Earshot - Abc Radio National

A split second was all it took to shatter Judi Green’s life. It took decades, a lot of forgiveness and a little luck to piece it back together.

In the final episode Peter Mares is in Brisbane to see if the not-for-profit community housing model offers some solutions to the crisis in affordable housing.

Peter Mares travels to Adelaide, home to the South Australian Housing Trust, which once set the gold standard for state housing authorities worldwide, but now struggles to house even the most vulnerable and needy citizens. With the public sector failing to meet the need, Peter goes onsite with an enterprising developer who claims he can build and sell houses at price that even pensioners can afford.

Peter travels to Hobart which in late 2019 was named Australia’s least affordable capital city for renters. More than one in four Australian households rent from a private landlord. There are growing numbers of long-term renters, older renters, and families renting with young children.

The COVID-19 virus has exposed the failings of Australia’s housing system like never before: rough sleeping and homelessness, the insecurity of renting, and a real estate boom-bust cycle. Our housing mess can be measured in lost productivity, poor health, high debt and growing inequality. Peter Mares visits four capital cities, to investigate what’s gone wrong with housing in Australia, and what we might do about it, beginning in his home town of Melbourne

A paramedic, an Indigenous educator in the remote Kimberley, and an international student turned bike courier take us to the frontline of working through COVID-19.

From the trenches of the home schooling front a teacher, a student and a parent tell the story of the education revolution brought on by COVID-19.

Stolen hand sanitizer, an iso wedding, losing all three of your jobs in one week—life at home in lockdown in Australia, as told through the intimate audio diaries of three women.

In 2019, the famous flying great white sharks of South Africa’s False Bay completely disappeared, leaving locals, scientists and a booming tourism industry desperate for answers. Are shark-eating orcas or climate change to blame? Or could the answer lie across the Southern Ocean in Australia?

The story of one man's slide into the white supremacist movement in Canada, and the aftermath. How do we deal with those who've engaged in the politics of hate when they decide to walk away from it?

The story of one man's slide into the white supremacist movement in Canada in the late 1980s, and which asks the question; whose voices should be heard in the aftermath of violence, as a community attempts to move towards life after hate?

The fascinating life story of Homer Rieth — a composer, poet and founder of the Minyip Philosophical Society.

If your government failed to provide running water, electricity, roads, safety from gender violence, or other staples of everyday life, what would you do? In the Solomon Islands people are taking matters into their own hands, even schoolgirls. If their government can’t provide, they’ll try.

We make it easy for New Zealanders to work in Australia but not so easy for them to survive in times of personal crisis. Four Kiwis tell their stories of falling between the cracks.

Tombstones were once doors to the afterlife, where spirits could pass through. Today they're smaller, but they still mark a place where we can leave offerings, tell stories and think alternative thoughts.

Cystic fibrosis affects nearly 4000 Australians but how much do you know about what it's like to live with?

How do you make people care when they risk going to jail for it? Three women helped start a movement in Jakarta bringing attention to West Papua, and today it’s seen thousands protesting across the country. But the personal toll has been huge.

After her own traumatic birth Elly Bradfield started asking other mothers about their births, it was like swapping war stories. Why are so many Australian women leaving the birth suite traumatised?

150 years ago thousands of young men were taken from the Pacific Islands. Today the scars are still being felt.

Muslim Malaysians often have complex and tangled views about polygamy. Their feelings and beliefs aren’t always mirrored by their actions.  What role does pragmatism play? What role does faith play?