This is the learning curve for me – this event is so clearly an emergency that everyone has put the bush-fire mission ahead of their own agendas. We understand that peacetime rules don’t apply in this situation. Even our own schedules have been pushed aside – no unnecessary meetings – no long coffees or chats… we have an important work to do right now.
It got me thinking about the 2000 young people that sleep homeless every night in Australia – or about the tens of thousands foster kids without a decent home OR about the Asylum seekers who have fled similar disasters (or worse) and have been left to fend for themselves… human-trafficking survivors and those still suffering – I was thinking perhaps we could declare some other emergencies – organize ourselves so we are fixed and unified in mission and do it again.
The quote above highlights a point that’s worth considering. The correlation between our 2000 young homeless every night and the bushfire survivors who have lost their homes is too stark to easily ignore. We (quite fairly) consider the bushfire survivors to be in urgent need of help because they have had no choice in the dramatic nature of their slide into homelessness. And somewhere deep down, we want to believe that it’s the choices others have made that means that I’m doing fine while someone else is homeless.
Imagine what could be accomplished if government and the community took on Danielle’s suggestion above, and declared human trafficking, homelessness and severe poverty to be national emergencies of the same magnitude. There is even precedent – the former Howard Government declared that the level of child abuse in indigenous communities in the Northern Territory was an emergency, and while I’d suggest that the implementation of their “intervention” was ill-considered to the point of just about being racist – the point is that this could actually happen. These causes are emergencies. It’s certainly easier to ignore, but a little bit of urgency could be an amazing thing.
I’ve been thinking the same things Geoff.
Maybe it’s because we can empathise with the bushfire victims whereas the average Aussie can’t empathise with the homeless, refugee etc.
But these are issues that are happening each and every day, rather than a once off event.
See, I’m not sure I’d completely agree. I think that when the plight of the homeless is put to members of the broader community, they generally do feel sympathetic. Perhaps not as sympathetic as they would towards bushfire victims, but the feeling is usually there. I think the big thing is that there’s a sense of hopelessness about the whole thing, that we’ve tried things and failed. I seriously think that if some urgency was injected – however you do that – we could make an enormous difference.