Will be become the sand people in Star Wars?

People who, in their own way, personify the sand people from Star Wars or the underworld characters in Mad Max 3, Beyond Thunderdome, roam Sydney's CBD.

Don't get me wrong, I mean that in a nice way, in that some people, whom society forced into homelessness, beg on the streets can appear to be scavengers, in terms of picking up an item someone abandoned on the street and making it their own. You see them lying or sitting up on their bedding in the on major city sidewalks. I wonder if this is a growing trend. These scenes really make me despise our major political parties. One of our coalition politicians said he can't relate to the homeless people. The statement enraged me, because if you consider Sydney, it was his own party, which embraced the Richmond Report. This horrific document closed down many psychiatric hospitals in 1988. We now see, in all its folly, the end result of the Richmond Report. You guessed it - all the psych wards of Gladesville Mental Hospital, who parade up and down the southern end of the CBD and sleep on the footpath, outside the big corporate buildings. Do all politicians believe that when you 'can't relate' to someone, you throw them out onto the street?

It is a worldwide trend. The number of homeless people we see on the streets is based a per-capita figure. The United States always appeared to have the worse problem, but they have a much bigger population than Sydney.

It is clear that many of them need to be sent for full psychiatric assessments and given the help they need. It's disgusting that we we refuse to organise appropriate dormitories for homeless people, because of the insurance and occupational health and safety. In short they are concerned that one of them will start a fire and so the only option is to force them to live on the street. I mean seriously, why don't our lawmakers and politicians simply get over it and do the right thing, instead of this infliction of punitive policies on the most vulnerable of our citizens.

I believe we also must take the drugs and alcohol away from those who can not consume these things responsibly.

The rest of the problem is something else. For my mind, the problem can be defined in two words: school education. It is very true that if you give school students extremely extensive self-sufficiency education modules from grade 3, until grade 12, you will fix many of the problems, which lead to homelessness. In other words, the 10 years of their schooling from age 8 until 18.

Just remember that the middle class started in Australia in the 1950s. Before then children were sent off to learn a trade from the age of 12. Others learnt to be a jackaroo out in the country from the age of 10.

Part of the problem with our society was that they redesigned education to fit a middle class world. The downside has always been that this is not the sort of education that many people need. If people come out of school with no idea of what they want to do, then you have wasted 10 years of a person's life and a fortune in school fees.

We need to revolutionise education. People need to leave school aged 18, in a completely self sufficient condition.

The self sufficiency module must have eight-year olds roaming around the school with their profit and loss sheets, until they turn 18. The self sufficiency models must force young people to view case studies about all the horrific things drug, alcohol and cigarette abuse does to peoples' bodies, throughout the 10 years of their schooling.

I have said for many years that we must run simulator halls in schools, with 100 different basic work tasks. Professional assessors would assess them for work speed for 10 years. Their higher school certificate would include their two best basic skills. None of this means they cannot study to be a rocket scientist or brain surgeon, but we must replace all the rubbish subjects, which students will never use, with self sufficiency modules, which I have discussed, lest we create the sand people from the Star Wars movie ― Joseph Walz