Australians Without a Home: Where They Sleep and How They Got There
Homelessness is a growing issue in Australia, with the number of people accessing homeless services each month jumping by eight percent over the past four years. This is double the growth rate of new houses built each year, according to the 2022 Australian Homelessness Monitor. In this article, we speak to Australians without a home about where they bed down each night and how they came to be there.
Lee Anthony: Sleeping Under an Inner-City Expressway
For the first four months of this year, Lee Anthony slept in the underbelly of an inner-city Sydney expressway. His mattress, propped each morning against a concrete pillar, had instructions written on it to stop council workers binning it. “A homeless person sleeps on this every night so please don’t remove,” he wrote.
It was not the first time the 58-year-old had slept on the street. “It’s just so confronting. It’s not supposed to happen,” he says. Mr Anthony was working in IT six years ago when his mental health began to decline. He put his possessions into storage, signed up to a public pool for somewhere to shower and spent days in the library learning a new programming language. Each night he covered his mattress in plastic, blew up his travel pillow, and tried to sleep.
Just as Sydney’s temperatures dropped to single digits, he got a break. Last month the NSW Department of Communities and Justice gave him a one-bedroom apartment in the Waterloo public housing towers. “That, to me, is literally like winning the lottery,” he says. “I can get my clothes and dress for interviews … and grab my laptop and apply for jobs — so it just fundamentally changes what’s within your possibilities.”
James: Pitching a Tent in Melbourne’s Outskirts
James clears just enough undergrowth to pitch a tent. It’s these discreet green spaces on Melbourne’s outskirts he turns to each night, hidden from dog-walkers and late-night joggers. “As a general rule of thumb, you look for places that have 24-hour accessibility,” he explains.
James is a former academic who went through a relationship breakdown through COVID. When the lockdown lifted, he couldn’t find anywhere to live. “I looked at everything from hostels to studio apartments to share houses, I even looked at renting a caravan,” he says. “But before I could get to inspections they were always gone.”
He, like so many other homeless people he meets, are what he calls “ordinary” Australians hit by sudden hardship, squeezed out of the housing market, eking out private corners in public spaces. “They had normal lives, some were industry professionals, some ran small businesses, they were normal people you’d normally meet in the street,” he says. “You wouldn’t know they were homeless unless you actually saw them in the shelter and they told you they were homeless, because they were very well put together.”
Katie Blackman: Living by a Gold Coast Highway
Katie Blackman is a Ballina flood refugee. Her tent is hidden in bushland beside a Gold Coast highway, where thousands of cars pass each day. The 49-year-old has lived there for more than a month. She has solar-powered lights, a pot-plant garden, and recycles containers for some cash.
“Being on the street can take your dignity away, your self-worth, your self-respect, your pride,” Katie says. “Some days I am embarrassed about it.” The disability pensioner can’t afford to rent again after the floods washed her home away. “Sometimes I feel like I am treated like a mongrel dog. I ask people not to judge, don’t judge straight up. There is a reason why most of us are in this situation,” she says. “Losing my rental home in the floods was a slap in the face and it makes you realise what you take of granted. I just wish a fairy godmother would wave her wand at me and make it better.”
Ron Hughes and Julie Ann Tucker: Living in a Campervan
Pensioner Ron Hughes lives in a campervan on a property in rural Queensland, where he works for the landowner in exchange for a fixed address. Before that, he and his partner Julie Ann Tucker, 68, lived in a Bundaberg tourist park. There, the 71-year-old became a mediator between his fellow homeless and local agencies, and says he’s helped about 20 people find a home in the past year.
The couple, now living an hour inland in Biggenden, feel despondent and exhausted, but know there are others worse off. “It’s not Australia. It’s very, very sad to see women and children and families on the street,” Mr Hughes says. “It’s very hard, and I feel so sad that it’s making me nearly ashamed to be an Australian.” This new stop in Biggenden is only temporary, as they sit on the social housing waiting list. “They have to stop putting people out on the street,” Ms Tucker says. “But there is just nowhere to go so at least the council should leave people camping on public grounds, instead of kicking them out.”
What’s Behind Australia’s Housing Crisis?
A welfare boost in the May budget has not been enough to dent the rapidly rising number of Australians without a home. The rate of homelessness varies drastically, depending where you are in Australia. In South Australia, it’s been fairly constant over four years. In Tasmania, homelessness is up 24 percent, and there’s been a 22 percent increase in Queensland.
And the number of people accessing homeless services has grown at more than double the rate in regional Australia, up 13 percent compared to six percent in capital cities. Australian Council of Social Services CEO Cassandra Goldie says the financial deprivation, and anguish it brings, is worse than she has ever seen.
But she says you can’t just blame global conditions for our housing crisis. “The severe cost-of-living crisis is affecting people on so many levels,” Dr Goldie says. “It is a very easy story to suggest that somehow this is the way things are and we are in tough times and there are global conditions. That is simply incorrect, we are here today in 2023 because of bad policy decisions and failures over the last 30 years.”
What is Being Done About It?
State and territory governments have announced and implemented a series of measures and the federal government has pledged to build a million new homes in five years under its Housing Accord. In December, it introduced legislation to set up a Housing Australia Future Fund – a $10-billion fund promising 30,000 social and affordable homes.
But it’s getting pushback from other parties. The Greens say Labor’s plan won’t do enough for renters, and the Coalition has criticised the government’s decision to allow a record 1.5 million migrants to arrive in Australia while there’s a housing crisis.