Anne Moran: SA’s most vulnerable are being shamefully neglected
ANYONE aged over 45 living in South Australia grew up in a state without homelessness. Today, drug-affected and mentally ill people wander untreated on the streets — and it’s time authorities took this seriously, writes Anne Moran.
Opinion
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ANYONE aged over 45 living in South Australia grew up in a state without homelessness, without drug-affected and mentally ill people wandering untreated on the streets.
Our only encounter with this was when we did the young person migration to London, Europe and beyond to see the world.
We young people returned from these jaunts with wide-eyed stories told to our families of people living on the streets, sleeping under bridges and beggars everywhere.
We all enjoyed the travel experience but it reinforced to us, our parents and friends that home was definitely the best place to live and we were, indeed, the lucky country.
Now if you are under 45, you have grown up in an Adelaide where people are often seen sleeping in doorways, in the Parklands, begging on the streets and the vulnerable mentally ill and drug-affected are wandering untreated.
The under-45s probably think this is normal, that these problems are complex and hard to solve and this is the downside of modern life.
This is not true. South Australia had solved these sad social problems — until the last few decades.
We had two “state of the art” mental health hospitals, Glenside and Hillcrest, and a Housing Trust that built thousands of houses for the low income “battlers”. We had the problems solved brilliantly.
The other states regularly sent politicians over to inspect Glenside and it was hailed as the best in Australia.
Our Housing Trust was something we were all proud of and rightly so, providing housing for those who could least afford it across the state.
That’s all gone now. Hillcrest has long closed and the land sold. Glenside, under the guise of building a film industry in South Australia, has been drastically reduced and much of the land sold off for private housing.
The Housing Trust no longer exists in its previous form and most of the houses have been either demolished or sold off, with few being used for affordable housing.
The quality of a society is how well it looks after its most vulnerable. Agencies such as Hutt Street Centre and Anglicare were never meant to do it all. They are fantastic, saints in fact, but they are overwhelmed, as can be seen by the sad scenario playing out on our streets and getting worse daily.
Sixteen years this Government has been at our helm and overseen the dismantling of our state in these critical areas. We have a wonderful new stadium, a brand new hospital, a new desal plant and new trams but our vulnerable are being short-changed.
It is a great shame and we should not be prepared to turn our faces away from this crisis for one minute more.
ANNE MORAN IS A LONG-TERM ADELAIDE CITY COUNCILLOR
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