Pegging compliance action requests to the tents of homeless people is unlikely to solve the problem. Photo: Supplied.
Let’s demolish dozens of public homes at Tolland Estate.
We won’t replace them until 2030. And those other empty social housing properties scattered around Wagga? We won’t fix those up either. Let’s just leave them sitting idle.
It might add to homelessness, but the local council can always threaten people with $1100 fines if they refuse to leave their makeshift camps at Wilks Park and Wagga Beach.
Then, we’ll pay motel operators hundreds of dollars a night to put each of them up. That might inflate prices for everyone, cause a shortage of motel rooms and hurt Wagga tourism – but we’ll deal with that problem later.
The above might sound like the ranting of someone insane, but it is actually a succinct summary of the NSW Government’s policy to combat Wagga’s homelessness crisis.
Some bureaucrat, somewhere, has actually come up with all these ideas and had them approved and actioned.
It’s clear we are doing this wrong. We’re demolishing public housing after decades of failing to construct enough of them. We are relying on hotels that are expensive and often unavailable, and threatening people with fines for having nowhere else to go.
The obvious answer is to build a serviced temporary camp now – somewhere safe, stable and properly supported – while fast-tracking the building of permanent homes. That would be both cheaper and more effective and humane than what’s happening now.
Nobody pretends homelessness is an easy problem to solve.
But is it possible for our leaders to have handled things any worse since the tragic death of a baby in a tent raised hopes that everyone would finally work together to provide shelter for our most vulnerable residents?
The government’s first response was to form a mysterious “emergency working group” to combat the problem.
But here’s the rub: nobody really seems to know what this group is doing.
The NSW Government says Homes NSW, homelessness services, police and Wagga Council are working together. Yet on the ground, the people who actually understand the problem – homeless people themselves and local advocates who have spent years helping them – have been left out.
Wagga’s Vickie Burkinshaw, Chris Roche, Leigh Swansborough, Tim Verhoef, Moyra Shields and Richard Foley have all been working directly with the homeless to help them find shelter, but none have even received a phone call from the working group.
And the bureaucrats don’t even seem to be talking to each other.
When council bulldozed a homeless campsite at Wagga Beach, it said Homes NSW was driving the compliance action. Homes NSW denied directing it.
Then there was the great Ashmont social housing debacle.
The government promised 12 factory-built homes. The minister said they were complete while her own bureaucrats said none of them were.
Take your pick.
Meanwhile, Tuesday this week was supposed to be D-Day for the homeless people at Wilks Park – the date by which the council had told them they needed to leave.
Police officers and Wagga Council workers move through the Wilks Park campsite issuing letters earlier this month. Photo: Supplied.
The council said alternatives had been offered, but with social housing in desperately short supply, many people had been moved into hotels and motels instead.
Then came the punchline.
On the very day people were supposed to leave, there were no hotel or motel rooms available in Wagga.
Region searched online and found one solitary room – at the International Hotel for the bargain price of $999 for one night.
That neatly demonstrates the folly of relying on commercial accommodation as a homelessness strategy.
Hotels are designed to accommodate tourists, workers, families and visitors – not to function as a giant, taxpayer-funded emergency housing system.
And when the rooms are full, the entire strategy falls apart.
Worse, it starts hurting Wagga’s tourism economy too – anyone visiting the city early this week would have had to sleep in a tent or drive to Junee if they wanted a bed for the night.
So what is the alternative?
It is the solution advocates have been suggesting from the beginning: build a temporary, serviced camp.
A properly managed transitional site could have cabins or dongas, toilets, showers, kitchens, electricity, security and, crucially, support workers on-site.
Australia already builds temporary villages for disaster victims, seasonal workers and major infrastructure projects. Governments can install this infrastructure within weeks when they decide something is urgent.
The government keeps ignoring this idea, but look what it has come up with: demolish houses, move people on, book them a motel room and hope the problem disappears.
It won’t – it’s just causing more headaches.
So stop moving the tents. Stop moving the problem. Give people somewhere safe to pitch them – and the support to get them into permanent housing.
