Sustained and passionate community action is absolutely critical to halting a further escalation of the Border region’s homelessness crisis.
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That is the resolute view of a La Trobe University academic who worked with the homeless in Albury and Wodonga for many years.
Darran Stonehouse said it was abundantly clear that a cultural shift in people’s attitude and a genuinely serious approach to government funding was needed.
And that had to happen with a degree of urgency as more and more people were being marginalised by homelessness on a daily basis.
“This is one of the most – if not the most – pressing economic-social issues that we have as a nation,” he said.
“Secure housing is so fundamental to every measure of health and well being that you could possibly identify.
“Without that safe, secure base, people struggle even more than they would otherwise.”
Mr Stonehouse said the evidence of the issue’s drastic impact on so many lives, both in the Border region and further afield, was already quite obvious, he said, and so the highest reaches of government simply had no excuses for not instigating long-term, wide-ranging planning and funding.
He was one of the authors of a detailed report into homelessness in the Hume region, released in 2016.
The La Trobe study drew on a range of organisations for the 173-page report, including Hume Region Homelessness Network, Rural Housing Network Ltd, Junction Support Services, Centre Against Violence, MIND Australia, Yarrawonga Health and the Department of Health and Human Services.
A key recommendation of this report was the need for a “comprehensive affordable housing and homelessness strategy to be developed for the Hume region”.
“While housing and homelessness services do well to manage growing demand, their ability to adequately address issues of housing affordability and homelessness are diminished in a context of policy uncertainty, resource constraints and geographical variations in need and access,” the report says.
The report highlights how there simply is not enough funding to “adequately respond to the scale and scope of the crisis” as the system is operating “well above capacity”.
Further, the report makes the damning finding that the policy response from government is “insufficient. Evidence would clearly suggest that forthcoming policies will need to divert significantly from the established status quo in order to alter the course of the crisis.”
And the only way this was going to change, Mr Stonehouse said, was for there to be this significant cultural shift in the attitude to homelessness.
Mr Stonehouse said that from a research point of view, “we have all the evidence in Australia now that we could possibly want to have to demonstrate what the problems are and what they stem from”.
“The evidence is clear that the challenge is really about getting government at all levels to recognise they need to genuinely show commitment to long-term strategies to address those issues,” he said.
Mr Stonehouse’s views are not confined to those of an academic, though he is conducting doctoral research into homelessness in Victoria and is also a lecturer and course adviser in social work.
He spent about 10 years at the coal face of these issues on the Border as a social worker in homelessness and housing, firstly with the former Youth and Family Services, now yes unlimited.
He then went to to work for Rural Housing Network, of which he remains a director.
“Generally speaking, we’ve shifted to a much more privatised approach to housing issues,” he said.
“And really we’re seeing the evidence that this is not working for a growing proportion of the population.”
This is one of the most - if not the most - pressing economic-social issues that we have as a nation. Secure housing is so fundamental to every measure of health and well-being that you could possibly identify.
- Darran Stonehouse, La Trobe University academic and former homelessness worker in Albury-Wodonga
What added to disappointment about no real action in the government sphere, Mr Stonehouse said, was the fact a previous constructive approach was abandoned.
“The reforms that had started under the Rudd government with the focus on the National Housing Affordability Agreement was heading in the right direction,” he said.
“There were certainly gaps and issues, but I think that was – if anything – a recognition of the role and responsibilities of government at all levels to recognised the problem.”
The housing scheme, which reputedly cost the federal government almost $9 billion since being introduced by Labor in 2009, was axed this year by the Turnbull government.
Concerns were that the scheme was costing the government about $1.5 billion a year without producing desired outcomes, given that the 2017 Report on Government Services revealed the housing supply had dropped by about 16,000 properties.
But Mr Stonehouse said there was an urgent need to address the federal policy vacuum on homelessness, especially a greater investment in social housing.
“I don’t like to talk about housing bubbles because I’m not an economist. But I think we might be forced into action because of a significantly deteriorating situation.”