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Gerry Georgatos: Mega-rich Australia must get serious on homelessness

Gerry GeorgatosThe West Australian
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Australia has the money to end homelessness in all forms.
Camera IconAustralia has the money to end homelessness in all forms. Credit: Don Lindsay/The West Australian

It is never too late to make things right, as the present is only what we can influence.

The late Margaret Mead, experiential anthropologist, was asked to describe potential historical first signs towards civilisation. Mead responded a broken femur which had healed.

Any creature in the wild, of any species of the animal kingdom which breaks a leg will die. A healed femur meant someone assisted or carried to safety the injured human and maybe tended their recovery. This may have been the birth of humaneness. Mead emphasised helping someone else through difficulties is where civilisation begins.

In our contemporaneous world, the lowest quintile of income base comprises the most significant proportion of suicidality and of the suicides toll.

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According to the 2020 Global Wealth Report, on average, Australian adults are the richest in the world — average net wealth $315,000. One in 10 Australians are millionaires. Only Switzerland has a greater density of millionaires, with 15 per cent of their adult population estimated as millionaires.

My point is, how does a rich economy like Australia live alongside a street homelessness crisis, one which is increasing. Australia has one of the greatest densities of “1 per centers”. Australia has a deep treasure trove of national net wealth. If Australia, with all its wealth, does not have the moral political will to end street homelessness, then what hope is there?

The nation sells recession and socioeconomic stressors to its citizens on a routine basis even in the face of a treasure trove supported economy.

For a moment, let us assume governments are telling the truth that once again, ever so soon, we are facing tough economic times. If so, now is the time to spend on ending all forms of homelessness, on lifting people up from abject poverty, on turning around the lives of the incarcerated. If we don’t spend now on our most vulnerable, when will we?

If we spend now, triage-based, with needs-first approaches, on the have-nots, the economic burdens of disease, trauma, impoverishment and incarceration will be reduced. If we do not, fast-approaching future citizenry will inescapably endure catastrophic times.

Australia can afford to build 150,000 public and social houses within two years and end all forms of homelessness. Australia can easily afford the $80 billion it would cost to do so.

Australia is a trillionaire economy and its gross domestic product at the end of last year was $2 trillion. It can spare $80 billion to build at least 150,000 various social houses — the majority public housing rentals — ensuring everyone on the continent has a home. That’s equality. Preaching universal rights and failing to enshrine and domesticate these rights as law is beyond hypocrisy.

Australia’s GDP per capita rank is 10th in the world. Its total wealth, as of end of last year, surpassed $11 trillion — and in recent years national net wealth, the treasure trove, hovered between $11 trillion to $15 trillion.

In our own WA, less is being done for the most vulnerable than in any period in my living memory.

More than half a decade ago, when the incumbent State Government swept in, there were 14,890 applications for a public housing rental, with 2097 priority listed.

Presently, there are 19,070 applications — more than 31,000 individuals. The priority listed has increased to 4141 applicants — a 163 per cent increase.

Since Labor became Government, promising much and subsequently delivering little for our poorest West Australians, in their half-decade of power and control, public housing declined by 1,155 from 44,087 to 42,932 homes.

In recent years, the average number of deaths on the streets of homeless people in Perth alone has been at least 60.

WA is Australia’s richest jurisdiction, boasting annual budget surpluses.

Working-class Australians confronted by relative poverty are swiftly informed to expect more socio-economic stressors and sacrifice for nation-building. There will be zero economic relief.

The working poor — and the abject poor — are on the increase, with no end to this in sight.

Four per cent of Australia’s households are public and social housing rentals. Australians living in social housing are our poorest Australians after our homeless.

I have estimated suicides are up to six times more likely among social housing tenants compared to other housed Australians.

If Australia genuinely wishes to reduce its tragic suicide toll, then focus on housing the homeless, on supporting social housing families, on supporting Australians living in the lowest two quintiles of income-base. Governments which go down this path will be long remembered.

Already, one in five Australian children live below the poverty line. But two in five live proximal to some form of poverty.

In 1983, the immediate former boss of the ACTU, Bob Hawke became prime minister. The Hawke-Keating era oversaw wage accords locked in that would lead to wage stagnancies and real wages dip in the decades ahead. They oversaw the implementation of a “neo-liberal” concord. They removed domestic economic market protections, swiftly went about wild deregulations, sold off capital assets, weighed in privatisations and scaled back hard-won workers’ rights.

Successive governments have tracked along with more damage — the real cost in human lives, drudgery, miserableness, pile-high unresolvable stressors, mental unwellness, absence of hope.

Inflation is a lever. Cost of living increases protect heavy duty investors. Inflation is not just a lever. It is a tool misused, to exploit.

Since 1983, real labour costs have been reduced 24 per cent, while the net share of national income consigned to profits increased to its present record high of 32 per cent.

It is 39 years since 1983. Both the ALP and the Coalition should equally take credit for workers’ wages reduced with concomitant exponential increases of profit-share.

Of the past 39 years, both have governed 19.5 years each, equally. With mostly hidden bipartisanship they have teamed up four-fifths of the time to pass bills.

In fact, Australia is that wealthy its economy should have delivered universalisms; the elimination of street-present homelessness, an end to all forms of homelessness and housing insecurity, delivered substantive assistances in housing affordability, transformed prisons to genuinely restorative and transformational experiences, reduced the suicide toll.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics counts nearly 117,000 Australians in some form of homelessness, with more than an estimated 7000 on the streets.

I argue homelessness in all its forms has a much higher toll; excess of 300,000 Australians and closer to 15,000 sleeping on the streets.

Nearly one-fifth of Australia’s homeless are children aged 12 years and younger. You know the heart of a society by how it treats its most vulnerable. I have never forgotten the statement by a homeless person to a group of support workers: Please don’t say my needs are complex. I only need a roof and a bed.”

Nationally, I have estimated the death toll on the streets of homeless people at more than 400 and sadly maybe well past 600.

One comparator grimly stands out. If we accept the street-present homelessness at a little more than the ABS estimate, say at 8000, we will find about 5 per cent of street-homeless people die on the streets each year. Australia has a population of 25.5 million and its annual death toll is about 170,000, or 0.66 per cent.

I am reminded of Voltaire, “Everyone is guilty of all the good they did not do.”

Gerry Georgatos is founder/volunteer at the Georgatos Foundation.

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