Events

"To state the obvious, the main reason people are homeless is because they dont have a house. Rates of housing affordability and availability have dropped to alarmingly low levels, with public housing becoming a safety net option only available for those with the most complex needs." Hollows and Keenan

Homelessness is one of the starkest examples of inequality in Australia as Andrew Hollows and Tony Keenan show. Presently 105,000 people are counted as experiencing some form of homelessness — one third are children under the age of 18, and 16 per cent are sleeping rough on our streets. While the narrative of homelessness has largely been about its impact in Sydney and Melbourne, it is overwhelmingly a problem in rural and remote areas, with an especially high overrepresentation of Indigenous Australians.

As well as being a particular form of inequality, homelessness compounds others. It impacts on the education of children, on health, and on political participation. Hollows and Keenan applaud the ‘joining up’ of housing, law reform, education, policing and social security policies in the Australian Government’s White Paper on Homelessness, making the obvious point that the key cause of homelessness is the houses stupid.

The collapse in expenditure in public housing alongside the growth in private rental demand and increased rental costs means that the degree of investment and policy reform needed to tackle homelessness is huge.

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