UNDER THE BRIDGE

Counting the homeless people the Greens sold out

Is the Housing Australia Future Fund first-best policy? No.

It’s a pretty dumb idea to put money in an account somewhere that may or may not be able to pay for housing in the future; there’s no reason that housing shouldn’t be funded out of consolidated revenue. It’s also pretty dumb for the Commonwealth to ostensibly take over responsibility for new social housing builds from the States; without some sort of overarching agreement they may well crowd-out State investment. And by the way, States don’t manage social housing very well. More to follow in a future post.

Dumb or not, it’s what’s on the table.

The Greens in rejecting what’s on the table have played for political points instead of people.

My guess, based on Max Chandler-Mather’s personally-authored bio, is that he has never taken a call from someone desperately seeking crisis accommodation just for tonight. And my guess is that Max has never had to tell that caller that there is no crisis accommodation available.

I have taken those calls. I have told that caller that I’m sorry there just isn’t any accommodation available tonight. It hurt me every time I said it.

Unconscionable conduct

Every day that Green politicians pass their lives in Canberra is another day that Australians are sleeping rough.

Narrow estimates are that 32,000 Australians are either sleeping rough or sleeping in shelters on any given night. It turns out that delivering census forms to people sleeping rough is difficult, so you should consider these numbers to be a lower bound estimate. And, of course, these figures pre-date the current housing crisis.

The Narrowest Estimate of Homeless People in Australia

Source: 1hand calculations based on ABS 2049.0.

Another 90,000 Australians are couch-surfing or otherwise in temporary or severely over-crowded habitation arrangements.

Adding those numbers together, we can also break it down by age. About 29,000 children 18 years or younger were homeless by this broader definition in 2021.

That’s 29,000 kids that will have to wait another 4 months for the Greens to make up their minds.

Homeless people by age

Daylight come and we want to go home

In what has been a grubby fortnight of Federal politics, on housing the Greens have managed to limbo under the incredibly low bar set by the major parties.