This page is to document certain happenings at a certain group of retirement units owned by the Laura and Alfred West Cottage Homes Incorporated and administered by Anglicare in the form of Rude Rhonda M. Callaghan. To be fair, the incidents recounted below don't form the totality of the lives of those criticised. No doubt, there are many who can recount the kind and selfless acts done by Rude Rhonda Callaghan, Deidre Knight, Patricia Buhagiar, Ben Moore and that grass cutter.
The faulty security lights were eventually fixed after more than six months of not operating properly. They were easily and cheaply fixed. All the talk about digging trenches was untrue and a symptom of slack bureaucrats. The numerous electricians who fiddled with the power box were incompetent. Even the crazy grass cutter has got a new ride-on mower and which doesn't cut the grass at dirt level.
This website is a protest on behalf of people who are little regarded by the many bureaucracies that control their lives. However...
(above) The security lights at Anglicare's Laura and Alfred West units in Adelaide's crime-ridden suburb of Elizabeth blaze brightly during the day when the aged residents don't need them.
(above) At night when the local housebreakers begin their shifts, Anglicare's security lights turn off at the Laura and Alfred West Units for the aged. Well paid executive Rhonda Callaghan has been told of this fault for six months, but is unable to do the job for which she is paid.
Rude Rhonda
Last month I drove a neighbour from our Laura and Alfred West
Cottage Home units to the Royal Adelaide Hospital where he underwent a melanoma
biopsy. (Tests later proved it malignant.)
Whilst we were away, Rhonda M. Callaghan from the Elizabeth office
of Anglicare, who administer the units, used office keys to enter our units.
Rude Rhonda’s visit wasn’t simply to inspect the units to
determine if repairs were required, but to see if we made our beds, washed our
dishes, mopped the floor, left articles strewn about, and to examine the
intricate details of our lives. She determined both units were dirty and
required further cleaning.
So what was the problem with this? Well, Rude Rhonda was doing a
lifestyle inspection as well as a building inspection.Anglicare now believes it has the right to
monitor tenants’ lives and give instructions for change despite this not being
part of the tenancy contract.
During other inspections 25-year-old Anglicare employees have
given unrequested lifestyle instruction to sixty-five-year-old men and women.
This bureaucratic intrusion reduces a person’s sense of self-mastery and
self-respect, and to add insult to injury it is the tenant who pays indirectly
for this humiliating inspection.
Anglicare is taking advantage of low-income tenants who have
nowhere else to go. The heart is dying. 15 April 2015
Anglicare
evicts woman
Rhonda Callaghan of
Anglicare evicted a woman from her Laura and Alfred West Cottage Homes
Incorporated two-bedroom unit in Elizabeth South because she married a younger
man, according to her neighbour.
Anglicare said the woman
was too young, anyway, to be living in the units, but it was them who rented it
to her in the first place. The woman was fifty and the units are usually rented
to those over 55. However, there have been others living there under the age of
fifty who were not evicted.
19
April 2015
(above) The cover of this security light at the Laura and Alfred West Cottage Homes complex in the crime-ridden Adelaide suburb of Elizabeth has been removed to show that it burns brightly all day, every day.
(above) At night, this and other security lights surrounding the aged care units automatically switch off leaving the residents, some of whom are infirm and up to 90-years-old, anxious for their safety. Anglicare housing manager Rhonda M. Callaghan treats the residents with a degree of contempt and won't do anything about it despite six months of requests for action.
The
nature of betrayal
Anglicare occupational
activity officer Deidre Knight’s invitation to the residents of the Laura and
Alfred West units in Elizabeth initially seemed innocuous enough: Armchair Tai
Chi classes at the Midway Road Community House in Elizabeth East. Gold Coin
donation. Tea and biscuits.
But something didn’t
seem right as the tiny classes had more welfare industry employees making up
the numbers when they should have been doing something useful. They claimed to
be monitoring the increasingly unenthusiastic participants, most in their
seventies.
After one class the
biscuits and tea were kept back in the kitchen until the arrival of welfare
bureaucrats and two State politicians, Tony Piccolo and Lee Odenwalder, and
their Minders.
The three participants
left in the class were outnumbered by the nine bureaucrats, politicians and
their minders.
When I argued with
Piccolo about the Housing Trust, Deidre Knight intervened and told him that I
was her client. That was new to me. She and the two minders then began taking
pictures of me next to Piccolo, for his Facebook page, and for Anglicare promotional
material.
Deidre Knight then
ostentatiously handed me some leaflets from Helping Hand that were
inapplicable, but the act of doing so felt insulting and humiliating. It felt
like a calculated multi-layered betrayal.
30
April 2015
The
Case of the short grass
This
minor issue shows the intractable nature of the Anglicare bureaucracy.
