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OSMAN:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Osman Faruqi, this is 7am.

There are growing fears that homelessness could soon rise in Australia, with the end of government policies like JobKeeper and eviction moratoriums putting more people under financial stress.

One of the most at risk groups in the country is older women, who tend to have less money and face both age and gender discrimination.

Today, journalist for The Saturday Paper Kristine Ziwica, on the homelessness crisis Australia should have seen coming.

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OSMAN:

Kristine as you've been reporting this story, you've spoken to many women around the country about their experiences of economic hardship. Can you tell me about one of them? Can you tell me about Berry?

KRISTINE:

Sure.

Archival Tape -- Kristine:

“All right. Are you there?”

Archival Tape -- Berry:

“Yes, I am. All right.”

Archival Tape -- Kristine:

“Well, I will…”

KRISTINE:

So Barry grew up in Craigieburn in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. She's the child of first generation immigrants. Her father was from Austria, her mother from Slovenia -

Archival Tape -- Berry:

“Mum was from former Yugoslavia and a first generation Australian. So you grew up with ethnic loving parents.”

KRISTINE:

And she told me that she didn't have a lot of the advantages that a lot of other students had growing up in terms of progressing and wanting to go to University. So she joined the Army Reserves and fell pregnant at the age of 17.

Archival Tape -- Berry:

“So there goes any potential career. So young mum to start with. So that was a disadvantage for me.”

KRISTINE:

She eventually did manage to make things work. She went into the public service. She started her own training business, helping those who are long term unemployed, ironically, and that grew really rapidly.

Archival Tape -- Berry:

“So for 20 years, I had a registered training organisation that I built and that I was a founder of and it started off with me and then three and then we reached one hundred and fifty staff.”

KRISTINE:

Unfortunately, there was a change of government policy, so there was less funding for the kinds of services that Barrie provided and her business went under and she was found herself going from being the CEO of a business to possibly being homeless and finding herself within a day off sleeping in the car with her youngest child.

Archival Tape -- Berry:

“And I found myself packing up… And then my daughter, who was only 10 at the time, we looked at each other and said, well, where the hell are we going to go? We had nowhere to go.”

KRISTINE:

And it was a really frightening and I think difficult experience.

Archival Tape -- Berry:

“I was just destitute. I had absolutely nothing. I was destitute.”

KRISTINE:

So Berry’s 60 now and in the intervening years it took her a number of years to get herself back on her feet. And I think Berry herself would probably describe her situation - I just spoke to her not too long ago - as still very precarious indeed.
And she just couldn't help but feel that there was age discrimination and gender discrimination under underpinning that and making it really hard for her to find work and get back on her feet.

OSMAN:

Mm, so how common is an experience like Berry's? What do we know about the number of women like her, older women in particular, that are experiencing this kind of risk of being homeless, if not actually experiencing homelessness themselves?

KRISTINE:

Well, Fiona York, who is the executive director of the Housing for the Aged Action Group told me that they see a lot of clients like Berry who come through their doors around the age of 50, 55, 60, recently retrenched, not a lot of super. Very often they don't have or own their own home. And quite likely they're single. And just being single and not owning your own home automatically puts you at risk of homelessness.

And I think we also have to remember, just in the broader context of how common an experience like Berry's is, that in the last two censuses we have found that women over the age of 55 are the fastest growing portion of Australia's homelessness population. Also, Social Ventures Australia and the Housing for the Aged Action Group. They published a report last year that found four hundred and five thousand older women are at risk of homelessness.

Obviously, then covid hit. And things got a lot worse.

OSMAN:

Yeah, you're painting a pretty dire picture even before the pandemic. So what impact did that have on women who were already at risk of homelessness?

KRISTINE:

So I spoke to Annabel Daniel, who runs a women's community shelters in New South Wales, and she began to see a worrying trend.

Archival Tape -- Annabel Daniel:

“Oh it changed absolutely everything. I remember in mid march last year what we had was like a 30% spike in…”

KRISTINE:

There were significantly more women seeking support from services like Annebelle’s.

Archival Tape -- Annabel Daniel:

“And a large number of those women were older women as I say who had experienced very conventional lives.”

KRISTINE:

And Annabelle told me that this is a crisis that has been more than a decade in the making.

Archival Tape -- Annabel Daniel:

“I knew this was a crisis a decade ago. You know, it's an incoming tsunami. And, you know, we were seeing a huge demand for our services almost a decade ago and it hasn't stopped. And the pandemic, again, has just layered another level of vulnerability on older women because they will often struggle to get another job if they lose one.”

KRISTINE:

So this is absolutely a crisis we should have seen coming, we've known about this for more than a decade. The writing has been on the wall.

We've seen it in the last two censuses, or most likely, according to all the experts I spoke to, you're going to see a continued upwards trajectory at the next census. The question now that I think many have is, are we going to wait until the writing's on the wall and the human impacts of this are very clear? Or are we going to finally recognise that this is a crisis that needs a response?

OSMAN:

We’ll be right back.

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OSMAN:

Christine, we're talking about the growing rates of economic insecurity amongst older women. How long have we known about this problem, and how serious it is?

KRISTINE:

So when I started reporting this, I really wanted to go back and talk to Elizabeth Broderick, because it's my understanding that she and the legendary Susan Ryan, who served as age discrimination commissioner alongside Liz, really helped put this issue on the map a little over a decade ago.

Archival Tape -- Kristine:

“Okay are you there?”

Archival Tape -- Liz:

“Yes.”

KRISTINE:

So I spoke to Liz and she went out on her first listening tour when she was appointed the Sex Discrimination Commissioner about 12 years ago sort of thing, that she kind of invented the listening tour.

