Pelican "men make up the large proportion of homelessness - mainly due to alcohol or other mental illness" Ah, like a true feminist, you blame the victim. Don't women suffer from addictions and mental illness too?

Pelican "women do find themselves literally on the streets as well even if they are not in sufficient numbers to satisfy you." My point is that there is discrimination - there is gender-based funding that is available for women, but not men. Certainly I don't want more women homeless, but I want the money that is rorted by false claims of violence to be re-directed to save those truely homeless and on the street, who are nearly entirely men.

I want fairness.

"Ah, like a true feminist, you blame the victim..."

How? You should be ashamed of yourself for pushing an anti-woman agenda on a thread about homelessness.

As for fairness, I don't really think that is what you want at all, otherwise you would recognise the conditions that result in homelessness and not see them as an opportunity to misrepresent the cause of homelessness for men as a 'blaming the victim' stance.

You are the one that put forward the statistics that men make up the larger portion of homelessness.

Sheesh...instead of asking why there are more men on the street and working towards a solution you don't really give a toss.

Let's go back to Burdekin...he spoke the truth when he said that the seriously mentally ill (SMI) live a very difficult life; he added that without decent and safe housing, such a life becomes almost impossible to live.

A short time after that, all of our stand-alone hospitals for the mentally ill are destroyed; deinstitutionalization begins. It is never finished, and those SMI who manage to survive that unhousing swell the ranks of the homeless and fill thousands of male and female prison cells.

Rudd, in his paper on homelessness, spoke of the possibility of not allowing a seriously mentally ill person to be discharged from hospital onto the street. This is a minimal, responsible action. The Mental Health Council of Australia wrote 'Home Truths' in reply to Rudd's paper, citing that statement as of crucial importance in saving lives of seriously ill people. After all, we do not discharge seriously ill cardiac or cancer patients onto the street.

We must begin somewhere, and to legislate that seriously mentally ill patients may not be discharged onto the streets will force governments to fund the social housing AND support which the
seriously mentally ill have been denied for decades.