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 […]
March 2018
Housing in the remote and regions for Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander peoples is a national disgrace. The majority of it is an act of racism. It’s horrific shanty living in both the remote and regions of Western Australia and an even worse abomination throughout the majority of the Northern Territory. A Northern Territory housing […]
Last year in Western Australia an ill female prisoner was denied every dignity and carted naked, handcuffed, in the back of a prisoner transport vehicle to a hospital. Last year in South Australian prisons pregnant inmates were still being shackled. Why are common sense, basic dignities and courtesies denied? The prison experience, as Don Dale […]
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 […]
Bill Shorten had his time as a government minister and we saw his wares. We experienced what he was about. He sold himself as someone from within a union championing minimum standards for the worker. But he sold out this sell when he was the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Financial Services and Superannuation. […]
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 […]
Data can be anything one can want it to be. We are told there are nearly 800,000 people who identify as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islanders. Despite an increasing population of people who identify as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islanders, nationally one in 8 have been to prison. From a racialised lens that’s the world’s […]
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 […]
The Northern Territory government is sort of accepting the 227 recommendations produced by the royal commission into youth justice following the disgraces exposed to the nation by the ABC’s Four Corners. Recommendations and findings are a dime a dozen. The government is giving in-principle support to 91 of the recommendations. Whether it’s in-principle or substantive […]
After 10 years the Close the Gap report tells us that most of the gaps are not closing. Life expectancy, school attendance, literacy, and employment are still reflecting First Nations disadvantage. The entire campaign is said to be in need of “refreshing”. In fact, the reason for the failure of the Close the Gap campaign […]
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 […]
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