“Seven Days” columnist IAN MEIKLE is haunted by the ignored faces – people in crisis, people crushed  – in our community as we march to the beat of nation-leading political indifference… 

“NATION leading” is how Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith hailed the passage of the legislation decriminalising possession of small amounts of illicit hard drugs the other day. 

I’m weary of “nation-leading” epithets. They seem to me to be coming at a terrible cost to our community from a heartless place where voices in the street are silenced by spin and arrogance. I am reminded of Henry Lawson’s fine poem “Faces in the Street” (1888). 

They lie, the men who tell us in a loud decisive tone

That want is here a stranger, and that misery’s unknown;

For where the nearest suburb and the city proper meet

My window-sill is level with the faces in the street

Drifting past, drifting past,

To the beat of weary feet

While I sorrow for the owners of those faces in the street.

SO many faces, so many voices being ignored. The minister’s triumphal announcement of putting more drugs on the street brought to mind the mournful face of Tom McLuckie. 

Tom is the reluctant road-safety advocate, forced into the local media spotlight by the tragic death of his son Matthew in a head-on collision on Hindmarsh Drive in Canberra’s south, on May 19.

The 20-year-old was driving home from his part-time job at Canberra Airport when a stolen vehicle, believed to be travelling at high speeds on the wrong side of the road, collided with his car.

“Knowing the extent of his injuries, I wake at night worrying about how much pain he was in, and how much he suffered,” says the grieving dad. 

In the months since his son’s death, McLuckie has forensically compiled and examined sentencing outcomes, drawing the conclusion that they are inadequate to act as a real deterrent against dangerous driving behaviour. 

He drew up three petitions that were presented to the Legislative Assembly. He had more than 7000 signatures agreeing with his call for an independent review of the judiciary “and certainly the sentencing”. His voice seems destined to be lost in the cacophony of excuses. 

And cause I have to sorrow, in a land so young and fair,

To see upon those faces stamped the marks of Want and Care;

I look in vain for traces of the fresh and fair and sweet

In sallow, sunken faces that are drifting through the street

Drifting on, drifting on,

To the scrape of restless feet;

I can sorrow for the owners of the faces in the street.

THEN there is the haunting face of grief-stricken Katrina Spadafora whose five-year-old daughter Rozalia died on July 5, a day after being admitted to Canberra Hospital with flu.

The pre-schooler suffered a cardiac arrest almost 30 hours after presenting to the hospital while awaiting emergency transfer to Sydney for specialist treatment.

Months on from Rozalia’s death, her grieving mother still seeks answers: “How could this have happened? If you can take your child with a clean bill of health to the hospital and you don’t bring them back home then something is wrong.”

There may be some answers in an independent review into pediatric services at Canberra Hospital, tabled over recent days in the Legislative Assembly. Of no consolation to the heartbroken Spadafora family is the news that it found there is a lack of appropriate care for critically ill and deteriorating patients. 

Conducted in 2021, the external review revealed 11 critical issues including a lack of appropriate care settings for deteriorating patients, workforce and training gaps, sustainability for general paediatrics staff and a lack of formal arrangements with the Sydney Children’s Hospital Network.

The review’s collection of evidence precedes the recent four paediatric deaths (we know of) at Canberra Hospital. How preventable the young deaths were is lost under the coronial shroud of investigation. 

Then there is the haunting face of grief-stricken 

In hours before the dawning dims the starlight in the sky

The wan and weary faces first begin to trickle by,

Increasing as the moments hurry on with morning feet,

Till like a pallid river flow the faces in the street

Flowing in, flowing in,

To the beat of hurried feet

Ah! I sorrow for the owners of those faces in the street.

WHO can ignore the defiant face of Yvette van Loo, the plucky Canberra grandmother ordered to leave her home in Ainslie of 41 years after failing in her 10-minute Zoom bid to convince the feared Tenant Relocation Exemption Panel she should remain in her Ainslie home, a social-housing property earmarked for sale under ACT Housing’s “Growth and Renewal” program.

