Cornflower:

...To your list of country towns, add the entirety of Australia: Crime is desperation. Desperation wrought from social abandonment. People (conveniently branded as criminals once abandoned), demonstrate exclusion in many ways, and crime becomes one of the signals of racism and exclusion.

...Ready yourselves for the next “Nueva” crime wave from social abandonment of the homeless. Build the walls of your “gated” suburbs higher. Ready yourselves for expanding private prisons, and costs associated, added to your taxes.

...Governments are increasingly abandoning the marginalised (Homeless, Aboriginals, Boatpeople, mentally ill, disabled, and added to the list on the lesser end of the scale, families with children and pets. et-al) to flounder in a sea of private enterprise (NGO’s( including real estate “Agents”)) discrimination.

...With an insidious stealth, successive Governments deliberately distance themselves from the pain of its citizenry, with all ears rotated forward to those that really matter in society, like themselves, the comfortable (but ever decreasing) middle class and well housed: Who bleat their bigotry through venues such as OLO (thankfully, where they may be challenged), and fall in line with media bias; not even with displays of originality of thought, but lazily following historic racist mantras, rhetoric from a long dead past of a disgraceful thread of Australian history, where all not “white” was scum. I say nothing has changed

diver dan,

There are thousands of migrants who came from the most wretched of circumstances. Yet they do not choose to walk past the soap, destroy their shelter, or discourage their children from going to school.

There is a noticeable split in indigenous Australia, where some choose victimhood and act accordingly, refusing to take any responsibility for their choices, while others are getting on with their education and the opportunities they are given. However the same can be said of the remainder of the population where lateral thinking and support are necessary to break the welfare dependence tradition in some families. Talk with police and they will tell you that it is the same street addresses that occupy most of their time and are the source of 'domestics' (family violence) calls.

The social degradation of country towns is a shame and it is not because of low incomes, that was always the case with the seasonal farm work available. It is also why there used to be home veggie gardens, house cows/goats for milk for growing children and underground mutton simmering on the stove.

And of course we are both guilty of overlooking the evils of Alcohol in society “generally”. Grog does not carry on the label, “blackfella” anymore than “whitefella”.

[Deleted for abuse.]

I get the impression that the "shallow understanding" might lie more with some of the advocates at least as much as with the "deeply angry" commentators.

Those who've got into the industry because of their views on society and who are unable to take a different look at the issue.

Most of us will only have annecdotal evidence to go on, the small number of people we know personally who live in public housing, media reports and the experiences of other friends. For many the picture is not uniform but it's quite different to the one that many of the public housing advocates present.

We need way's of helping the genuinely needy and at the same time of bring change in those along for the ride and of breaking cycles of intergenational welfare depence in some families.

A more honest approach to the issue and less dismisal of the concerns of those who pay for all this by the industry might be a start.

R0bert

Hmm, it's strange that a topic about online commentators carrying prejudices about public housing would erupt into a conversation that proves the author right.

Cornflower
"
There are thousands of migrants who came from the most wretched of circumstances. Yet they do not choose to walk past the soap, destroy their shelter, or discourage their children from going to school."

Difference is these people come from an environment where these things didn't exist, all the way to Australia specifically because they wanted TO experience these things.

For Aboriginal Australians, up until very recently most parents were forced to attend schools where they were treated very poorly and only remember being offered zero opportunities afterwards;
This they carried with them, and regardless of the state of today, is what they tell their kids and grandkids- preventing the cycle from breaking.

Let's face it, when you grow up in a family wallowing in externally-applied social stigma for most of its life, and you ask them about their life and they tell you about their school life, you're not exactly going to be motivated to experience those things next.