The
closest feeling to having nowhere to stay for the night is that of a
broken heart. It is a feeling of abandonment, of rejection and
loneliness. When you are homeless you feel rejected by all, not just by
another.
Homeless people in Australia are not only the stereotypical person suffering from psychosis carrying around a few belongings in a shopping cart – although they certainly exist. Homelessness can mean couch surfing, relying on friends for temporary shelter, sleeping in your car, minding people’s houses when you can, or lodging somewhere where the lack of welcome can be palpable.
Homelessness can happen to almost anyone, especially in a country where housing is not a right and the housing market has become an investor’s paradise.
There are many homeless in Australia who are professionals or trades people. If you find yourself single, without property and with a health problem that prevents you from working much of the time, in a very short period of time you will go through your savings and probably your super. You will have to move into more Spartan lodgings and within a few years you will be homeless.
I worked mostly as a writer and editor in the public service, but as I moved into my forties my health condition began to take a toll. I have a cyst in the middle of my spinal cord in my neck. The symptoms are chronic and often acute neuropathic pain and chronic migraines. I have about four migraines per week which I control with imperfect drugs, but I am nearly always going in or out of a headache.
By my late forties I simply couldn’t go into an office and work. I do
have relatively good days when I could work, but I never know when
these will be. I have tried to keep up with freelance work, but as the
years have gone by my contacts have drifted away and mostly they want
you in the office.
I receive the Disability Support Pension from the government which is not enough to pay rent and bills as well as feed myself – it is either or. The 2017 Anglicare Rental Affordability Snapshot reported, “It is also important to emphasise the rental affordability crisis faced by people living on the Disability Support Pension (DSP). On the Snapshot weekend only 586 or 0.9% of properties Australia-wide are affordable for people living on the DSP. There were no affordable properties in Sydney, Brisbane or Darwin; only two in Canberra and Hobart, four in Adelaide and five in Melbourne and Perth.”
The lack of available properties is compounded by the extraordinary numbers of empty dwellings across the country. According to the recently released ABS Census on census night there were 1,089,165 empty dwellings or one in ten of all dwellings in Australia were empty, although other calculations - which specifically focus on speculative vacancies as opposed to people simply being out on Census night – put the figure at around 300,000, or about 3% of Australia’s 9.8 million dwellings.
What the Anglicare report does not tell you is that even if there is a rental property you can afford on a pension there is basically no chance you will be considered. When I applied for a unit a few years ago the agent took me aside and said, “You should know that with your income and your situation no agent will ever consider you for a property.”
I have been on the waiting list for public housing in NSW since 2009. I was kicked off the waiting list at one stage because I failed to reply to a letter. I have stayed in so many places who knows where the letter was sent. I certainly never saw it. I was sent to the back of the queue with no avenue of appeal. Mercifully they now make contact by text or email.
I watch our government and its internecine bickering and their failure to address housing affordability and homelessness with dismay. They seem to think the free market will somehow provide housing for all.
Every time the government announces a new crackdown on welfare I feel gripped with fear and a knot tightens in my stomach. The truth is, I feel ashamed of having to rely on the handout of the DSP and I avoid telling people that I receive it unless it is absolutely necessary. Ever since Joe Hockey announced the “end of the age of entitlement” the government conveys the idea that they are coming after you – it is the cruelty of politics.
The housing crisis comes from a long line of government decisions that have favoured investors over owner occupiers and renters. Soaring house prices began with Howard and Costello halving the rate of capital gains tax in the late nineties. Add this to negative gearing, and the investors piled in to the real estate market.
Then Howard and Costello removed taxes on high end super and self-managed super investors saw their chance and they piled in as well. After the GFC, property was the only asset class left that was still growing and so capital moved steadily out of the stock and bond markets into real estate. At the same time resources have been ripped out of public housing leaving longer and longer queues for those most in need.
Reversing these decisions might be the answer, but it is doubtful that a government whose chief supporters and constituency are generally the propertied class will act. But if governments fail to act it will simply mean more and more soup kitchens, doss houses, crime, and people sleeping rough.
When I grew up in 1960s Australia it was paradise – a little rough around the edges, but paradise. And it was paradise because the middle class dominated, the gap between rich and poor was relatively small and housing was plentiful and affordable. The Menzies government of that time wouldn’t recognise what we have become and they wouldn’t recognise the Liberal Party of today.
