Bill Crews’ Exodus Foundation at Ashfield serves a relentless incoming tide of homeless and destitute visitors. Because of the high profile of Crews and his team in highlighting issues such as poverty, street kids, drugs and domestic abuse, thousands support Exodus with tax-deductible donations. So there’s always a lot on the menu, and those going to the Foundation leave well fed. And if they come in ill, want to unburden themselves or have hit rock bottom with drugs, alcohol or money problems, they can see the foundation’s doctor, counsellors or welfare workers.

But Bill Crews hands out more than soup and succour. Like a good many other active church people, he regularly dishes out far less palatable fare to those in political power.

He has brought plain talk into arguments about the factors that perpetuate poverty. They include levels of social security, tenancy laws, policies that keep the poor “in their place”, and social attitudes that kill people by placing the sensibilities of society ahead of life-saving programs such as safe injecting rooms and heroin prescription trials.

Last November, the prime minister announced an inquiry into the definition of charities and related organisations after a well-motivated Democrat initiative seeking to broaden “common law definitions [of charities] carried forward from 17th-century England”. But the sometimes gormless Democrats had better watch themselves, lest the government blind-side them with its own agenda.

Announcing the inquiry, which reports next month, Howard said: “We need to ensure that the legislative framework in which [charities] operate is appropriate to the modern social and economic environment.” Decoded, this may well be Howard-talk for applying the blowtorch to charities that step out of the government’s Dickensian comfort zone.

The Dickensian image of charity is epitomised by the soup kitchen and workhouse. Charities were there to mop up human detritus from the streets and salve the disquiet of the comfortable classes: “There but for the grace of God . . .” For decades workhouses gave shelter and gruel in return for virtual slavery and scant hope of breaking out of poverty.

Meanwhile, the terms of reference for the inquiry suggest that Howard’s reputed nostalgia for the past may involve a social vision much earlier than the 1950s. And the background issues paper to the inquiry provides loud hints of the government’s agenda. The committee conducting the inquiry noted that charities are increasingly focusing on “advocacy activities” and that some engage in “activities that in isolation would not be defined as charitable, religious or community service . . . for example . . . lobbying on behalf of disadvantaged client groups”. As plain as that.

The paper goes on to canvass whether charities that step out of the soup-and-shelter line of trade and have the temerity to suggest ways of preventing the revolving-door problems to which they minister, or criticise government inactivity, may lose their charitable status or have it downgraded.

Perhaps significantly, last November Tony Abbott, then employment services minister, told the St Vincent de Paul Society to pull its head in when it said Centrelink was trying to make the charity a de facto arm of government by referring thousands of people to it.

Also under fire could be groups such as the New South Wales Cancer Council, the largest charity in the state supporting research, patient support groups and efforts to prevent cancer. It has regularly got up the noses of different governments, lobbying forcefully for removing taxes on sunscreens, for the tax deductibility of outdoor workers’ clothes and hats, for law and tax reform on tobacco, and for more public money for services such as radiotherapy. If the Abbott model triumphs through the inquiry, any charity lobbying for reform in this way could be cut off at the knees.

Crews has not put a submission to the inquiry. He didn’t even know it was on. He has been too busy serving soup and fundraising, and talking about the jaws of poverty and what drives people into them. Many of those Crews assists are unable to fight their own battles. They’re shattered by the devastation of poverty. Many can’t read, let alone write letters to the minister. Marginalised, dirt poor and isolated, they can’t rely on supportive social fabrics such as old-school-tie networks to get them through when their luck is down.

Any charity that were to lose its charitable tax status would close its doors within weeks. The Exodus Foundation, which survives entirely on tax-deductible and other donations from the community, may well be one if it continues to step outside the government’s definition of charitable work. Tax deductibility is critical to the flow of public and particularly corporate benevolence.

There will be plenty of pragmatism in the boardrooms of the nation’s charities if the government’s goals are realised. Welfare charities, like the people they serve, will have to learn their place, button their mouths and be grateful for whatever role they can salvage. Acute problems such as feeding and housing the homeless will always take precedence over visionary concerns about ways of reducing poverty that involve structural reforms. Cancer research and support will be acceptable as long as they aren’t backed by expressions of concern about shortfalls in government support or services. If it’s a question of doing something or nothing, many will compromise and be cowed into submission.

Those within government departments cannot openly be critical of government policy. Likewise, policy advocacy by academics is often viewed with some suspicion, and considered of less importance than research and teaching. So it’s often been down to non-government organisations (NGOs) working in health, welfare and human rights to provide the bulk of informed coalface criticism to governments of both stripes.

During the past two terms of the Howard government, NGOs have lost grants partly because of the government’s Darwinian reverence for survival of the fittest but mostly because of a bulldozing contempt for any source of criticism. Now it seems charities risk being redefined as  band-aids rather than being critical forces advocating on behalf of those often least able to fend for themselves.

There is no doubt that this will be one more blow against equity and justice and will have tragic repercussions in many areas of society.