While I always knew that there were homeless people in Sydney, I never really thought of that as poverty. When I was thinking about my topic for this Blog Action Day, I thought I would keep it close to home but I couldn’t work out if it was considered poverty. Of course it is. Where there are homeless, there is poverty. Where there are low income earners barely covering their costs, there is poverty.

I know that there are a lot of feaux homeless people in Sydney who like to beg (and make a bloody good living doing it) and I think my distrust of these individuals clouds my judgement. I am the first person to offer anything I can to people who legitimately need my help but when these beggars have a fresh pack of cigarettes and arn’t that dirty then I’m pretty sure they don’t need my help. Maybe this is why I don’t see Sydney as having levels of poverty.

Photo By Kate Geraghty

I was surprised last week to see a story about the death of a homeless man grace the pages of our prestigious Sydney Morning Herald. This man, John O’Connor was barely 45 when he died on a street in Kings Cross. It wasn’t his death that surprised me, or the fact that the Herald ran the story. It was that he died not 500 metres from where I share a building with ex Prime Ministers and NSW Premiers, on William St.

How is it, that we can have true homeless individuals dying on the streets of one of the wealthiest cities in the world? We have one of the best welfare systems on the planet and we do a lot for our less fortunate, but why were we unable to step up and actually change something? I understand that if somebody does not want to be helped then there is simply nothing you can do, but there are other cases, I’m sure, of individuals like John, who try to reach out and get nothing back.

The problem is that there is too big a gap between our high income earners and our low income earners. For instance, the ex-CEO of the company I work for, Simon Baker, was paid over $800,000 as a ‘termination payout’ for leaving REA. That is obscene. If that was his termination payout, any guesses about his salary would probably put you about $500,000 and that’s before you consider his shares in REA. Tell me, what does anybody need that amount of money for? Apparently people do need that much money. A house in Sydney sold recently for $47 million dollars. And yet, people like John O’Connor in the same city can die, alone on a street.

If you think this might be an isolated occurrence. Think again. And while these facts exist, charities like Mission Beat have to ask for a new van. In a city that has this much money, they still require more funding.

The kicker in this story is that there were about 70 people at Johns funeral. This guy had friends. He may have even had family. He was well known enough to have at least 4 separate stories about him in the Sydney Morning Herald. The system failed him and it continues to fail for every day that people are paid ridiculous money while others die of hunger and disease. And all this in Australia. I haven’t even mentioned Africa, South America, Burma and everywhere else where human life is treated so poorly.

Wake up Australia. Stop living for yourself only.

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