EveryMan

Sami is 66 years old. He lives with schizophrenia, a psychosocial disability that developed years after a workplace injury and long-term depression. His journey into mental health challenges, isolation and homelessness reveals how easily people can fall through the cracks when systems fail to respond early enough, if at all.

After arriving in Australia, he settled in Sydney and worked hard in the aluminium industry, then as a taxi driver, and eventually in aircraft manufacturing.

In 2000, a serious back injury brought his working life to an abrupt halt. The aftermath, fighting for workers’ compensation and cycling through six lawyers, left him mentally and emotionally drained.

“I went to court six times. It was stressful. I got depressed,” he says. That depression, in time, deepened and spiralled.

By 2016, Sami was experiencing severe psychiatric symptoms. “I don’t know what I ate or what happened,” he recalls, “but I got sick. I couldn’t go out. I was seeing things. I was terrified for two years.”

Then, in 2018, he was evicted from his home of seven years without warning.

“The landlord kicked me out, just like that. I had nowhere to go. I had no choice but to sleep in abandoned cars. When I got paid, I would stay in a hotel to clean myself up. But most days I was living and sleeping in the streets, alone.”

Read the full article here: https://www.everyman.org.au/our-blog/man-talking-himself-street-has-name-and-story

For too long, perpetrators of family and domestic violence have used borders to evade accountability.

Fifteen men have been arrested in the ACT, and hundreds more in NSW, as part of coordinated cross-border police operations targeting people accused of family violence offences.

But arrests are only one part of the response.

What happens after an arrest? How do we ensure accountability leads to lasting behaviour change? Are men who use violence getting the right interventions, early enough and are victim-survivors receiving the safety and support they need?

And, crucially, what must we do earlier to prevent violence before police intervention is required?

The biggest challenge is building a system that prevents that harm, supports lasting change and keeps families safe.

Read more:

'Can't hide behind borders': Police arrest hundreds of DV offenders during blitz ACT and New South Wales police use cross-border operations to put domestic and family violence offenders "on notice", with 15 arrests made in the territory and hundreds more across the state.

ACT's public housing waiting list currently has 3,600 approved applicants.

The average wait time for priority housing is more than five months.

For standard housing, people are on average waiting more than five years.

Surely, we can do better Canberra: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-07/canberra-homelessness-services-rise-public-housing/107004258

When people experiencing homelessness lose their lives, they can too easily become invisible.

Without accurate data, we can't fully understand the scale of the issue, identify preventable factors or improve the systems designed to keep people safe.

Every person deserves to be counted, because every life lost helps us to understand how we can do better.

Call to change ACT law so homelessness deaths are no longer invisible | Region Canberra Calls are growing for the ACT to become the first jurisdiction in Australia to require the deaths of people experiencing…