Archival Tape -- Liz:

“So I travelled the length and breadth of Australia. And when I was in Hobart, I was able to go out to a young women's refuge. And I still remember being greeted by a beautiful older woman called Lurlene.”

KRISTINE:

So Lurlene worked in a shelter for young women who were leaving family violence situations. And she stayed there. She slept there.

Archival Tape -- Liz:

“She talked about the fact that when she retired from this job, she wouldn't be able to be a self-funded retiree at all. She would move on to the pension.”

KRISTINE:

And she told me that she was really moved and galvanised by story after story that she heard from women who feared living in poverty and possibly facing homelessness in old age.

Archival Tape -- Liz:

“So I think it was hearing her story that helped me understand the cumulative result of women’s inequality, particularly their economic inequality over the life cycle…”

KRISTINE:

And Liz told me that that really reframed this whole debate in her mind.

Archival Tape -- Liz:

“And it was the first time I’ve really understood that a reframing of this whole area - to start to ask the question: is poverty to be the reward for a life-time spent caring?”

OSMAN:

Kristine, what's happened since then? Has there been any more kind of reviews or enquiries looking specifically into these issues?

KRISTINE:

So in the intervening decade, there has been no shortage of attention to this issue and no shortage of recommendations. So just to name a few, we've had the Equality Rights Alliance's retiring anti-poverty report, the Security for Women Alliance's White Paper on Women's Economic Security, which was recently updated to take into account the impacts of Covid.

And perhaps most famously, Senator Jenny McAllister's very aptly named A Husband Is Not A Retirement Plan from the 2015 Senate enquiry into the issue. And that made a number of recommendations.

OSMAN:

So there's been reports going back years and years, and the situation, as you've laid out right now, is certainly at a crisis point. So what is the government doing about it?

KRISTINE:

Until now, not very much. So all of these reports have seemingly fallen on deaf ears.
When I spoke to Elizabeth Broderick and asked her to sort of reflect on action or inaction over the last decade or so since she arguably helped put this issue on the map. She made no secret of her disappointment.

Archival Tape -- Liz:

“I still think it's critical because our economy, and as in most country’s economies, the economy sits on the back of the invisible labour of women.”

KRISTINE:

So not a terrible amount of optimism and a deep frustration from a number of the experts that I spoke to and bitter disappointment from the women themselves who have experienced what it's like to live this.

Archival Tape -- Liz:

“And so what all women do contribute to society from all different levels, whether you’re married or single, a professional, you know, it's just like, it's okay for you to end up in poverty.”

KRISTINE:

So when I spoke to Mary Ann Wright. She worked multiple shifts at multiple jobs at multiple different care homes in a really highly casualized environment in order to make ends meet.

Archival Tape -- Mary Ann:

“Soon it became like... oh my god, I can’t pay my rent…”

Archival Tape -- Kristine:

“How old were you at that time Mary Ann?”

Archival Tape -- Mary Ann:

“I was 55 or 56.”

KRISTINE:

I think it would be safe to say that she didn't mince her words. She was absolutely scathing.

Archival Tape -- Mary Ann:

“Oh it does make me angry. It makes me angry because it’s about this - you’re not valued.”

KRISTINE:

She really wanted to know if there was a willingness of governments and parties to make some real effort to engage with this issue and make some pledge for change.

Archival Tape -- Mary Ann

“There is something fundamentally wrong if it's been ignored for 12 years or more. What is it? They just don't care.”

KRISTINE:

She did say something that I think really resonated with me about what it might take to turn the corner on this issue. She said that sometimes she thinks until people in power think-

Archival Tape --

“Oh my God, that's Mary Ann Wright who used to live next door to us. Well, that's Mary Ann Wright, who was God. She was mum's best friend in Kangaroo Flat. How the hell did that happen?”

Archival Tape -- Mary Ann

“I think that those are the things that sometimes are going to help change. We just gotta keep pushing. We just gotta keep pushing and getting that out there, you know, talking about it.”

OSMAN:

Kristine, over the past few months now, we've seen the issue of the treatment of women in Australia start to dominate what's going on in federal politics. And whilst that was instigated perhaps by issues of sexual harassment and assault, demands of women activists have become much broader than that and focussed on a whole range of issues around inequality more broadly. Looking at those campaigns and perhaps the way that politicians are responding. How do you feel about where the issues that you've been outlining to me might be going from here?

KRISTINE:

So there has been a really significant paradigm shift, I'd say, over the last few months that have ushered in what I would describe as a new age of accountability, the fact that I'm here today talking to you about this issue is part of that new age of accountability. We’re forensically in the media, in the political sphere, looking at these issues and asking for accountability and change.

And in the last week or so, we've seen. The impact of that in relation to violence against women, so the government had a significant response last week to the respect at work sexual harassment enquiry from Kate Jenkins, which has been sitting in a minister's drawer for the better part of a year. So the fact that we have a significant response where they are essentially saying that they will take up in principle the fifty five recommendations is significant.

And I think that that does open up the door for accountability and action on a number of issues in relation to gender equality. And that certainly should. And I hope it will apply to the conversation around economic justice for women.

OSMAN:

Kristine, thank you so much for your reporting and talking to me today.

KRISTINE:

Well, thanks for having me. My pleasure.

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OSMAN:

Also in the news today…

An earthquake on the Indonesian island of Java has killed eight people and injured more than 20.

The magnitude 6 quake also damaged hundreds of buildings. It’s the second disaster to hit Indonesia in recent weeks.

Last weekend heavy rain caused by a tropical cyclone killed over 170 people.

And federal trade minister Dan Tehan has said that the Morrison government still hopes that every adult Australian will receive the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine by the end of the year.

But Labor’s health spokesman Mark Butler said the Coalition’s timeline was too slow and vague.

I’m Osman Faruqi, this is 7am. See ya tomorrow.

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