Wilks Park in North Wagga is another place where homeless people have been forced to live in tents. Photo: Chris Roe
The tragic death of a newborn baby in a tent at Wagga Beach has sparked calls for more to be done to address the growing homelessness crisis across the city.
On Saturday (2 May), emergency services arrived at Cadell Place where they found a 37-year-old woman, along with the body of a deceased newborn infant and a second infant.
The woman and the surviving infant were treated by NSW Ambulance paramedics before being taken to Wagga Wagga Base Hospital, where the baby remains in a critical condition.
While NSW Police say there are no suspicious circumstances regarding the death, there have already been calls for action.
“Why are women and their children living in tents in Australia?” activist Sherele Moody asked on social media.
She questioned whether Prime Minister Anthony Albanese knew that a baby had died and that a woman and another infant were in hospital.
“How the f*** do we not have enough housing for every Australian?” she asked.
A Wagga council paper indicated there were 257 homeless people in the city in 2024 — a 71 per cent increase from eight years earlier. Some live rough in tents in places such as Wagga Beach and Wilks Park.
Currently there are no rental properties in Wagga advertised for less than $300 a week. Given that an unemployed person receives about $400 per week, they would have to spend almost all their income on rent.
But that’s only if they can find somewhere to live, with the private rental vacancy rate sitting below two per cent.
The average rent in Wagga is about $555 per week, a roughly 40 per cent increase since 2021.
Wagga councillor Richard Foley said he had been sounding the alarm about the crisis for years.
“Vulnerable people, including women of child-bearing age, have been sleeping rough on the Wagga riverbank,” he said.
“This has been documented. This has been reported. This has been raised at council. And nothing adequate, in my opinion, has yet been done.
“This crisis has been duck-shoved between bureaucracies for too long. State agencies, federal departments and yes, at times this very council have passed responsibility around while vulnerable people sleep rough on our riverbanks.”
He called for immediate action from state and federal governments.
“Our Federal Government can find hundreds of billions of dollars for nuclear submarines. It cannot house and support its most vulnerable people. That is a moral obscenity,” he said.
