Urgent need for bipartisan plan on homelessness

15/05/2018

An alliance of housing and homelessness community organisations today called for all parties to support a bipartisan national plan to end homelessness by 2030.

The Everybody’s Home campaign is calling for a comprehensive plan that addresses all the causes of homelessness, including the chronic lack of social housing and affordable housing, poverty and family violence.

Everybody’s Home campaign spokesperson, Kate Colvin, said all governments had dropped the ball on homelessness since a 2008 commitment to halving homelessness by 2020.

Ms Colvin said the Launch Housing Homelessness Monitor released today quantifies for the first time what is driving growing homelessness rates in Australia, and our national response over the past decade.

“The Homelessness Monitor shows we’re seeing more people of every generation homeless, and more people being forced to sleep rough,” Ms Colvin said.

“It shows that punitive welfare policies and the inadequacy of Newstart and rising housing costs are forcing more people in to poverty.

“More women and children are escaping domestic violence and an increasing number of people are leaving prison and out of home care with no support or housing options.

“And with successive decreases in investment in social housing there is simply nowhere for thousands of people who are vulnerable or at risk of homelessness to live.”

Ms Colvin said Launch Housing’s Homelessness Monitor is a direction marker for what needs to be included in national a plan to address homelessness, including the need for 500,000 more social and affordable homes.

“And we need to take the lead from New Zealand, and pledge to rapidly rehouse people who are homeless and help them keep them in that housing,” she said.

“It’s time every side of Parliament put politics aside to make sure everybody in Australia has a home.”