Are some homeless people being denied access to affordable housing in Australia also?

It would be foolish in today's political environment - and with society seemingly drifting mindlessly further to the right each decade - to reject the propostion outright that this would not be occurring somewhere in Australia today.......

The Guardian, 17 September 2019:

Homeless people are being denied access to affordable housing because social landlords are routinely excluding prospective tenants who are deemed too poor or vulnerable to pay the rent, a study has revealed.

Research by the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) found that “screening out” of homeless applicants nominated for newly available lets was widespread, as housing associations and local authorities increasingly ration their shrinking stocks of social homes.

In many cases nominees were refused a home because of the likelihood they would accrue major rent arrears after moving on to universal credit, because of the probability they would be hit by the bedroom tax or because the benefit cap had made them a financial risk.

Others were rejected after social landlords identified they had unmet mental health or addiction problems, often because of cuts to local NHS and housing support services. Individuals with unmet support needs were regarded as “too high a risk to tenancy sustainment”, the CIH said.

Homeless people were at risk of being caught in a “catch-22 scenario”, the CIH said, with some landlords’ letting practices creating a “perverse situation where the reasons why people may need access to social homes the most can often become barriers to accessing them”.

Some housing associations demanded that prospective tenants who would be moving on to universal credit pay a month’s rent up front, an impossible requirement for many homeless people. Landlords have been badly hit by rent arrears caused by tenants’ five-week wait for a first universal credit payment.

Faye Greaves, the CIH policy and practice officer, who wrote the report, said: “For decades, we have failed to build enough homes, and our welfare safety net is no longer fit for purpose. More and more people are turning to local authorities and housing associations for help to access social housing.

“But that leaves housing providers having to find a balance between people in acute need, local priorities and their need to develop sustainable tenancies. What we found is that relying solely on processes can end up having the opposite effect to that intended.”

It called on ministers to launch a major social housing building programme and scrap right to buy. There has been a net loss of 165,000 social homes in England since 2012, the CIH estimates. It adds that 90,000 of the 340,000 new homes needed every year should be set at social rent. In 2017-18 only 6,434 homes were built for social rent.

The findings will concern critics who believe some housing associations are becoming increasingly estranged from their charitable mission to house homeless people. Many were set up in the late 1960s on a wave of public outrage over growing homelessness typified by the famous BBC drama Cathy Come Home.

Jon Sparkes, the chief executive of Crisis, called for proper scrutiny of social landlords’ letting practices: “Having a safe and stable home is a human need, and this report paints a sorry picture of the difficulties that people who are homeless, or who are at risk of becoming homeless, face in accessing this basic right.”

Pre-tenancy screening is causing tension between housing associations, which want to minimise the damage to their balance sheet of taking on tenants at risk of rent arrears, and councils, which want to exercise their right to nominate social tenancies to reduce growing numbers of homeless people on their books.

The research did not ask what happens to homeless people who are refused social tenancies but the assumption is that most will continue to be housed in high-cost and often unsuitable temporary accommodation in the private sector. Local authorities in England spend nearly £1bn a year on temporary accommodation.

In recent years cuts to government grant funding have meant housing associations have adopted more commercial, profit-orientated approaches, resulting in some being accused of concentrating on building homes for private sale and “affordable rent” at the expense of the people they were set up to help.

The National Housing Federation, which represents housing associations, said its members were committed to providing homes for those most in need and on the lowest incomes but action was needed to reverse the “dire shortage of social rented housing caused by decades of underinvestment”.

David Bogle of Homes for Cathy, a group of housing associations dedicated to restoring the sector’s commitment to ending homelessness, welcomed the report. “Housing associations and local authorities need to be given additional support to develop new social homes and to allocate those homes to those who are homeless and in greatest need.”......