Given a little assistance I feel that I could still have a future where I could contribute, but without somewhere to live there are too many rungs missing from the ladder and I am left to peer in through the window from out here.
Homeless people in Australia are not only the stereotypical person suffering from psychosis carrying around a few belongings in a shopping cart – although they certainly exist. Homelessness can mean couch surfing, relying on friends for temporary shelter, sleeping in your car, minding people’s houses when you can, or lodging somewhere where the lack of welcome can be palpable.
Homelessness can happen to almost anyone, especially in a country where housing is not a right and the housing market has become an investor’s paradise.
There are many homeless in Australia who are professionals or trades people. If you find yourself single, without property and with a health problem that prevents you from working much of the time, in a very short period of time you will go through your savings and probably your super. You will have to move into more Spartan lodgings and within a few years you will be homeless.
I worked mostly as a writer and editor in the public service, but as I moved into my forties my health condition began to take a toll. I have a cyst in the middle of my spinal cord in my neck. The symptoms are chronic and often acute neuropathic pain and chronic migraines. I have about four migraines per week which I control with imperfect drugs, but I am nearly always going in or out of a headache.
I receive the Disability Support Pension from the government which is not enough to pay rent and bills as well as feed myself – it is either or. The 2017 Anglicare Rental Affordability Snapshot reported, “It is also important to emphasise the rental affordability crisis faced by people living on the Disability Support Pension (DSP). On the Snapshot weekend only 586 or 0.9% of properties Australia-wide are affordable for people living on the DSP. There were no affordable properties in Sydney, Brisbane or Darwin; only two in Canberra and Hobart, four in Adelaide and five in Melbourne and Perth.”
The lack of available properties is compounded by the extraordinary numbers of empty dwellings across the country. According to the recently released ABS Census on census night there were 1,089,165 empty dwellings or one in ten of all dwellings in Australia were empty, although other calculations - which specifically focus on speculative vacancies as opposed to people simply being out on Census night – put the figure at around 300,000, or about 3% of Australia’s 9.8 million dwellings.
What the Anglicare report does not tell you is that even if there is a rental property you can afford on a pension there is basically no chance you will be considered. When I applied for a unit a few years ago the agent took me aside and said, “You should know that with your income and your situation no agent will ever consider you for a property.”
I have been on the waiting list for public housing in NSW since 2009. I was kicked off the waiting list at one stage because I failed to reply to a letter. I have stayed in so many places who knows where the letter was sent. I certainly never saw it. I was sent to the back of the queue with no avenue of appeal. Mercifully they now make contact by text or email.
I watch our government and its internecine bickering and their failure to address housing affordability and homelessness with dismay. They seem to think the free market will somehow provide housing for all.
Every time the government announces a new crackdown on welfare I feel gripped with fear and a knot tightens in my stomach. The truth is, I feel ashamed of having to rely on the handout of the DSP and I avoid telling people that I receive it unless it is absolutely necessary. Ever since Joe Hockey announced the “end of the age of entitlement” the government conveys the idea that they are coming after you – it is the cruelty of politics.
The housing crisis comes from a long line of government decisions that have favoured investors over owner occupiers and renters. Soaring house prices began with Howard and Costello halving the rate of capital gains tax in the late nineties. Add this to negative gearing, and the investors piled in to the real estate market.
Then Howard and Costello removed taxes on high end super and self-managed super investors saw their chance and they piled in as well. After the GFC, property was the only asset class left that was still growing and so capital moved steadily out of the stock and bond markets into real estate. At the same time resources have been ripped out of public housing leaving longer and longer queues for those most in need.
Reversing these decisions might be the answer, but it is doubtful that a government whose chief supporters and constituency are generally the propertied class will act. But if governments fail to act it will simply mean more and more soup kitchens, doss houses, crime, and people sleeping rough.
When I grew up in 1960s Australia it was paradise – a little rough around the edges, but paradise. And it was paradise because the middle class dominated, the gap between rich and poor was relatively small and housing was plentiful and affordable. The Menzies government of that time wouldn’t recognise what we have become and they wouldn’t recognise the Liberal Party of today.
Given a little assistance I feel that I could still have a future where I could contribute, but without somewhere to live there are too many rungs missing from the ladder and I am left to peer in through the window from out here.
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