Our hidden homelessness crisis is one of our greatest challenges. Nigel McNay reports on those in the Border community with faith in a way forward
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
No one deserves to be homeless. No one deserves to be poor.
And no one deserves to be hungry.
For that, says Kevin Mack, “is the bottom line” when it comes to dealing with the all-pervasive crisis that is homelessness in the Border region.
“They don’t want to be where they are. Never form the assumption that they deserve what they get, because they don’t,” he says.
Without addressing these core issues but, most importantly he says, giving people in such dire need the skills and also the responsibility of solving their own problems, the cost to the wider Border community will be considerable.
It simply won’t get any better by itself, despite what many have said are the herculean efforts of homelessness workers at the coalface across Albury-Wodonga.
All those things that make people worry about, the Albury mayor says, are intrinsically linked to making a far better fist of tackling so many of those things that jar.
“These are the precursors of criminal behaviour, anti-social behaviour, drug taking and mental health,” he says.
“If you solve those basic elements then suddenly you’re on track to solving the other issues.”
Kevin Mack doesn’t speak from a soapbox. He’s been too busy helping do what needs to be done to settle into such convenient, misdirected, ill-informed ways.
It comes firstly from being part of a community for decades. And then it has been built-on through working so closely for many years with young people. That has been with his high-profile work as a Wodonga policeman, in helping resurrect the Albury PCYC and in establishing Youth Albury-Wodonga, which runs camps and programs for young people “at risk”.
What he has seen though with homelessness, as so many in the field recognise, is that the approach has to change.
An enormous amount of highly effective work is being done by the various agencies on the Border.
Everyone's working, everyone's doing their stuff and everyone's got very busy so everybody's got to be more independent and self-sufficient. Well, for the people who are falling through the cracks it doesn't work. From a social perspective we need to pull together better than we do
- Albury mayor Kevin Mack
But Cr Mack says that is not enough. The community has to get involved and government has to be “more solution-focused”.
“The homelessness we have is a social issue,” he says.
“You’ve got to actually get on the ground, you can’t throw money at a problem.
“You’ve got to work with the communities of interest and understand what the problem is.”
Many of those who have spoken about the Border’s homelessness crisis over the past two weeks have drawn attention to the root causes: the financial stresses caused by housing affordability and cost-of-living hikes; the scourge of mental illness; family breakdowns; and, the flight from domestic violence.
Goodwill on the ground means individual agencies on both sides of the border put the client first, making sure that all that someone needs is resourced by the agencies themselves. That way people are not pushed from one door to the next and so on.
But a common refrain is the lack of a genuine priority in the higher reaches of government, backed by long-term planning and the much-desired long-term funding.
The issue is growing at a rate many in the sector never anticipated, especially over the past five years though some indications of that were starting to arise even earlier.
What else that is happening earlier is just when people are seeking help for their problems, though many – which is the general concern – are not.
“Homelessness can happen to absolutely anybody, it can be the businessman behind the desk, whoever,” says Di Glover, head of Albury homelessness agency yes unlimited.
“And when we say we need a united approach to homelessness, that’s on an individual, community and government level.”
Katharine Hodgens senses there has been a subtle shift in the way families work as one way to explain the sudden increase in the past couple of years in the number of young mums becoming homeless.
She is the client services manager at Junction Support Services in Wodonga, where a youth supporter worker had to be moved to cater for this worrying trend. An especially concerning revelation was that about half of the 89 young people helped over the 10 months to April this year were fleeing domestic violence.
The surge in young mums becoming homeless has a possible other cause, though she says it is hard to know for sure.
“I don’t know whether homelessness was a huge issue for young parents possibly 10 years ago,” she says.
“It might have been the case then that families stayed together as a community and helped raise the children. Families are now kind of warning their kids to move out because they were young parents themselves.”
La Trobe University academic Darran Stonehouse is a strong advocate for government “at all levels” embarking on long-term strategic planning and in turn, implementing policies that make a genuine attempt at changing the way that all of society addresses homelessness”.
The former Albury-Wodonga homelessness worker is critic of the dismantling of the Rudd Labor government’s almost $9 billion National Housing Affordability Agreement this year, arguing it had left a stark policy vacuum in addition to the paucity of commitment to creating sufficient social housing.
“I think particularly with housing that we’re all involved. Whether you’re a homeowner or whether you’re someone looking to buy an investment property or someone trying to find a secure rental, it’s something we all share,” he says. “And there’s a lot of vested interests in leaving things as they are. I guess we see that played out in the debate about negative gearing as a really good example of who benefits and who might lose that benefit if arrangements were to change.”
It is clear, he says, that the whole community cares about homelessness.
“But translating that into actual political pressure and sustained community interest I think is the challenge.”
Albury-Wodonga has not wavered in the past when it has come to getting involved in such issues, such as the strongly supported and ultimately successful campaigns to get federal funding for a headspace centre in Wodonga and to build the Albury-Wodonga Regional Cancer Centre.
When St Vincent de Paul announced four years ago it would cut its 16 beds for the homeless at Quamby House, the outcry was immediate. This resulted in a forum in Albury’s St Matthew’s Church, which has been a community leader in helping those who sleep rough on Border streets.
Those packing the pews numbered 100-plus. They were told the number of homeless on the Border topped 400. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures have put the total at around 800 but it accepted the cities’ hidden homeless crisis means the number is far greater.
The turn-out though on that cold winter’s night at St Matthew’s is a clear example of what Cr Mack says is “one of the most generous communities I think in regional Australia”.
“Everyone's working, everyone's doing their stuff and everyone's got very busy so everybody's got to be more independent and self-sufficient. Well, for the people who are falling through the cracks it doesn't work. From a social perspective we need to pull together better than we do.”
While the rough sleepers are considered a tiny percentage of the true problem, given that so many people feel too much shame to approach agencies, Cr Mack says the community’s rough sleepers are still a reminder of what needs to be done. It’s a prevailing pattern of wandering the streets.
“The complexities of the issue just don’t go towards firstly providing them with a free home. It’s about providing them with support and the education to understand what its is and what it looks like in terms of affording that home and prioritising the money they do receive to pay for that home.”
Into that is blended their priorities with mental health, with drugs and alcohol and other issues that affect their behaviour.
But as much as many have decried the loss of the national housing strategy, Cr Mack is glad to see it gone. The profile for homelessness was significant, but the method of “throwing money at things” without a solution was flawed. “Just don’t look at a homeless person as a homeless person. Ask why are they homeless and what can we do to help them be better people so they can sustain themselves.
“The most successful process I’ve dealt with in my nearly 40 years of policing has been this community consulting process. This is where you sit the person of family down, sit the agency down with them. You’ve already prepared them with ‘what are your problems, what are your issues?’.
“And you have people in the room who can assist with that. Each person then talks about what they can provide and the family says who can help them. You come up with a plan for the family and they drive the plan.”