David Penberthy: We’re miserably callous about the homeless
THERE’S no better way to harden people’s hearts against the homeless than a tent city, writes David Penberthy. But that doesn’t mean our homeless crisis isn’t real.
A MIDDLE-AGED homeless man has taken up residence outside my local servo. He moved there about a year ago and has been there every day ever since.
He is a harmless person who doesn’t hassle anyone. He keeps his eyes peeled for smokers as they leave the store, politely asking if he can cadge a fag. Apart from that he keeps to himself. He props himself up on a rickety old walking frame. He wears ill-fitting pants and sometimes when he is walking around out the front of the servo or in the side street near the local park, his dacks fall down.
A couple of months ago I was in the servo waiting to pay for petrol when a man in front of me started complaining loudly to the staff. He was asking them to call the police to move the homeless man on. He explained that when he pulled in front of the store, with his teenage daughter in the front passenger seat, they copped an eyeful of the homeless man’s private parts. His dacks had fallen down again. The man was bordering on hysterical about the fact that his precious daughter had seen the homeless bloke’s old feller.
To his credit, the console operator said calmly “Leave it with me, I’ll see what I can do”, but when the man left the store, he did nothing, aside from raise an eyebrow and have a quiet laugh while serving me.
The manner in which that man complained seemed such a miserably callous, middle-class reaction, where a destitute, accidental flasher was treated not as a human but as an irritant who should be removed from sight.
There is a mindset out there that in a country as affluent as Australia, with a welfare system as generous as ours, there can never be any excuse for panhandling or lying about in public spaces. It’s a pretty unthinking position.
Everyone I have ever spoken to who works with the homeless says that one of the key reasons people sleep rough is not poverty but mental health. These health problems become the precursor to poverty, where people are so unwell that they are unable to function in any workplace. They are often also alienated from family and friends as a result of their condition.
In addition, the growing use of ice and the continuing scourge of domestic violence forces others onto the street.
Rarely is there a case of homeless people simply being bludgers who are voluntarily opting out of productive life, in return for the apparent joys of sleeping under a piece of cardboard in a park.
In the past few weeks the epicentre of Australian capitalism, Sydney’s Martin Place, has become the venue for the creation of a ramshackle Tent City of homeless people. The scenes are reminiscent of those in Melbourne earlier this year, when homeless people congregated at Flinders St and had to be booted out when things turned nasty.
These protests strike me as stupid and counter-productive.
As was the case in Melbourne, the Sydney Tent City appears to be less a desperate reaction to a lack of available shelter than a deliberately political statement, organised not by the homeless but hard line outsiders. I can’t think of anything more likely to push average Australians into the camp of that flint-hearted bloke who complained in the servo.
The people in this Tent City are being held up as a troublemaking rabble who must simply be moved on. That has been the tenor of much of the coverage and opinion writing on the topic. The cause has been further damaged by the self-styled “mayor” of the Tent City, New Zealander Lanz Priestly, being revealed as a longstanding criminal troublemaker with priors for assaulting women, who has lived off the lam in Australia since the 1980s.
Martin Place has clearly been chosen by the organisers as the venue for their demonstration to make the contestable point that capitalism is somehow to blame for the plight of the homeless. I would beg to differ.
If it’s real life-threatening deprivation you’re after, look to a planned economy such as North Korea, or the nations in Africa that are devoid of business infrastructure or investment to get money moving through the economy. Think not of modern capitalist China but China under Mao with its great leaps forward, or pre-Suharto Indonesia, where tens of millions of people have lifted themselves out of penury as the middle class has exploded in growth.
Rather than being the cause of homelessness, capitalism could provide an answer. One of the more novel grassroots inventions of the new economy has been Airbnb. Motivated by commercial gain, private citizens have identified rooms they own as surplus to requirements, or capable of being shared from time to time, and let them out for a fee. You wonder how many commercial buildings and homes in this country are sitting empty and idle.
The cost to government of creating and funding emergency accommodation could be reduced if it farmed out that responsibility to amenable private owners for a commercial return. This could provide the cashed-up with an incentive to share spaces that serve no current benefit to anyone, aside from their long-term investment value.
In his own sad way, the homeless guy down at the servo has been afforded a comparatively safe space by the people who work and shop there. He is given food and drink and some shelter from the weather. But he doesn’t have a proper roof over his head, and there are plenty of roofs in this country that have got nothing under them. There has to be a better way.