Report: CIH: put people before process when allocating social housing, 17/09/2019

Thought of the Week

If you combine photos of Australian political players Joyce, Abbott, Dutton and McCormack in a soup pan you have the makings of a simple borscht - beetroot, onion, potato and dill. [Anon]

Quote of the Week

"NSW is experiencing one of the most severe droughts on record, with the Central West, Far West and North West regions the worst affected to date. There have been extreme low inflows (the amount of water entering the river and its storages) – the past six months have seen the lowest recorded inflows in history. ..... Without imminent inflows, the lack of water will continue to impact water quality and the riverine environment, while curtailing agricultural production."  [WaterNSW, Regional Drought Information, August 2019]

At last, a class action to be mounted against Morrison Government's error-prone 'robodebt'

If any of the following applies to you and you are considering joining this class action challenge on behalf of Centrelink clients who were served with a debt notice, the following are first contact details for the law firm which may act for you if you are eligible:

Gordon Legal
Ph: 1300 55 50 16

Informaton at https://gordonlegal.com.au/robodebt-class-action/ Online contact form at https://gordonlegal.com.au/contact

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Guardian, 17 September 2019:

Gordon Legal has put out its official statement on the class action: 

"The law firm will challenge, on behalf of affected persons, the government’s use of a flawed calculation system by Centrelink to unlawfully take back tens of millions of dollars from many thousands of Centrelink recipients, including pensioners. 

The money for pensioners, carers, widows, students, farmers and unemployed people was taken from them due to a one-size-fits-all online compliance system. 

The robodebt scheme has been in place since mid-2016, its legality was first raised with us by the new shadow minister for government services, Bill Shorten. 

The basis for the challenge is that that the federal government financially benefited when it wrongfully took and banked money that legitimately belonged to recipients. 

Gordon Legal Senior Partner Peter Gordon says ‘investigations reveal between two to three hundred million dollars have been wrongly taken from people, and making it even worse was many were hit with penalties of 10% on those amounts.’ 

‘These people are the least able groups to afford the heavy-handed actions which are based on a system that used ATO averages that didn’t take into account individual circumstances.’ 

‘The unfair and incorrect assumptions had a devastating financial impact on people’s lives. The emotional distress for people who have done nothing wrong has been high.’ 

‘The robodebt system put debt collectors onto innocent people to chase unlawful debts.’ 

‘They have been unfairly financially disadvantaged and must be repaid with interest, penalties dropped and damages paid.’ 

‘The amounts owed will vary from case to case but the average repayments could be a few thousand dollars which is vital from a financial and wellbeing perspective for these people who are least able to afford it.’

Peter Gordon says ‘The people in this class action were not gaming the system. They had honest claims to payments and allowances that Robodebt wrongly assessed, penalised and pursued with harsh consequences.’ 

‘If you have been unfairly affected by Robodebt, you should register your details on the Gordon Legal website and we will be in touch.’ 

Gordon Legal considers a class action is likely to be the best way to deliver redress for people unfairly impacted by Robodebt." [my yellow highlighting]

Peter Gordon: 

"The class action element of the claim is reasonably straightforward. What is innovative about this is to bring a claim against the government for damages for unjust enrichment that will require the high court to recognise legal principles, which I hardly recognised in other common law countries, particularly the United Kingdom. It may break new ground. We think there … is a strong legal basis for it. 

In order for a class action to proceed, either in a state court or the federal jurisdiction, you need to demonstrate that there appear to be several more people who have claims with similar or the same common issues in the fact of law, and there are clearly a large number of people who have similar issues of fact and of law. 

So the question of its status as a class action is not particularly controversial. Under class-action law, not every case needs to be exactly the same. They only have to be roughly similar. Not every case needs to be bound to succeed. You simply need to demonstrate that there are cases that have similar issues that the court can resolve for the benefit of everybody. 

Everyone who believes they are aggrieved is entitled to bring their own actions, whether they are in the ART or as appropriately advised. We are working with the legal aid agencies, but it doesn’t take, I think, a lot of consideration of what has happened to understand that if a template approach has been applied across 800,000 people, and there are admittedly, on the part of the government, 150,000 errors that have been made, that’s a very large number of mistakes which have been made. If they’ve been made, there is a limit to the ability of any court system and indeed bureaucracy to take them off one by one. 

We think it’s appropriate that if there are common issues that have been got wrong by the Commonwealth, that they be addressed in a way that gives everyone release, not just those who are able to access lawyers and legal aid or have the wherewithal all the records to be able to do it themselves."

Bill Shorten: 

" Let’s be clear, we’ve asked the government to fix this, but they’ve got it wrong. If the government through parliament won’t fix the problem, I think giving justice to victims through class action is a legitimate political approach to take. 

Question: Should the program then in your view be suspended while this class action is even being looked at? 

