Yesterday, Wesley Mission CEO Rev Stu Cameron interviewed our Chair, Rob Stokes and Foodbank NSW & ACT CEO, John Robertson. Dubbed the ‘exes’, despite long careers on opposite sides of politics, they strongly agreed upon the need for collective action to address growing inequities.
John Robertson highlighted the broad impact of the cost-of-living crisis, with about 50% of the food they distribute going to people who are employed but cannot make ends meet -
“Foodbank works with all the major charities—Salvos, Vinnies, Anglicare, and Wesley, as well as small community-based organisations that operate community pantries across NSW and the ACT.
“What we’re now seeing for the first time is families where parents both work, who are both paying mortgages, who are turning up and saying, ‘I never thought I would find myself in this situation’.
"My expectation is that this is going to get worse and worse. And if I can get on my soapbox for a minute… we’ve now got a Reserve Bank that’s now saying interest rates are going to stay high, and that’s going to make it tough, and people will need to continue relying on charity for another nine or ten months.”
“It’s almost like we’ve been conditioned as a nation to believe that’s an acceptable outcome. And for me, if that’s where we’re headed, there’s something fundamentally wrong in our society that needs to change.”
Rob Stokes pressed the need to view housing as a human right over speculative investment and solving the housing crisis as essential to our society’s functioning -
“Surely, the outcome we want to achieve for our country is that every single person has access to a safe, secure and healthy home. And everyone gets one before anyone else gets support to get another one. Yet we have tax settings that encourage people to get multiple homes, fighting with people who don’t have access to any, and that strikes me as being self-evidently unfair.
“All of us share this social contract, where we give away some of our freedom to government in order to secure all of our other freedoms. But if people are increasingly seeing that they’re not benefitting from being part of community, the community will fall apart over time.”
#housingcrisis #costoflivingcrisis #housingforall #housingjustice #sharehope
Director at FIS
3wYou guys should go to China and help the hungry over there.. i am sure that will end well... Look at us.. making advertisements using the hungry.. *slow claps