| Home Two Trojan Horses David Cappo and Roseanne Haggerty Norm Barber Adelaide, South Australia Roseanne Haggerty appeared unaffected by the extended applause at the packed Adelaide Town Hall two years ago. She had described an incident where a homeless old man in New York City was picked up by ambulance then treated in hospital for a few days before being discharged back onto the streets. The problem was he�d return a few weeks later and each process cost the government a fortune. Wouldn�t it be cheaper to supply the old boy with housing and regular nurse visits, Haggerty asked? The answer was an obvious, yes. Yes, too, for the old men living in the Adelaide parklands was the implication. It was difficult to dispute her logic. The South Australian government hired Haggerty as its Thinker-in-Residence on homelessness. Her contract cost taxpayers $250,000. It had little practical impact for most people living outside but it was a public relations coup for the Premier, Mike Rann. It endorsed his government�s policy of grabbing old homeless men off the streets via the psychiatric agency, Street-to-Home. They�d rounded up the previous year ten sick old men living outside, putting some of them into Glenside Psychiatric Hospital. The process generally involved destroyed their personal belongings and taking control of their income and assets via the Public Trustee. The old men were medicated then dressed in flannelette shirts, track pants and Chinese slippers. Some were put into boarding houses for discharged psychiatric patients. Others went into HousingSA units. They were all, effectively, under �benevolent house arrest�. The fact they�d been tricked or coerced into signing away their medical, economic and personal privacy rights was beside the point: they were off the streets. Roseanne Haggerty: the first Trojan Horse? Corporate director Monsignor, Vicar General, Catholic Priest, and government Social Inclusion Commissioner David Cappo had been threatening to resign his Commissioner job. His gripe in part was that government departments wouldn�t relinquish sensitive personal details of lower socio-economic clients. Cappo wanted sensitive information made accessible to certain psychiatric and rehabilitation agencies. He wanted these departments to renege on privacy guarantees they�d pledged to clients. His motive was to help people by taking control of their lives; by making everything about them available to an array of health and criminal professionals, and even hostile relatives. Little would be secret. Welfare bureaucrats would either coerce or trick clients into signing disclosure agreements or it might be done regardless of client wishes. Cappo claimed that privacy firewalls between government departments and private contractors were barriers to helping �the homeless� and other people. But few listened to the Monsignor. Some said he was merely a Catholic Priest meddling in secular affairs. Sure, he might be the Premier�s right-hand man with more influence than most elected Members of Parliament, but they still wouldn�t listen to him. Roseanne Haggerty changed that. Haggerty is an icy New York real estate agent who plays the game well. She looks good, she speaks well and she is comfortable in expensive restaurants. And being a quick learner she learned to bow to the right people and ignore the rest. She also made sense to Adelaide city property owners sick of vagrants begging for money and lowering property values. Her plan was to semi-institutionalise the homeless class by renovating old city buildings into �studio� apartments, and place high fences and guard boxes in front of existing HousingSA blocks of flats. Haggerty�s �Common Ground� housing plan for Adelaide�s �homeless� people featured �studio� apartments smaller than those rented by HousingSA and more expensive. Her versions would include electronic surveillance of tenant movements and in-house guards/social workers whose costs would be absorbed by higher rents and smaller accommodation. The primary condition of �Common Ground� housing was that tenants agreed to open their lives to various government departments and contracted �helping agencies�. For example, the initial application form required an approved personal Manager, usually from the three main homeless centres. Applicants were also required to provide details of their doctor, prescribed medications and next of kin. The general public loved the concept but apart from a couple of token projects that were happening anyway, it was laid to rest. Haggerty�s Thinker-in-Residence ideas were simply irrelevant but the positive publicity she created allowed David Cappo to steamroll ahead with his pervasive and comprehensive intervention into peoples� lives. His plan was similar to Haggerty�s except his version would apply to every person applying for public housing. Applicants in mass would be treated as potential criminals, psychiatric patients, drug addicts, disabled persons, refugees or