It’s long overdue – an inquiry into some of what’s dished out as public housing. I’ve seen hundreds of families housed into the most appalling conditions. Nationwide, the majority of remote public housing is a disgrace, third-world-akin hovels. But in the urban masses too there are hovels offered up as homes to desperate families. Some […]
Social Policy – Page 2
Australia is facing homelessness and poverty levels the likes it has never known and nor is prepared to admit. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) there are 110,000 homeless Australians. That’s how many they’ve identified. However there are 300,000 homeless Australians. More than 100,000 are children. We’ve long identified that nearly one in […]
Homelessness can be ended but the will to do so is not a universal one. In the world’s 12th biggest economy, Australia, the number of older women who are homeless has doubled in the past four years. Australia has among the world’s highest median wages, argues itself as a global social justice warrior but the […]
I have written often about the discrimination accorded to people with disabilities and health conditions in our Migration system. In addition to the prohibition in the Act in relation to these applicants for residency visas, we also have a “health waiver” that is assessed by the Commonwealth Medical Officer (CMO). It is this process of […]
By Lavanya Rathnam Edward Snowden, one of the most famous whistleblowers of our times, brought to light the many surveillance programs and other snooping activities of the U.S. government. This former intelligence officer revealed top secret documents to Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian and Laura Poitras, a freelance journalist, in May 2013 at a hotel […]
Over the last three years, in my capacity as President of the National Ethnic Disability Alliance I have almost become inured to anger when I come across another instance of discrimination against people with disability (PWD) in our immigration system. However, the pain does not stop. Irrespective of the number of times I have seen […]
“If austerity were tested like a medication in a clinical trial, it would have been stopped long ago, given its deadly side effects…. One need not be an economic ideologue – we certainly aren’t – to recognize that the price of austerity can be calculated in human lives.” David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu,“The body economic: […]
Writing in the ABC Online magazine The Drum, John Mendoza has described the Abbott/Turnbull Government’s recently announced mental health reform package as ”the most transformative reform package in a generation”. Mendoza, who was previously chair of the National Advisory Council on Mental Health and CEO of the Mental Health Council of Australia, is a respected figure in […]
‘What I am basically saying is that welfare must become a good deal for investors, for private investors. We have to make it a good deal for the returns to be there, to attract the level of capital that will be necessary in addition to the significant injection of capital and resources that is already […]
Australian society is failing its youth and setting itself up for economic disaster. The persistent rise in youth unemployment will reverberate across the economy for decades to come, potentially reducing productivity and limiting creativity and innovation. Callum Pickering “It’s a disaster for our young people who want to work but are getting locked out of […]
General News
- March 9, 2021
Australia’s governments must end health discrimination in its prisons. An incarcerated child must not be a second-class citizen. Nor any adult. We must ask, why are our governments dishing the vulnerable jailed, second-class healthcare? When evaluating the nation’s carceral system, we are […]
- February 2, 2021
When will the cries of the homeless be heard? Is there some sort of grotesque caste system in Western Australia? The anti-humanism is a brutal public spectacle. On the last day of January, the Western Australian Government actuated five days […]
- December 3, 2020
West Australia is the nation’s backwater. It is the mother of injustices, inequalities and the draconian. West Australia and the Northern Territory leave the have-nots that far behind, for many their lot appears irreparable. If there is a Mason-Dixon line […]
- September 22, 2020
There are many faces to homelessness. A 51-year-old woman walked into my Perth office. She has lived thirteen consecutive years street-homeless. Not long ago, she spent eighteen months sleeping her nights in the same park. She is weary, harrowed by […]
- September 3, 2020
Often beleaguered by international aid work I have lifelong been involved in; the increasing unmet needs, the mongrel injustices, I have argued the horrendous lie of our generation is that poverty is being reduced around the world. There are countries […]
- March 10, 2020
Gerry Georgatos – In 2014, I disaggregated to the Kimberley’s First Nations peoples, the nation’s highest suicide rate, one of the world’s highest, at over 70 suicides per 100,000 population (First Nations), thereabouts seven times the national rate. Fortunately, although […]
- February 18, 2020
Gerry Georgatos – More than 51 months ago I wrote an article on the imperatives of forgiveness and redemption. This remains true. We journey together in one form or another, we can either salt the earth or jag the road, […]
- January 29, 2020
By Gerry Georgatos – Trae lost his eleven-year-old brother to suicide. Nine months later he lost his mother to suicide. Trae was the last to see his brother. Half an hour later he went looking for his little brother. In the […]
- January 21, 2020
Gerry Georgatos – Children as young as 9 years have been lost to suicide, three in fact in recent years. Australians should ask, why? Proportionally, more children aged 14 years and less have been lost so far this century compared […]
- December 10, 2019
Gerry Georgatos – A mother suicides, a father suicides, their child was a suicide. Not once has this occurred but untold times. Over the years I have warned of mothers and fathers that would be near certain lost to suicide […]
Join us on