Van Loo is one of 340 Canberra tenants, mostly widows and single parents, “relocated” under the program designed to “grow the public housing portfolio and provide homes for more households in need”.

Ordered to vacate the home, the pensioner declared: “I’d rather be dead than transferred to a new location.”

In the meantime, local law firm Ken Cush and Associates is representing, pro bono, three of the dispossessed tenants and taking court action to fight their effective eviction. 

The human river dwindles when ’tis past the hour of eight,

Its waves go flowing faster in the fear of being late;

But slowly drag the moments, whilst beneath the dust and heat

The city grinds the owners of the faces in the street

Grinding body, grinding soul,

Yielding scarce enough to eat

Oh I sorrow for the owners of the faces in the street.

THE compassionate face of Emma Campbell, the fearless CEO of the ACT Council of Social Service, resonates with me. She stays relentlessly true to advocating against the injustice of Canberra’s 38,000 people and 9000 children living in poverty. In poverty. In Canberra. In 2022. She constantly battles the bureaucracy over social housing shortfalls and shameful homeless waiting lists that snake out to three years for state housing.

“I LOVE my job, I love my people and as long as I breathe, I will be out there advocating for people who don’t have a voice,” says tireless Julie Tongs, CEO of the Winnunga Nimmityjah Aboriginal Health and Community Services. She endlessly fights the disinterest in the ACT’s nation-leading rate of incarceration of indigenous people. The drug-addled prison is a nation-leading disgrace, too. 

I wonder would the apathy of wealthy men endure

Were all their windows level with the faces of the poor?

Ah! Mammon’s slaves, your knees shall knock, your hearts in terror beat,

When God demands a reason for the sorrows of the street,

The wrong things and the bad things

And the sad things that we meet

In the filthy lane and alley, and the cruel, heartless street.

“CANBERRA Matters” columnist Paul Costigan never loses energy in calling out the hypocrisy and inconsistencies of the planning system in the ACT and its developer-friendly scarring of the urban landscape. 

His belief in the spirit of people in suburbs to demand green space and to demand more trees is inspirational. He throws uncomfortable light on the doings of the NCA and its seemingly compliant and cosy relationship with the territory planners. 

Ah! My heart aches for the owner of that sad face in the street.

But, ah to dreader things than these our fair young city comes,

For in its heart are growing thick the filthy dens and slums,

Where human forms shall rot away in sties for swine unmeet,

And ghostly faces shall be seen unfit for any street

Rotting out, rotting out,

For the lack of air and meat

In dens of vice and horror that are hidden from the street.

FOR months, with clear-eyed bravery, former chief minister Jon Stanhope and former senior ACT Treasury officer Ahmed Khalid have relentlessly and empirically charted the shortfalls and the shameful mounting billions of debt this community’s children and beyond will endure. 

They have fearlessly stood up and deciphered the deceptive spin and exposed the heartlessness in spending shortfalls on health, hospitals and social housing. They are faces seen, but voices that go unheard by the people who should be listening most. 

And who are these people turning away from our faces and our voices? Let me list them: Andrew Barr, Yvette Berry, Rachel Stephen-Smith, Tara Cheyne, Mick Gentleman, Marisa Paterson, Shane Rattenbury, Jo Clay, Andrew Braddock, Emma Davidson, Johnathan Davis, Suzanne Orr, Michael Pettersson, Chris Steel and Rebecca Vassarotti. 

And so it must be while the world goes rolling round its course,

The warning pen shall write in vain, the warning voice grow hoarse,

But not until a city feels Red Revolution’s feet

Shall its sad people miss awhile the terrors of the street —

The dreadful everlasting strife

For scarcely clothes and meat

In that pent track of living death – the city’s cruel street.

• Ian Meikle is the editor of “CityNews” and can be heard with Rod Henshaw on the “CityNews Sunday Roast” news and interview program, 2CC, 9am-noon.