That would be smart for them to suspend it. The question you have to ask is why is the government looking at a blanket scheme looking at annual wages data against people getting fortnightly payments? 

They are hoping they can shake down people into paying up. This is a government building their government position based on this faulty, immoral and quite possibly illegal scheme, but they should suspend it and rule out extending it to anyone else, and in fact they should revisit their own files and perhaps sit down and work out why this is wrong and stop it. 

The government keeps reaching for blaming Labor pre-2013. Robodebt, this online compliance system, was introduced by the current government. 

The current government announced compliance campaigns in 2015, 2016, and they started introducing robodebt, their use of an algorithm to data match. 

It was born under this government and the pathology of robodebt is sick, it has caused countless harm. I give a shoutout to the media, you’ve all covered the problems of robodebt, but at what point in Australia do you say once you’ve seen individual case after individual case it is called a pattern, and the pattern shows robodebt is immoral itself. 

What we and Gordon Legal is going to do is testing the legal foundations of robodebt, because my own research in the last couple of months has led me to believe it is almost certainly illegal and I just have to do research through the stories you’ve covered to say there is a sickness at the heart of robodebt which needs to be cured."

Publishing video footage of animal cruelty could now incur penalties of up to one year in an Australian prison.

The Northern Star, 16 September 2019, p.6:

Animal rights charity Aussie Farms have slammed the passing of a new ‘ag-gag’ law that introduces a criminal charge for “inciting trespass onto agricultural land”.

Several Northern Rivers agricultural businesses were targeted, including Northern Co-operative Meat Company, when Aussie Farms published a map online and called for activists to collect and upload evidence of animal abuse.

But the new law includes simply publishing footage of animal cruelty, or publishing a map of factory farms and slaughterhouses where such cruelty is known to occur, regardless of whether incitement to trespass was intended by the publisher, and regardless of whether the cruelty was legal or illegal.

It follows years of covertly-obtained footage being broadcast to the public by Aussie Farms and other animal protection organisations, revealing widespread practices such as the use of gas chambers in pig slaughterhouses, the live shredding of male baby chicks in the egg industry, and most recently, the slaughter of male baby goats at a high profile Victorian dairy farm.

Publishing such footage now could incur penalties of up to one year in prison.

Executive director Chris Delforce said “consumers had a right to know about the cruelty occurring ... within Australian animal agriculture” and the new law was “designed to limit the public’s ability to see what’s happening inside farms and slaughterhouses”......

On 12 September 2019 the Australian House of Representatives and the Senate passed the Criminal Code Amendment (Agricultural Protection) Bill 2019.

It passed the lower house by a majority of just 8 votes, with Labor, Independent, Greens and Center Alliance MPs voting against the bill becoming law.

https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Chamber_documents/HoR/Divisions/details?id=732

Australian PM Scott 'Liar from the Shire' Morrison caught manipulating and misleading the electorate yet again - this time over the cashless welfare card

"In these trials, we have seen 48% of drug takers using fewer drugs, 41% of drinkers drinking less, and 48% of gamblers gambling less." [Liberal Party of Australia, Our Plan, April 2019]

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the Liberal Party are living up to their reputations as a politician and party who rarely speak the truth.

One social media user called Morrison out over his misuse of statistics, as he pushes forward with his plan to control and penalise all wefare recipients by restricting access to Centrelink cash transfer payments (pensions, benefits, allowances etc) by placing these payments on the Indue Limited Cashless Debit Card.

Turns out that hidden in his misuse of statistics is the fact that of those Ceduna and Kununurra cashless debit card trial participants surveyed in 2017 only est. 8 people self-reported a reduction in the use of alcohol.

[https://twitter.com/AusGovSlave/status/1173505356317655041]

The 2017 final trial evaluation report itself notes that there was a risk that participants may only have reported lower alcohol consumption, illicit drug use or gambling because they believed that: a) to claim a reduction in use was the more socially acceptable answer; and/or b) this is what the questioner wanted to hear.

It noted that some existing data sets relied on were for broader areas than the trial sites and could not be reliably narrowed to those sites and, that there was no adequate time series data available to perform robust preTrial and post-Trial comparisons.

The final report also notes that survey did not necessarily gain a statistically representative random sample of the underlying population due to unequal selection probabilities.