indigenous and all needing intervention into their lives until proven otherwise. What was good for ten sick old men living outside was suddenly appropriate for the whole socio-economic group known as the �underclass�. This consists of about 5% of South Australia�s population. Cappo�s political influence grew further when the Premier, Mike Rann told his senior Ministers to fall into line and order their departments to adopt �social inclusion� principles. HousingSA with over 40,000 government-owned rental houses, flats and units was told to virtually wipe 80% of its usual client base off its books. Housing would in future be rented only to those submitting letters from doctors, psychiatrists, parole officers, drug addiction counsellors or the like, detailing the applicants� personal �problems�. There was suddenly huge incentive to �develop� problems like, for example, depression: hard to diagnose and easy to feign. The downside was that those seeking housing were also forced to sign privacy waivers meaning their most private medical details could end up anywhere, and they�d never be informed of the fact. To camouflage this huge change the then Minister in charge of HousingSA, Jay Weatherill, stated publicly that no one would be kicked off the waiting lists. He sounded sincere. What he didn�t say was that those who wouldn�t sign away their medical and other privacy rights would languish on Category 3. Category 3 has a nominal waiting time of twenty years though insiders say Category 3 is effectively dead. Weatherill deceived these people waiting for housing so as to disguise the fact that 20,000 of them had effectively being thrown off the housing waiting list. To discourage these clients demanding explanations the South Australia State Government hired Sue Vardon as the Chief Executive Officer of the Department of Families and Communities. This includes HousingSA (formerly the Housing Trust of South Australia). Her previous job was that of CEO for Centrelink. She changed Centrelink from an agency accountable to its clients to that of a closed bureaucracy. She simply destroyed the chain of command. Under Vardon what the front counter employee said to a client was effectively a final decision. She dumbed down staff knowledge of welfare rules making them niche bureaucrats, each understanding a tiny section of the rules they administered. Vardon�s dumbing down process was so successful that some staff don�t even understand the basic decision review procedures. This means clients lose payments they are legally entitled to claim. Angry clients could complain, sure, by using the complaints hotline. But this was merely an �anger sink� to dissipate client grievances. Centrelink employees openly called the Hotline a joke. Vardon called this whole process �cutting the fat�. The recently retired Sue Vardon has gone for good, hopefully, but her effect on HousingSA has been similar to that on Centrelink. Even veteran church and community housing advocates now find themselves unable to help clients obtain basic housing information such as: where they are on the waiting list; conditions of housing; rent costs; requirements to get on Category 1. HousingSA staff have become secretive, obstructive and reputedly enact vendettas against clients who challenge them, the latter because the chain of command has been destroyed. So while David Cappo issues his warm talk about �social inclusion� the actuality is that the government via HousingSA has excluded most of its client base and treats the less with diminished dignity. Roseanne Haggerty�s Thinker-in-Residence placement was a Public Relations campaign in disguise. It allowed the government to strip civil liberties from a large section of the underclass by equating them with ten elderly homeless men living in the Adelaide parklands. Cappo couldn�t have done it without Haggerty, who for a mere $250,000 did far more than any more expensive publicity campaign. She was both Cappo�s Trojan Horse and the government�s Trojan Horse. The Second Trojan Horse Premier Mike Rann�s next problem was cracking the church homeless agencies. These places provide food, showers, nurses and moral support for those living outside. Mike�s version of �social inclusion� was along the lines of starving the �homeless� from the city and sending them to suburbia � places like Elizabeth. He wanted to close down homeless agencies like WestCare, Hutt Street Centre and Byron Place Community Centre, or co-opt them into his plan of �socially including� the homeless. But what sort of hired gun could he get for the job? There were dozens of mid-forties, high power female bureaucrats in Adelaide desperate to become Commissioners for anything. But they wouldn�t get past the front door of church homeless agencies. �Media Mike� Rann needed a Trojan Horse who could penetrate church defences, especially Catholic defences, without being identified as the enemy. He found his man in Monsignor Corporate Director Vicar