said his wife, Meridi, initially said it was “not possible” to move here. “And I know that if my wife says no like that, that’s the end of it.”
Costello chuckles. After they saw the house, he recalled: He went to speak at an event for cyclists. Just as he was about to speak, a murmur echoed through the room: one of the group’s members, a man with a young child, was in the hospital. A few minutes later, I received an email saying he had passed away.
“So I tried to change the way I spoke and speak to their grief and help them,” he says.
When he returned to the car, Meridy looked at him. She told him she was going to buy a house by the beach. Life is too precious and too short, and she didn’t want to waste any of it. In the six years they’ve lived here, Costello swam every day when he was home, but his wife never swam.
“But she likes having cocktails on the deck,” he says.
Costello can go from talking to bikers, to bad sleepers, to the prime minister, all in one day. The day before our walk, he was playing tennis with some of Melbourne’s wealthiest surgeons. He then flew to Hobart to campaign against backflips by Tasmania Premier Jeremy Rockliffe’s call for the introduction of pre-commitment cards for pokie users.
But if it had been a young man, it might have been very different.
“The question of whether poverty is natural or created by poverty led me to think that legislation is a good idea,” he says. “I thought this was justice.”
Costello graduated from Monash Law School in 1978 and then worked as a corporate lawyer at a firm in Melbourne’s affluent eastern suburbs. They asked him if he wanted to become a partner, which is a dream for many graduates. But his mind was elsewhere.
“Within three years, I realized that law is about business,” he says.
So Costello went to Switzerland to study theology in 1981. Four years later, he returned to work at St. Kilda Baptist Church, which had fewer than 10 members.
“They couldn’t pay me, so I opened a law firm in a church to pay my living expenses.”
He admits that’s not the approach most people would take. But the marriage of his two great loves, faith and righteousness, was changing his world.
“My first clients were sex workers,” he says. “She came in and said, ‘Can you represent me?’ I said, ‘Of course. When will the incident occur? As I reached for my diary, she looked at the clock and said, “10 minutes left.” ”
He will take you while Costello speaks. He tells this story with humor about himself being too young and unprepared. But there’s a bigger message.
His first client had a swollen eye from a heroin injection and had been living on the streets for years. After Mr. Costello helped her avoid jail time, he stood next to her on the street and found himself feeling a wave of criticism towards her.
On a crowded street, the woman put her arm around Costello and asked him to take her to lunch.
While eating lunch, he realized that he knew very little about life. He grew up in a safe house in the eastern suburbs, free from oppression, discrimination, and poverty.
“All my judgment was shattered,” he says.
In 1992, he took on another female client. The married mother of three children ended up in prison for four years.
She never even had a traffic fine, but she developed an addiction to poker machines and stole $60,000 from her employer. This was a turning point for Costello. Slot machines had just been introduced to Victoria. There were no safeguards or warnings to consumers, and little understanding of how addictive they were.
“When I visited her in a women’s prison, I realized how could a middle-aged woman who is married with three children spend four years in prison even though she had never been involved in a crime before? “I wondered if it was going to happen,” he says.
“Since then, I’ve been fighting for pokie reform and gambling reform.”
aAs we walked around the river near his house, our neighbor Rob yelled hello. Another woman, Vivian, stopped to introduce herself and said she was a big fan. Costello tells his grandson’s story about what people said when he first moved to Frankston, a suburb known for crime and disadvantage. He laughed at his opponents.
“Look at this, we could be in Europe,” he says.
He’s not wrong. A pier leads down this small canal. It could be mistaken for the French countryside if it weren’t for the swampy rubber on its shores.
Costello grew up in a household where curiosity was encouraged, the son of two teachers who talked politics, world events, and religion around the dinner table.
“I thought all families did it, but I realized that’s not the case,” he says.
He met Meridi when he was 17 and she was 16. The two rode the same train to school.
“Over the next six or seven years, we broke up seven times,” he says. He gave a shy little smile before stopping. “She nailed it every time. She said she didn’t want to marry someone less intelligent than she was.”
He laughed and admitted that she was right. Costello is both humble and humorous.
“Each time I had to get her back.” They married in their mid-20s, and 45 years later had three children and five grandchildren.
After our walk, we sat on his deck, cups in hand, and we both gazed out at the bay. After everything he’s seen, including the natural disasters and war zones he visited while working for World Vision, Costello says he just wanted to sit somewhere with a view of the horizon. There are tears in his eyes.
“For 17 years, I’ve been to almost every disaster happening on Earth: earthquakes, volcanoes, wars, tsunamis,” he says. “You live with the guilt of not doing enough.”
He says he sometimes starts crying out of nowhere when speaking in public or when he’s with his family.
“I find myself building fences around my emotions, creating boundaries to keep me moving forward, and those fences start to leak,” he says.
“I think I’ve healed a lot, but I’ll never fully recover.”
CMr. Ostello has been asked several times to run for Congress. He was approached to run as a Democratic candidate in 1994, but was to run against his brother Peter, who was then Treasurer in John Howard’s right-wing coalition government. He said Meridi, who was “more emotionally connected than usual,” advised him to stop doing that.
“It definitely would have exacerbated difficulties in family relationships,” he says. “In the end, I realized that politics was a great temptation for me, but not a calling.”
He was asked again several times, but he did not say by whom. Costello is never far from politics and power, but he believes he can do more outside the tent.
“Actually, I’m called to a different job,” he says. “I can talk to both sides of politics. I think I probably had as much influence as I did being there. Whether it’s justified or not, I think it’s right. I felt it was a good decision.”
He would like to scale back some of his brother’s policies, such as tax breaks for real estate investors, if possible.
Mr Costello wants to introduce a wealth tax through capital gains tax reform, negative gearing and a death tax (he notes Australia is one of the few countries without a wealth tax).
Despite their differing political views, the Costello brothers and sisters are close. A few weeks later, they will be spending Christmas together.
More fundamentally, He is concerned that the social fabric of multicultural societies is fraying. he stopped. For the first time, he looked very serious.
“Social cohesion is really being shaken,” he says.
Multiculturalism, he says, cuts into the past 10,000 years of human history. “Actually embracing multiculturalism is a unique and novel experience.” But while the First Fleet had a devastating impact on the country’s original administrators, modern-day immigration has led to better societies. He claims to have built a
But now, “Every three weeks, Andrew Bolt and others will claim that multiculturalism has failed.
“I think the challenge is whether we can actually say that immigration has built Australia’s very rich society. We have to move past this.”
Costello is worried about the direction of the world. We live in chaotic times and challenges can be overwhelming. he It says inequality is growing in Australia. The rich are getting richer. He worries about global warming and the rise of leaders like Donald Trump. Ukraine war, Palestinian death toll.
But he’s not without hope.
“Right now I’m trying to distinguish between sadness and despair,” he says. “I’m grieving. I don’t want to go into despair.
“I’m sad and I want to say this is the reality. We are taking a step back. I’m worried about my grandchildren. But if I give in to despair, it’s even worse. It’s unfair to the next generation.”
