Why couldn't Dan get a job?

I always wondered why Candy was usually the breadwinner between the two, until the very end when he finally was able to pull his weight. Assuming that this story spans at least a few years, it makes me wonder what Dan was doing all that time while Candy was making money as a hooker. Did he write poetry? Was he trying to publish? Candy had excused Dan multiple times as being "hopeless," but I never understood what that meant in terms of Dan being unable to make money. Did Dan have some kind of anti-capitalist attitude? Perhaps it was the economy in Australia back then?