Please, please can you get it past those kind hearts that the people in your hotels and on the beaches are not poor. Out of all the tourists coming to Bali I only hear Australians talk about gifts and tips and pressies for staff children etc etc. And the locals know it and they milk you, which saddens me that Australia are targeted just as they are known to be the easiest to fool.
Sorry, I am having a lot of vents lately as it's getting to the stage where it's so obvious that they are ripping some of you off blind and make fools of you but you don't all see it.
Minimum wages in 2012 for the Badung regency is 1.295 mil and if you work at any any hotel or restaurant with service you get double that, sometimes triple in peak season. That goes a long long long way here. Stop comparing 1 rupiah to $1.
The women doing massages on the beach can earn up to 650,000IDR per day in peak season. I know some of you even use the same masseuses on the beach over and over again and bring their children gifts and give them money for schooling etc. You bring them old clothes (which now they have started selling). I sit down and talk with some of these ladies when they return to the village for a ceremony (we have 7 ladies working outside the Legian Beach Hotel and 5 working the end of Double 6 from our village). They can't read or write themselves and they did need the help 10 years ago to get their kids to school, but not now. They now live in extremely nice houses and think you are all fools and they don't really appreciate it at all, but it is expected now, they say they could even text "their friend in Australia" and ask for money and it would come.
Sorry, but you can give what ever you want to who ever you want but please understand that they are not poor (in relative terms to the cost of living in Australia I would say many are better off than Australians).
One of the richest woman I know wears an old tracksuit, holes in her t-shirt, a floppy hat and has been doing massages on the beach outside the Legian Beach Hotel for 30 years. She's a big fat woman (which gives it a away, in Bali if you are fat it is considered you are wealthy).
It's time to start seeing Bali as a new Bali, the Opportunist Balinese in tourism are not the Balinese of the past. The Desperation you see in their eyes now-days is not from poverty but a new era, "debt", paying off the flat screen TV, the car payments, building a second story on the house etc etc, they love credit and they haven't been taught the dangers of it yet.