Louise Miller-Frost (Boothby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This motion asks this House to note that this is National Homelessness Week, and it has a theme: to end homelessness, we need a plan. As the member for Macnamara mentioned, I've spent many years in the homelessness sector, helping people in this situation. In my first speech in this place just last week I spoke at length about the terrifying ease with which people with seemingly stable and comfortable lives can fall into homelessness. It truly can happen to anyone. I've seen it.

According to the 2016 census there were over 116,000 Australians experiencing homelessness that year. Over 19½ thousand of these were children under the age of 14, either unaccompanied or homelessness with their families. Children who experience homelessness are more likely to experience it again as adults. The damaging and unsettling experience of being homeless while your brain is still developing has lifelong consequences. Of those experiencing homelessness, 43 per cent are women, and older women are the fastest-growing demographic experiencing homelessness. Women experiencing homelessness are often less visible, less likely to sleep on the streets and more likely to be couch surfing, staying in dangerous relationships or making dangerous decisions just to be off the streets. And 8,200 of these 116,000 Australians experiencing homelessness were rough-sleeping. Once you're sleeping rough, your physical and mental health declines rapidly. Constant hypervigilance, fear for your safety, lack of sleep and getting inadequate food take their toll very quickly. The average life expectancy of an Australian sleeping rough is 50 years. We don't yet have the stats from the 2021 census, but I can tell you, from the sector, we expect them to have risen significantly.

I was honoured to be the co-chair for the first four years of the Adelaide Zero Project, which, under the guidance of Baroness Louise Casey and Nonie Brennan from the Institute of Global Homelessness, brought together services to work in coordination to address the needs of people experiencing homelessness in the Adelaide CBD, to end their homelessness once and for all. These services included not only the homelessness services but also health, police and local government services, as well as, of course, housing. Coordination of services at the local level is important, but, ultimately, unless there are housing outcomes for people, we just have well-coordinated people on the streets. Nothing changes. And affordable housing is not affordable for these people. It is not affordable for people in homelessness who've lost everything.

This government has inherited a severe shortage of rental properties and an increase in rental prices, and this is only going to exacerbate the number of people experiencing homelessness. Our newspapers are full of people experiencing homelessness for the first time—families separated because they can't all couch-surf at the same house; couples, both working, living in cars because their rent suddenly rose by 50 per cent; and caravan parks reporting that their accommodation is full of people living there long-term. But we shouldn't have to find sympathy via a newspaper in order to get a housing outcome. Doorknocking in Boothby, I came across people living in garages and squatting in derelict houses. People at community meetings told me about families living in cars, on the beachfront and in car parks. They told me about giving blankets and food to the man living behind the shopping centre in a wealthy area of the electorate. A man I met at a charity event pointed to his car and said, 'That's where I live now.'

To end homelessness, we need a plan. Given the theme of this year's National Homelessness Week, I am proud to be a member of the Labor government, which has a plan to address homelessness. Through our $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund, we will build 30,000 social and affordable houses in the first five years; provide $200 million for the repair, maintenance and improvement of housing in remote Indigenous communities; and provide $100 million for crisis transition housing options for women and children fleeing domestic and family violence and older women on lower incomes who are at risk of homelessness. I look forward to working with my colleague the Minister for Homelessness, the Hon. Julie Collins MP, as this government delivers on that plan to help people experiencing homelessness.

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