On a tour across the Riverina, Ms Rhiannon spoke with members of the local community to hear how the tragic and unfair funding outcome,s announced last week, would affect residents. 

She said society would become “more fractured, less educated and more divided”.

Among a spate of troubling funding cuts, Ms Rhiannon said the country’s leader were continuing to fail women who were victims of family violence.

“Women’s refuges are closing down and being combined with beds provided for the homeless,” she said. “Vulnerable women and children are being placed with strange men.”

Ms Rhiannon recalled one case, where a women fleeing a violent home was placed in the same shelter as her abuser. She said forty per cent of homeless individuals across the country were women and most were escaping domestic violence. 

One Riverina woman – who wished to remain anonymous – said she’d rather be back in domestic violence than living in commissioned housing. The 57-year old said women and children escaping abuse didn’t deserve to be placed back into what could be, physically, verbally and sexually abusive neighbourhoods. 

But the Greens senator Lee Rhiannon said the government shone no light on any reforms for these women. 

“It’s outrageous,” Ms Rhiannon said. “It’s outrageous how the government are dealing with this.”

Ms Rhiannon’s words follow Rosie Batty’s visit to the city last week, effectively kick-started a movement for change and combating Wagga’s “epidemic”. 

In addition, Ms Rhiannon said cuts to education would deepen an already troubling social divide. 

She said Charles Sturt Univeristy would experience job losses, leading to a lack of resources and dramatically increasing the cost of higher education.

“The increased financial burden is going to deter people from ever going to uni,” Ms Rhiannon said. “Education should be available for all.”

Ms Rhiannon said Narrandera’s three schools were losing more than $1 million in promised funding and further cuts could result in the closing of the town’s TAFE. 

She said the federal government’s unwillingness to tax big companies fairly was costing its most vulnerable.