Urgent need to address a surge in family violence-fuelled homelessness
A new report reveals a growing crisis of women and children fleeing domestic and family violence into homelessness prompting calls for an urgent funding package to provide pathways to safe housing.
Homelessness Australia’s Homelessness and domestic and family violence: State of Response Report for International Women’s Day analyses Australian Institute of Health and Welfare data to find 45 per cent of women and girls seeking homelessness assistance do so due to family and domestic violence.
It finds that over the last decade:
- the number of women and children sleeping rough or in a car at the end of homelessness support more than doubled, from 1,041 to 2,428
- the number of women and children couch surfing at the end of support more than doubled from 3,465 to 7,214.
And in the past year alone, the number of women and children sleeping rough or in a car after receiving homelessness support increased by 23%.
The report notes that lack of access to safe housing prevents many women from escaping violence and pushes women back to violent homes. The last Personal Safety Survey revealed that more than 20,000 women experiencing violence wanted to leave but were unable to because of a lack of money or financial support, and more than 13,000 women said lack of money or having nowhere to go was the reason they returned to violence.
Homelessness Australia proposes the Federal Government deliver a suite of measures to address the problem in the imminent National Housing and Homelessness Agreement, including increasing homelessness support, investing more in Safe at Home programs, increasing Commonwealth Rent Assistance (CRA) and delivering more social housing.
Kate Colvin, CEO of Homelessness Australia, said: “Thousands of Australian women are faced with an impossible choice – return to a violent home or confront homelessness. This is not a decision anyone should be forced to make, yet it’s happening more and more.
“Pathways to safe housing are the missing piece in the Government’s response to family violence, but can be addressed in the soon to be released five-year National Housing and Homelessness Agreement.
“This International Women’s Day it would be refreshing to see real action to fix a desperate, parlous situation that puts the lives and safety of too many women and girls at risk.
“Australia is a wealthy, sophisticated nation. We can and must do better.”
Jocelyn Bignold OAM, CEO of McAuley Community Services for Women said: “Every day we work with women who have suffered trauma in a violent relationship who then suffer more when they become trapped in homelessness. With the right early intervention supports many women would never become homeless and could safely remain in their home.”
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Sadly, many words, ultimately meaningless, will be spoken by politicians when it looks good then they usually back off and distract when pressed for solutions.
Time to return to the policy of super funds investing in residential real estate for “rent to buy” by allowing these investments tax breaks.
Why should the high income earners have negative gearing to legally minimise tax paid and corporations rarely pay any tax by “working the system”.
Indeed the Oz tax system is an old mouldy manky alphabet soup of exceptions and out-clauses and loopholes that ordinary folk (and small business) would need, at high cost, a tax lawyer and accountant to navigate. It is ludicrous and promotes tax evasion, concealment of wealth and assets. Combined with the Foreign Accruals legislation and the innumerable state-based quasi taxes via stamp duties, payroll taxes and other levies further thickens the soup, and engender jurisdiction jumping.
It lacks reasoned universality, and rather has been cobbled together over the years as various sectional interests have lobbied parliamentarians. It is a hugely wasteful institution of guile and red tape that has given rise to the imbroglio of the ‘Big 4+’ , the Tax Practitioner’s Board and the ATO itself, and politicians (and their departments) in a virtually impenetrable darkness of legal obscurantism. Jobs for ‘the boys’, servitude to the elite, deals for the mega-wealthy individuals and corporations and multi-nationals.
There have in the past been innumerable ‘green papers’ and even a few ‘white papers’ and ‘economic reviews’ ooze out of Canberra, but no government, even Whitlam’s nor Hawke / Keating’s reform gov’ts have had the guts to take them on. And that reticence certainly has much to do with the risk associated with our electoral cycles and whims of the season, the incumbents and aspirants.
So the entire taxation process remains as a miasma being variously being farted and puffed at in an ad hoc manner.
Since the notion of globalization and the great con of ‘privatization’, there has been an inevitable accelerated international commercialization of land-grabs and great deceptions like the GFC, governments have been caught completely flat-footed to the extent that sovereign power became almost meaningless, and beholden to the privateers and mega-merchant class. At the time of the ‘privatizations’, taxation systems across the world should have been redrawn root and branch. They weren’t, and mere mortals were left wondering why economies across the globe sere stagnating – because that’s the additional leverage the ‘privateers’ wanted.
So it lingers on, and now that the climate change abatement imperative is upon us, ‘western democratic’ suicide capitalism countries don’t have sovereign power nor wealth to make the transitions, and the same applies to the energy / water infrastructure and the housing / homelessness situation.
Now that the ‘privateer’ juggernaught has countries by the short and curlies, it’s a mind-blowingly complex and tenuous process to rein in their wild horses.
Oz is having a good go at it, in the face of substantial push-back by the privateers, the political right, the msm, and all their feckless flunkies, stacking on with the funds and lunacy of the fossil-fuelers and mega-evangelists.
I fear it’s going to get worse before it gets better. And horrendously, as history records, women and girls will suffer first and most, therefore the issues foist upon them should be attended to first, front and centre.