Homeless truths
The latest census shows the number of homeless Australians has risen more than 5 per cent since 2016, and lags in the data mean that many people currently sleeping rough aren’t captured in the count.
Clarice Quartermaine and her children had been without a home for a year and a half by the time the Australian Bureau of Statistics released its latest estimates of homelessness across Australia last week. Her family won’t show up in these figures.
Just weeks after Clarice filled out her census form in August 2021, she was evicted from their public housing property in Perth’s inner north.
The first night, she went to stay at her eldest son’s house in the southern suburbs, while her younger children caught a bus to the bush to try to find shelter with family in Western Australia’s Great Southern region. “Being homeless just tore the family apart, pretty much,” she says. “The stress and the pressure just affects you physically, emotionally and mentally.”
Clarice, a Noongar woman with chronic health issues, has been couch-surfing between family places ever since. “It’s drained us to the point where we feel like we’ve got no hope anymore … Sometimes we just want to end our lives.”
The ABS data show that the total number of people experiencing homelessness has increased nationally by 5.2 per cent in five years, to more than 122,000 people across Australia. While the per capita rate has dropped 1.6 points nationally since the previous census in 2016, it has increased in Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania.
But the lag between data capture and release has raised concerns that the ABS figures are already out of date and unreflective of the true scale of the crisis.
“The census data is better than nothing, but it’s measured every five years and it’s 19 months old the day it comes out,” says David Pearson, chief executive of the Australian Alliance to End Homelessness. “I mean, we just surely can do better than that. And if we want to actually manage and solve this problem of homelessness, we need to do better.”
A 2021 census officer, speaking to The Saturday Paper on the condition of anonymity, argues that the survey of homelessness in this latest round was more effective than in previous counts, and suggests the higher numbers across certain metrics is a result of better methodology.
“Are we just seeing what has always been there, and we’ve been happy, in our own privileged lives, not to look at it?” the officer asks, recounting conversations with rough sleepers who wanted to know why they were suddenly being counted “when they’d never counted before”.
“I remember going quite quiet really … The other responses that came from my colleagues were: ‘This is how you get seen, is by being counted. This is how we get the funding at the right places.’ ”
Nationally, the highest per capita increase was in Tasmania, where the number of people experiencing homelessness is up 45 per cent in five years. Among people aged 19 to 34, the increase is more than two-thirds.
Sebastian Pufke moved to Hobart at the beginning of this year to start a degree in engineering but was unable to find housing. “That was pretty rough, to be honest, and it made the start of uni much harder,” he says.
The 21-year-old spent his first two weeks of university sleeping on a camping mattress in a disused office space in Hobart. “Apparently the past tenants had used it for making soap, so the floors were all sticky,” Pufke says.
He couch-surfed with friends before finding a cabin at a farmstay outside Hobart for several weeks, in which time he says he applied for at least 10 properties. Finally, this month, he secured a house with friends close to the university.
“I’m pretty lucky,” he reflects.
“I was working, I’ve been able to save a bit of money … but you can see how quickly you could end up in a very unfortunate situation.”
The most visible form of homelessness around the country is what the ABS calls “people living in improvised dwellings, tents or sleeping out”. The number of people sleeping rough has actually declined since the 2016 census, which has been attributed to the pandemic response in some states.
“The Covid responses really targeted rough sleeping,” says Pearson.
In Victoria, where this cohort declined slightly between census counts, more than 1800 rough sleepers were provided temporary accommodation from July 2020. That said, issues have emerged with the transition to permanent housing for many participants in the “From Homelessness to a Home” program that was intended to permanently end rough sleeping in the state.
New South Wales – which accommodated more than 4000 people sleeping rough during the first year of the pandemic – recorded a 63 per cent decline in this population. However, the Audit Office of NSW also noted that 72 per cent exited temporary accommodation with an unknown housing outcome.
Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia were the only states where the category of rough sleeper numbers has increased since 2016. In WA, that number rose 114 per cent in five years, to a point where the state accounts for almost one-in-three people sleeping rough across the country.
Confronted by a state opposition calling WA “the homeless capital of Australia”, the state minister for Housing, Lands, Homelessness and Local Government, John Carey, told media last week that the census results were a “direct result of Covid and the pandemic”.
However, in response to questions from The Saturday Paper, Carey declined to expand on the role the pandemic may have played in the latest figures, instead repeating wellworn lines about new initiatives to address rough sleeping. He cited “a significant and continuing investment in transitional and crisis accommodation with a 143 per cent increase in accommodation between 2016 and 2021”.
Unlike other states, WA barely attempted to accommodate rough sleepers during the pandemic, despite a four-week trial for 20 people at the Pan Pacific hotel in April 2020.
Another shocking development in WA is the sharp increase in numbers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people experiencing homelessness, who now represent 35 per cent of the total, relative to a steady national average of 20 per cent of the overall population. Only the Northern Territory has a higher proportion of homelessness among First Peoples, and WA is now the only state or territory where more than 1 per cent of the entire Indigenous population is living on the street – almost four times the national average.
Ballardong Noongar man Desmond Blurton, deputy chair of the WA Deaths in Custody Watch Committee and a homelessness advocate, says more of his people have died on the street than from Covid-19. “We’ve got a homeless pandemic here with Aboriginal people,” he tells The Saturday Paper. “There’s nothing being done when our people are being let out of prisons, and they just walk the streets and they put pressure on other family members’ houses.
“Our Banksia kids can’t even get out on bail because their families haven’t even got a home,” Blurton says, referring to WA’S youth detention centre at Banksia Hill.
In the May budget, the WA government is expected to announce a $1.8 billion surplus, after record surpluses in 2020 and 2021.
“They’ve got a lot of surplus in this state that they’ve made off Aboriginal tribal lands,” Blurton says. “They have to start building culturally appropriate houses where we can sit down with our family members and talk about these things.”
Federally, the government is under pressure to explain why it can only muster $500 million a year for public, community and affordable housing. The Greens have proposed a national freeze on rent increases, along with 225,000 new social and affordable homes.
The Greens’ housing spokesperson, Max Chandler-mather, describes the government’s AUKUS spend of $368 billion for nuclear submarines as “morally repugnant” while it refuses to commit the $5 billion a year he says is necessary to address the national homelessness crisis. “We know that since 2021 homelessness would have surged, so perhaps the most alarming thing is that there is now almost certainly far more than 122,000 homeless,” he tells The Saturday Paper.
“Being homeless just tore the family apart, pretty much. The stress and the pressure just affects you physically, emotionally and mentally. It’s drained us to the point where we feel like we’ve got no hope anymore.”
Clarice Quartermaine is still waiting for a two-bedroom public housing property she can live in with her son as her carer. She’s almost given up looking for private rentals in Perth, which currently has the lowest vacancy rate in the country.
“The prices were ridiculous,” she says. “I mean, it is exhausting. We went to view a property that had hundreds of people there to see it.”
She agrees that the situation on the street is getting worse and attributes the death earlier this year of a family member in Perth to homelessness.
“There’s a lot of people, not just Aboriginal people but people of all nationalities,” she says. “Their health just deteriorates out there.”
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