March
9th,
2021
Australia’s governments must end health discrimination in its prisons. An incarcerated child must not be a second-class citizen. Nor any adult. We must ask, why are our governments dishing the vulnerable jailed, second-class healthcare?
When evaluating the nation’s carceral system, we are unable to make it to the second level of Maslow’s pyramid before encountering a deprivation of the most basic human rights.
There is no worse discrimination than health inequality. Australia boasts about its double trillion-dollar domestic product economy, but when it comes to the health rights of its citizens, not everybody counts.
Australia’s population is 25.5 million people, of which the overwhelming majority are citizens, thus entitled to receive Medicare. Readers may find this hard to believe, but health rights such as Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), are denied to Australia’s 42,000 incarcerated individuals, of whom thereabouts 1,000 annually are children.