General David Cappo. It�s easy to prompt a giggling fit with the more devout staff at the Hutt Street Centre for homeless people. You simply ask them when David Cappo issues them with directives does he make it clear whether he�s speaking as Social Inclusion Commissioner or as a Monsignor in the Catholic church. He�s their church boss and they must follow his orders but as a government Commissioner they can tell him to go to hell. The Hutt Street Centre was founded by the Daughters of Charity, a Catholic Order. Since the retirement of most of its Adelaide Nuns the Centre has led the way in adopting �social inclusion principles� by requiring clients to produce identification such as Health Care Cards when buying their two-dollar lunches at the Centre. Cappos� penetration of other homeless agencies hasn�t relied completely on his Catholic status; money has also helped. The Department of Families and Communities finances �homeless surveys� conducted by government financed church agency employees. Clients are asked their housing status and their use of other welfare agencies on the survey day. They are allocated �codified� identifiers to retain anonymity and to track changes in their lives at the next survey. The �codified� identifier contains part of their initials and birthdate. The Department collects this information for �statistical purposes�. These silly surveys include just three homeless agencies and a couple of Street-to-home employees walking around the Parklands. Everyone knows the statistics collected are gross underestimates and aren�t even good government propaganda. So why would the government waste money on them. The first issue is that the �codified� identifiers will eventually be united with the real names of the clients. Sophisticated data collection computer software will ensure that what was given anonymously initially will later be attached to a name and birth date. Another effect of these silly surveys is to get church staff used to the process of being government informers, spies on their own clients. And, secondly, to get clients used to providing personal �anonymous� information for services that previously were offered without strings attached. And, finally, to set in place a real time Homeless Register accessible by the police of those using homeless services like showers, food, laundry, nurses, anything. This Register would be accessible for law enforcement and psychiatric agencies like Street-to-home. When they wanted to locate and �grab� a homeless person the Register would identify the target�s movements. Again, you might think real time monitoring of certain citizens� use of basic services is a reasonable action. But if you consider the scenario of yourself being monitored each time you buy a can of Coke or have a shower then the horror of the situation becomes more evident. And remember, what was considered by authorities appropriate for ten homeless men has been partially extended to the whole underclass, and might in the future be applied to everyone. Who pays for the second Trojan Horse? David Cappo might have been surprised when his Archbishop wished him well in taking up the secular position of Social Inclusion Commissioner. It is quite unusual for a leading priest to become a high-ranking government employee. But the financial power brokers in the church and Dave�s Archbishop gave him their blessing. Back in 2003 when David Cappo was expounding his �help the homeless� social inclusion plan he was apparently arranging a deal between the state government of Mike Rann and the Catholic Church. For some strange reason the government was willing to sell to the Catholic Church prime city land, in this case the old tram barn site at Victoria Square, for a whopping discount. The Catholic Church Endowment Society, the business arm of the Church, got it for a million dollar discount at then current prices. When settlement finally occurred the land value had increased even more, making it perhaps a two-million dollar discount on market value. The church then secured a long term rental contract for the edifice that was built on the site with government instrumentality SAWater. One Church spokesman said it assured the Church�s financial future. So while Social Inclusion Commissioner David Cappo was promoting the government�s homeless housing plan, in which homeless people were excluded from housing if they wouldn�t meet increasingly stringent requirements, Monsignor David Cappo appears to have been negotiating a deal that could be described as at least a million-dollar gift to his church from the South Australia government. Perhaps this was the price the big money men of the Church demanded for the sacrifice of their top Priest. Thus, we get the second Trojan Horse. 15 August 2008 For more details of the Cappo land deal story see Jeremy Roberts�s report in The Australian Newspaper of 5 July, 2008. http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23971510-5006787,00.html |