There are 180,000 Australian families on the public housing lists. The majority will never be housed. A significant proportion will lose family members to the street present homelessness, to juvenile detention centres, to the prisons and to unnatural deaths including suicide. Our governments can afford to build homes for every family on the waiting lists […]
Social Policy – Page 2
Homelessness is actually 300,000 high and not only 116,000 homeless as according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. But what many of us have been barking about for years are both the number and the proportion of children aged 12 years and less who are homeless. Even according to the ABS figures there are 20,000 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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