Australia is no longer the home of the 'fair go', says report

Extract from The Guardian

Country is less fair, less safe and has more people in prison than comparable nations, says Community Council of Australia

A man begging in Sydney. The mantra of budget repair has become harmful because it promotes individual economic gain at the cost of a resilient society, the report says. Photograph: William West/AFP/Getty Images

Calla Wahlquist

@callapilla

Thursday 27 October 2016 08.12 AEDT 

A report by the Community Council of Australia has shattered perceptions that Australia is a country of the “fair go”, finding it is less fair, less safe, and with a higher incarceration rate than comparable OECD nations.

The Australia We Want report was released on Thursday before a National Press Club address by the council’s chairman and World Vision Australia’s chief executive, Tim Costello. It paints a damning picture of a society characterised by rising inequality, rising suicide rates and above-average carbon emissions.

The report’s author, the Community Council of Australia’s chief executive, David Crosbie, said he was “shocked” that Australia rated so poorly against other developed countries.

The national incarceration rate increased by 6% to 196 people for every 100,000 in 2015, higher than any country in western Europe. In the Northern Territory imprisonment rates are four times the national average, at 885 for every 100,000, and higher than the rate of imprisonment in the US.

The Indigenous incarceration rate was 15 times the national rate, at 2,253 for every 100,000 in 2015.

“Incarceration rates are like the canary in the coalmine, they tell you how your most vulnerable are being treated,” Crosbie told Guardian Australia.

He said it was disingenuous to suggest imprisonment rate was connected to crime, because only 25% of prisoners had been convicted of a violent offence. In 2015 almost 10,000 prisoners had not been convicted at all and were on remand awaiting court dates.

“The incarceration rates are entirely a product of policy we implemented and enacted,” he said. “They are not an accident.”

Crosbie compared the report to a credit rating delivered by Standard & Poor’s which sought to take a picture of the health of the economy by considering a range of interconnected indicators.

It set a baseline for community organisations to work against in order to enact what a group of 60 not-for-profit organisations set as the core values of Australian society.

“I think if we start saying we believe these things … then we need to work to make sure that we achieve them,” he said.

Crosbie suggested the mantra of “budget repair” had become harmful to the overall health of Australian society because it promoted and rewarded individual economic gain at the cost of a connected, resilient society.

Suicide rates in Victoria, the Northern Territory and South Australia increased by more than 20% last year, which Crosbie said should be considered a “crisis”. “If 300 extra people had been killed by terrorism we would do what it took, whatever it cost, to stop it,” he said.

The national suicide rate is 12 deaths for every 100,000 people, or 7.8 deaths by suicide a day.

But the indicator Crosbie was most surprised by was perceptions of safety: only 48% of Australian women said they felt safe walking alone at night, significantly lower than the OECD average of 60.6%.

Australian men, in comparison, felt safer than the OECD average, with 76% reporting they felt safe at night.

Crosbie said Australians had traditionally expected government to deliver change in social policy areas but “that has been a bit lost over the last six years because the capacity of government to fix things has been lost due to instability”.

“I think our faith in the ability of government to deliver a substantial agenda and make a difference over time has been significantly damaged,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of faith that if the government said it wanted to reduce suicide rates that it would go about it in a way that would actually reduce suicide rates.”

Costello said the report was an opportunity to “imagine an Australia where incarceration rates are actually falling, where the suicide rate is less than the road toll and where your postcode doesn’t define your chance of getting an education or a job”.

He called on businesses, individuals and not-for-profit organisations to be “more than passengers in an economy,” saying: “We must build the Australia we want.”