October 22: He had only one purpose. The 22 year-old only had one ambition when he walked up to
a police station to throw a rock through the windscreen of a nearby patrol car. The man also had just
this same singular thought on his mind when he immediately then strolled into the police station to
turn himself in. His sole aim was ... to go to jail! To go to jail so that he could get out of the cold. To
go to jail so that he could at least get some sort of meal. You see, the man was homeless with no job
and no money. A story from the Great Depression? No, a story from four months ago! An incident in
Calcutta? No, an incident right here in Sydney at the Glebe police station. The man, Lionel Kauone,
became homeless after he had to leave the boarding house in Auburn that he was living in after he
ran out of money. Kaoune had no prior criminal record and when the clean cut man appeared in the
Parramatta Bail Court, his Legal Aid solicitor followed Kaoune's directions by asking that his client
be kept in custody.
How can something like this be happening in a country as rich as Australia? In a country where
a small population combined with gigantic land and mineral resources has produced one of the
highest average wealth levels in the entire world. Well, the reality is that this country's capitalist
system has created a society of haves and have-nots. This is a society where much of the wealth
is grabbed by a small number of extremely rich tycoons who live in obscene luxury. For example,
Australia's fifth richest man Clive Palmer owns, among other luxuries, three luxury private jets, two
helicopters, several personal homes and a few lavish boats. Earlier this year Palmer gifted his 15
year-old daughter a 30m luxury yacht worth $ 5.3 million! Meanwhile, this country's seventh richest
man John Gandel lives in a three storey, 35-room mansion in Melbourne's Toorak. Yet alongside such
opulence, most working class people do it hard while those on the lowest income levels often lead a
life of deprivation. Nowhere is this more striking than in the numbers of homeless people. At the time
of the last census in 2006, nearly 105,000 people in this country were homeless. Of these people,
over 34,000 were under the age of 18 and over 12,000 were children under the age of 12. Of the
recorded homeless, 16,375 people were actually sleeping on the streets or in parks on census night.
Others were in emergency accommodation of various types, many doing the rounds from government
crisis housing to sleeping in cars or at friends' places to being cast out into the street and then back
into emergency accommodation.
Kevin Rudd - just like John Howard before him - loves to lecture other countries about "human
rights. "Yet it is the right to shelter, alongside the right to eat, which is the most basic of rights that
should be accorded to every human being. This right does not exist in "democratic" Australia.
Often Australia's homeless are families whose breadwinners have lost their jobs. In some cases people
become homeless because a physical disability or mental illness limits their chances of employment
or social support. Many homeless people are women - often with their children - fleeing domestic
violence. Indeed, all the groups in society who face discrimination are overly represented in homeless
statistics. An Aboriginal person is almost four times as likely to be homeless as a non-indigenous
person - indigenous people make up 9% of the homeless numbers despite being only 2.5% of the
population.
In a just society, any improvement in overall national wealth would go first to the most needy. However,
in Australia the opposite has happened during the recent mining boom. Thus, in the period from the