Bizarre QLD budget cut

Dear friends in Queensland,

If you heard about a program that was saving lives and dollars, while helping some of the most traumatised women in our society to heal and recover, you'd want to keep it running - right? With a budget of just $120,000 per year, the groundbreaking support program for women in prison, Sisters Inside, has been doing just that. Sisters Inside has been breaking the cycle of crime, poverty, trauma and recidivism.

The program is inexpensive to run, just $120,000 per year - far cheaper than the cost of keeping prisoners behind bars. It costs taxpayers $70,000 per person each year to keep a prisoner behind bars. Sisters Inside has already helped 188 women this year alone. Why would the incoming Newman Government want to cut a program that starts saving taxpayers money once it keeps just two women from re-offending, and exponentially more from there?

Stop the Queensland government from kicking an own goal, add your name to the grassroots CommunityRun campaign to save Sisters Inside: http://www.communityrun.org/petitions/save-sisters-inside?source=getup

$120,000 is about the salary of one mid-level bureaucrat or politician. Yet on this extremely modest budget Sisters Inside currently provide nine life-changing programs – ranging from sexual assault counselling to reunification for mothers and children. And for every mother who turns her life around, she also turns around the lives of her children, preventing untold suffering and huge costs to our community for years to come.

Sisters Inside is the kind of program we should be trying to learn from and replicate, not axe. That's why right now program founder Debbie Kilroy has a petition on our new CommunityRun platform, which she plans to deliver at a face-to-face meeting with Minister Davis in the coming days. Back Debbie and show your support for this program that's saving money and lives inside Queensland: http://www.communityrun.org/petitions/save-sisters-inside?source=getup

Thank you for speaking out,

The GetUp Team.

PS: If her program is cut, Debbie has told Queensland's 7:30 Report, "I don’t know how I’m going to walk away from the women. My life passion is about walking with and assisting women to move forward and do well – and not go back to prison, not commit crimes, not use drugs anymore. To raise their children, be healthy functioning families so they’re okay. But I’m going to have to go up there and say, ‘Sorry, we can't do anything anymore." Help stop this from happening: sign the petition now.