Homelessness has increased to 116,000 people in Australia, according to a report by Melbourne-based housing support agency Launch Housing.
In the five years to 2016, the report found, homelessness jumped by 48 percent in Sydney, 36 percent in Darwin and 14 percent nationally. The number of people sleeping rough rose by 20 percent.
According to Launch Housing CEO Tony Keenan, “Australia’s housing market is at breaking point. More people are experiencing homelessness than ever before. People face rising costs of living, high rental costs and harsher income support penalties”.
The report’s authors – researchers from the University of New South Wales and the University of Queensland – note that government housing policy has significantly contributed to the problem.
Skyrocketing rents have priced many low income earners out of the market. Yet Commonwealth Rent Assistance payments are far too low to bridge the widening gulf between incomes and rent. 
Those priced out of the private rental market usually can’t secure public housing, either. In Victoria alone, nearly 80,000 languish on the waiting list for public housing. Despite the growing demand, government investment in “social housing” (an ambiguous term that refers to both public housing and not-for-profit private housing) dropped by 8 percent in the four years to 2016-17. 
Social housing stock grew at half the rate required to keep pace with population growth. 
The report also blames the government’s cruel welfare policies for rising homelessness. Increasing numbers of people have been pushed off the Disability Support Pension or other payments onto Newstart. Newstart payments are lower and have not increased in 21 years. Fifty-five percent of recipients live below the poverty line, meaning secure, long-term housing is increasingly out of reach. 
What’s more, recipients are made to jump through endless bureaucratic hoops or face sanctions such as having their payments suspended. The number of such benefit sanctions increased fivefold between 2011 and 2016, a situation that can easily lead to people falling behind in their rent. 
This punitive approach combined with successive governments’ refusal to invest in housing and welfare underpins the increase in homelessness. It is a social problem that could readily be addressed, yet governments continue to cut social services while lavishing the private sector with subsidies and corporate tax cuts.

Damian Vargas

Government policy causes homelessness 

Throughout Australia, crime rates have decreased, but the incarceration rate – particularly of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders – has increased dramatically. 
Despite making up only 3 percent of the population, Indigenous people are 28 percent of the prison population.
According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, Indigenous youths are 25 times more likely than non-Indigenous young people to be placed in juvenile detention centres, in which – as the Don Dale scandal revealed – they face degrading and abusive treatment.
In fact, young Aboriginal people are more likely to be thrown into prison than to attend university.
The high incarceration rate results from mandatory sentencing for minor offences coupled with the racist over-policing of communities. Aboriginal people are jailed disproportionately for the “crime” of swearing in public, for failing to pay parking fines and for other minor infractions. 
The dazzling rates of incarceration occur against a backdrop of poverty and homelessness – which affects about one-quarter of Indigenous people. 
Not only are Aboriginal people often targeted by police, but, once arrested, economic disadvantage often affects their ability to meet bail or get a lawyer, which means they are more likely to stay in prison on remand or to be sentenced unfairly due to poor legal representation.
The problems are not the result of poor life decisions – they are a result of government policy.
Take housing. The Turnbull government’s most recent budget has allocated no funding for housing in remote Indigenous communities. This is the first time that remote housing has been left unfunded in a federal budget since 1967 – the year Australia voted to count Aboriginal people in the census. 
The lack of funding will likely increase homelessness and chronic overcrowding of houses in remote communities, and may cause the loss of local construction jobs, causing higher unemployment. 
Indigenous people are harder hit by the lack of growth in public housing stock, because they earn, on average, just 70 percent of the wages of non-Indigenous people and have an unemployment rate almost twice as high. 
In Australia, public housing comprises only 4 percent of all housing, compared to 15 percent in the United Kingdom. 
But rather than invest in housing and other services, governments continue to oversee mass incarceration.

Crime rates drop but Indigenous people being jailed more than ever

Amid continual assaults against social security, public housing and wages, homelessness is rising in Europe, the UK, the US and Australia. 
An exception is Finland – where homelessness has fallen by 35 percent in the past eight years. The reason for the decrease is simple: the Finnish government has adopted a policy of providing homes for the homeless. 
In most other countries, homeless people jump through bureaucratic hoops to prove themselves worthy of having a roof over their heads. In Australia, emergency housing is poorly funded, overcrowded and dangerous, driving many – including a disproportionate number of retirement-aged women lacking superannuation funds – out of the system. 
But in Finland, housing is treated as a human right, so homeless people are given full and immediate access to public housing. The example shows that what is often presented as a complex issue is actually a matter of common sense: if houses are provided for the homeless, homelessness decreases.
Representatives of big business and government often claim that homelessness and poverty stem from a personal failure to take initiative: that the poor are simply not trying hard enough. But the real reasons could not be clearer. 
Across Australia, rents and utility bills have risen, wages growth has stagnated at nearly record lows and welfare payments are regularly cut by Liberal and ALP governments. 
Homelessness has increased by 70 percent over the past five years in Victoria, and the number of employed Australians seeking homelessness support has surged by 30 percent. 
Living conditions are getting worse, which makes people more likely to end up without their own place to live. 
Rather than meaningfully address the problem by building public housing, the Victorian Labor government is attempting to sell off nine inner-city estates to private developers. To deflect potential criticism, the government has promised to build 100 new social housing units over four years. But if current trends persist at even a fraction of their current rate, the rise of homelessness will far outpace this minor growth in social housing.
We could address the problem if, instead of treating housing as a commodity, we treated it as a human right.

A simple solution to homelessness

The number of evictions in Victoria has risen dramatically in the past four years – from almost 18,000 in 2012 to more than 43,000 in the 2016-17 financial year.
The reason is straightforward: as banks and property developers make astronomical profits from skyrocketing housing prices and rents, Victorians are being priced out of the housing market.
Average wages increased 75 percent between 2001 and 2016. But rents rose much faster, increasing by 110 percent. With real wages now stagnating, Centrelink payments pitiful and utility prices rising, working class Victorians are being squeezed.
Scandalously, stamp duty collections by the state government have increased by more than $2 billion since 2012 (reaching $6.5 billion). Despite this influx of revenue, the state government offers a pitiful $800,000 to address homelessness and has done virtually nothing to control rising rents.
Meanwhile, the Andrews government is selling nine inner city public housing estates to property developers.
The government claims there will be an increase in social housing. Yet the plans so far released clearly show that tenants will be crammed into a much smaller area of public land, and that there will be fewer bedrooms.
If someone is homeless, it means they lack a home. The obvious solution is to build more homes and let people live in them.

Government policy causes homelessness

Crime rates drop but Indigenous people being jailed more than ever

A simple solution to homelessness

Evictions rise, yet Vic government sells public housing

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