Gold Coast’s homelessness crisis: The camp site with a million dollar Surfers Paradise view

The homeless are everywhere in our city and will be in growing numbers with the economic storms on the horizon – some have even moved to million-dollar real estate.

Last week’s column was about homeless moving out of the CBD, camping in the toilets of junior sporting clubs.

What was the reaction? The Southport councillor publicly trashed it.

On her Facebook, Brooke Patterson thanked Southport Tigers Rugby League Club “for their call to assure me they had nothing to do with the comments attributed to them in the GC (sic) Bulletin beat up today”.

Homeless crisis on the Gold Coast – a camp site near five-star hotels for Surfers Paradise.

She later added: “There were so many errors in it (the article). Not the least the main premise that rough sleepers are moving to these areas because of being moved on from the CBD.”

A reader later wrote: “It was an absolutely disgraceful story to suggest homeless people were a danger to kids.”

Let just be real clear here, the intent of the article was to highlight:

* A safety issue where a Tigers parent “moved on” a vagrant who had defecated on a footpath after he and his partner took over the toilet block next to where Owen Park juniors train.

* Again a safety issue of such concern we can now add police were making patrols.

* That this safety issue was also for the homeless, because at nearby Ashmore an older woman, alone in her car, was parked with longer-term vans outside similar playing fields.

Another tent in the camp.

The bigger picture here is an accommodation crisis, the debate about which level of government is responsible and how to help the mix of those requiring services – so incredibly complex.

When a nine-month-old baby was dumped in the Tweed river in 2018, your columnist visited homeless haunts from Broadbeach to the border.

An older woman who tried to protect that baby told me how she was bashed to the ground. Council workers and child safety staff tried to intervene, but their safety was also at risk.

Asked about safety in these haunts, a senior police source replied: “Many of these people have more form than Phar Lap. A lot of them are on crack or meth.”

Some homeless are in gangs, the men violent, their older women and young at risk.

Cr Patterson quite correctly wrote that “public safety is primarily a matter for the state government”.

A camp site among trees on the Nerang River near Surfers Paradise.

Her colleague Pauline Young was similarly contacted this year by this reporter after being sent photographs of a homeless couple caught having sex in a north Burleigh toilet used by nippers.

She had actioned extra security patrols and more CCTV footage. End of story.

Cr Patterson deserves recognition for meeting with other agencies and helping drive council’s expanded work in a sector abandoned by councils to include “homeless officers”. Since January they conducted 5000 interviews and helped 400 homeless.

But let’s also remember that as a candidate, Ms Patterson told me, for a story, that the phrase “not my job” would be banned from the working council vocabulary if elected in Southport.

So your columnist is walking south of the Southport CBD to Surfers, where there is this lush green undergrowth by a white stretch of sand on the Nerang River, mirrored by a blue sky.

On closer inspection there’s a camp site. Lovely lights strung up around the tents.

The shelters in and around Surfers are even being decorated.

Homeless with million-dollar property views, having a five-star hotel as neighbours.

The homeless are everywhere in our city and will be in growing numbers with the economic storms on the horizon.

So let’s be real clear about this – “my job” in highlighting this emerging crisis was to accommodate some sensible solutions. Everyone’s job is to help fix it.

Follow @PaulWestonGC