Veronika Wild

This article by  Kevin Bell, Professor, Law Resources, director, Castan Centre for Human Rights Law and Associate Professor, School of Social Sciences, Steven Roberts is reprinted with kind permission from The Monash University's Lens project. Professor Bell's concluding remarks are especially telling. The COVID-19 pandemic opens the door to solving the homelessness problem Homelessness and the COVID-19 pandemic are deeply entwined. In Melbourne – the COVID capital of Australia – we've seen not only the homeless, among many vulnerable communities, hit hard from multiple angles. Public housing, aged care, migrant communities and transient workers in industries such as meat processing have all been pinpointed as contagion trigger points. The homeless are stuck in the middle of all this. Professor Kevin Bell AM, QC, a former Victorian Supreme Court justice, is director of Monash University’s Castan Centre for Human Rights Law . He's a leading voice in human rights in Au...

  Image by Apollo22 from Pixabay I had an odd encounter a couple of weeks ago. I was in the underground shopping centre when someone tried to phone me. The signal was really distorted so I grabbed my shopping trolley full of groceries and headed out to the back of the carpark to take the call. When I got there, there were several people already standing or sitting around and they all had their shopping trolleys too. As I was talking one tapped me on the shoulder and said, “You should move over there," pointing out a covered area between the carpark and the street, “Out of the wind, see.” When I finished my call I realised that they were all homeless and thought I was homeless too. My trolley was full of assorted shopping bags. Theirs were full of piles of clothes, ratty backpacks and maybe a sleeping bag wrapped up in plastic. I was already late for an appointment, but promised I’d come back and talk to them another day.   The weather was awful for the next week or so,...

Random Bottle Brush * "I wish I had your worries," said my oldest son, when I was complaining about my present lack of focus and direction. "Then again," he added, "My worries would seem trivial to an African too." In consequence he's just sent me an excellent upbeat article about how well Australia has done on a number of social and economic indicators over the last twenty years in comparison with other OECD countries, but also poses the question, "If we have never had it so good, why aren’t we deliriously happy?" Certainly, I would not want to be in Africa right now, or even the mean streets of Britain or the USA, but I am a bit tired of people telling me how great things are and how lucky we are. Although our individual troubles may seem trivial in comparison, I think they can be summed up as follows: Firstly, it’s really hard to sing and dance and kick up your heels while you see others suffer. S...