A
number of tenants at an Anglicare administered group of retirement units in
Elizabeth were unhappy about the lawn mower crew. They cut the grass so low that
the roots and bare ground were exposed, and this every two weeks in the blaze
of summer. This was after one tenant painstakingly watered the ground to turn
the yellowed roots back to green. The cost of the water and grass cutting are
paid indirectly by the tenants.
At
least one tenant, an 85-year-old woman who does most of the gardening, avoids
contact with the owner of the lawn mowing business since an incident where she
asked him to stop poisoning the shrubs she had planted. His reaction resembled
that of a bully intimidating an elderly woman. The tenants, aged from 63 to 90,
stay inside their units when the grass cutting crew arrives.
I
asked the foreman to cut the grass less close to the ground ― a simple request.
Despite his reputation the reaction surprised me. He said he wasn’t going to
allow me to interfere with his contract with Anglicare. I warned that I might
complain to Anglicare, but didn’t. Nevertheless, the Anglicare housing manager,
Rhonda Callaghan, was at my door the next day. “Can I come in?” she asked.
Once
inside she said she was investigating a complaint the grass cutter had made
against me. Against me, what complaint? She wouldn’t explain, but said he’d
phoned her and she was here to say that he was doing a good job, and the grass
would continue to be cut every two weeks close to the ground.
It
wouldn’t have taken her any effort to tell the grass cutter to raise the blade
so the grass would stay above a certain height, like the foreshore area at
Glenelg, or around the military graves at the West Terrace Cemetery. But the
issue with Anglicare was not the grass. It was whether the tenants had the
right to expect that their simple aspirations would be shown respect. The
answer was, no.
This
shows the intractable nature of the Anglicare administration with its imperative
to show tenants their views over such a simple matter as grass won’t be
considered. And these people are disabled, elderly and affirm.
4
May 2015
Distorting the History - Anglicare-style
Two “before and after” photographs appearing in
the Laura and Alfred West Cottage Homes Inc Annual Report of 2014 show the
front gardens of an Anglicare-administered group of units in Elizabeth.
The “before” photograph is a patch of bare earth
in the heat of summer while the “after” photograph shows woodchips and planted
shrubbery. A third picture shows the staff from Aussie Home Loans who spent a
day covering the area with woodchips and planting native shrubbery. These unpaid
volunteer office workers were clearly exhausted after their work. It was a
commendable effort.
However, the Anglicare grass cutter and
quasi-gardener ignored the new plants and most of them died. Weeds sprung forth
that had existed within the soil plus those that came with the woodchips. The
result was an ugly mess that must have saddened the volunteers who later drove
by to see the result of their efforts.
Then came along a tenant named Annette. She
suffered extreme depression, but nevertheless spent twenty hours a week pulling
out the weeds. When Annette moved to Tasmania, Meg, the new tenant in her unit,
continued the effort to kill the weeds and nourish the remaining shrubbery.
Trish also helped when she moved into unit 7 after Jane died from cancer.
But the most active gardener was Jean Porter,
85, who brought hundreds of shrubs with her from her previous residence. She
also pruned the overgrown trees that were choked with weeds. She worked
tirelessly for two months, putting the rest of us to shame.
As the greenery blossomed it was then that
Deidre Knight from Anglicare arrived with her camera. Soon after, and the
tenants weren’t told, she published the “before and after” photographs in the
2014 Annual Report, and attributed the improved gardens solely to the Aussie
Home Loans Staff.
It was true, they had done a hard day’s work, but
the result was singularly ineffective. It was Meg, Annette, Trish, and mostly
Jean Porter who improved the gardens. But instead of acknowledging the
initiative of our aged tenants, and the Anglicare grass cutter who poisoned
some of Jean’s shrubbery, Deidre Knight falsified the history by attributing
the improvements solely to the Aussie Home Loans Staff.
And what about Anglicare’s promised follow-up of
volunteers and fertiliser to improve the gardens further? This never happened.
It was Jean Porter who paid for new shrubs, fertiliser and lime for the soil.
21 May 2015
Through
the looking glass:
A peephole into Anglicare's real attitude to
elderly
people in Elizabeth.
(above) Two weeks after Rhonda Callaghan's Anglicare grass cutter mowed too close to the ground the grass still hasn't regrown. But he returns on a quiet Saturday afternoon at the retirement units, inhabited by people aged 63 to 90, and at their expense begins another noisy session of unnecessary mowing.
(above) After leaving this mess, Anglicare housing manager Rhonda Callaghan declares the job a fine piece of work. Meanwhile, the security lights blaze most of the day then turn off at night. And according to Rhonda Callaghan, this won't change either.
The grass cutter won't accept critical suggestions gladly. When I arrived home one afternoon and was entering my retirement unit, the 30-year-old grass cutter rushed over to my car, and stood with his blower near the open window. He opened his mouth wide to display his teeth and held my stare. I checked later to see if he had actually been removing built-up leaves in the gutter, but nothing had changed. It was a show of .......perhaps, letting a bunch of old folk know who really ruled the roost.