Mayors’ plea on homelessness: give us funds to fix this now

Helen Matthews has run the gamut of homeless experiences, but after eight years she secured a place in community housing.

Helen Matthews in Melbourne’s Collingwood. Picture: Stefan Postles

Helen Matthews has run the gamut of homeless experiences, from rough sleeping in Melbourne’s Flinders Street station to couch surfing to rooming houses for women.

She feared for her life in some places, she said, and wanted for privacy in all of them. Finally, after eight years, she secured a place in community housing, a place with a lounge room.

“It’s the lounge room that really makes a difference,” she said. “I can have people come over to my place. I don’t have to go to common areas like what happens in bedsits, where people you don’t know are listening.”

Ms Matthews, 55, became homeless in 2010, two years after Kevin Rudd’s pledge to halve homelessness by 2020, when numbers sat around 105,000. The most recent census in 2016 had more than 116,000 people identifying as homeless. The Coalition’s six years of government haven’t shifted momentum. The issue is thorny, complex and expensive.

A delegation of lord mayors is set to meet with federal ministers in Canberra on Wednesday in an attempt to revitalise efforts to support people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness.

Their message is a “housing first” approach — to prioritise ­social and affordable housing in inner cities as a key national infrastructure priority. Other supports — mental health, employment, education — while critical for long-term success in keeping people out of homelessness, can be provided once accommodation is secure.

Melbourne Lord Mayor Sally Capp sees an urgent need to refresh the national effort on homelessness. “At the moment, it’s too easy for one arm of government to look at another and say ‘you need to fix it’,” she said. “Decades of governments at all levels have simply not allocated the resources needed to ensure appropriate housing for those in need.

“We need to reset how we think about housing support. It should be seen not so much as social policy, but as a key economic infrastructure priority.”

The mayors are to meet Social Services Minister Anne Ruston and Assistant Minister for Homelessness Luke Howarth. They are calling for a council of housing ministers to be created as a priority, and for a national housing and homelessness strategy based on a “housing first” approach.

They are seeking funding for inner-city sites to be turned into affordable housing.

Ms Matthews acknowledges her path to homelessness was driven by a complex family situation, mental health issues and addiction. But she is now on an even keel.

“It would be great if places were built that were just part of the community, and didn’t identify you with having something that had gone wrong in your life,” she said.