Waleed Aly officially threw his name into the race as Australia’s answer to John Oliver last night, when he ripped into the Australian government’s negligible spending to tackle domestic violence.
On The Project last night, and moments before the Budget was announced (read Pedestrian’s budget breakdown here), Waleed took a moment to – as he so eloquently put it – put his hand up for the thousands of Australian women who can’t. The Australian women who are “regularly beaten, abused, and killed by Australian men, usually their partners”.
He called upon old mates Tones and Hockey to SHOW ME THE MONEYYYY by allocating just some of that sweet budget money to reduce domestic violence.
“I’m talking about the 18,631 people whose calls went unanswered last year when they called 1800 RESPECT,” he said. “That’s the hotline set up to provide a counselling service for victims of domestic violence. They reached out and were turned away. Now the hotline needs $2.8 million each year to answer those calls.”
Just to put that in perspective: “That’s about 1/20th of what we will spend this year on the National School Chaplaincy Program.”
*flips table*
*flips everything*
The segment, which was a joint collab between Waleed and Tom Whitty, is currently going bonkers on social media. Naturally it comes with the hashtag #ShowMeTheMoney because this is 2015, and if a social movement exists in a forest without any hashtag around to make it trend, did it ever really exist at all?
Being the sensibly-minded person he is, Waleed pointed out that investing money into tackling domestic violence is actually a fiscally sound move: it costs Australians $13.6 billion annually.
$13.6 billion > $2.8 million. Your move, Hockey.
#ShowMeTheMoney to put an end to domestic violence #TheProjectTVhttp://www.fairagenda.org/whatwillittake (written by Waleed Aly and Tom Whitty @twhittyer)
Posted by The Project on Tuesday, 12 May 2015
If you can’t watch the video because of unfair reasons like being at work and such, here’s a quick and sobering breakdown of the stats:
- 150,000 people were turned away from community legal services last year.
- 423 people are turned away from homeless shelters each night, many of whom are women and children fleeing domestic violence.
- A woman is killed every five days by a current or former partner.
- That’s 23 this year so far.
If you need support for domestic violence, call 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) or visit www.whiteribbon.org.au
