July 2022 Guest speaker, John Falzon, on Homelessness

Homelessness in Albanese’s Australia

Dr John Falzon is well known, in particular for his role as national CEO of St Vincent de Paul from 2006 to 2018. He is a social justice advocate and a member of the Australian Services Union. A man of many talents; on this occasion he joined us to speak about the housing crisis. We also took the opportunity to discuss with him the election outcome.

photo: percapita.org.au

Homelessness is a topic which seems to confound the best and brightest of our policy makers and politicians. Here we post a link to John’s article from January this year, in Eureka Street online, “Homelessness is caused not by poverty but by wealth“.

…You can’t keep society going without working people. We’ve noticed that the people we tend to refer to as ‘essential’ are often actually amongst the lowest paid and the most insecurely employed. We’ve noticed that you can’t do public health if you haven’t ensured that people have safe housing. And that if we can’t expect someone who has just lost their job due to the pandemic to live below the poverty line on JobSeeker, then how can we expect anyone else to?

August 2016 Guest Speaker, John Falzon

john_falzon.jpegOur August guest speaker was John Falzon, the CEO of St Vincent de Paul, who spoke on Poverty. John Falzon has written and spoken widely on the structural causes of marginalisation and inequality in this country and is an advocate in campaigns for a fairer society.

John is a passionate supporter of the unemployed in a society where the market has failed but they are being blamed. The unemployed and the homeless are blamed for the collapse of the job market where whole industries have gone overseas, hours have fallen, and                      Photo: vinnies.org.au
casualisation continues to grow. They are blamed for being unable to get into the housing market, when this has become an arena for wealthy people to play in.