Cameron Daddo is rooting through a giant skip, looking for some insulation in the form of a cardboard box as he’s going to be down at the beach tonight, sleeping rough.
A group of men walk past, taunting him: “Oi! Bin boy!”
The comments shake him. “Cardboard Cam,” he says despondently, before heading back to his makeshift shelter near some of Sydney’s most expensive real estate. Life is hard enough sleeping rough, without people being cruel, says Daddo, and his eyes well up with tears.
Daddo cries a lot in this documentary. He’s not the only one. Now in its second season, SBS’s Filthy Rich and Homeless sends privileged Sydneysiders out to live on the streets for 10 days and to report back about their experiences and insights.
I admit there was a cynical part of me that approached the show with trepidation, thinking, “This is all just poverty porn.”
But without empathy there can be no compassion, and without compassion our hearts are not running at their full capacity, and there is no will to push for social change.
An empathic response to homelessness might be to ask: What if it were me? I’ve never imagined myself homeless until watching this show. How it might happen? I wondered. How would I cope?
This three part documentary – as with SBS’s similarly structured asylum seeker series, Go Back to Where You Came From – is an experiment in empathy, where “people like us” experience the conditions of “people like them”. By the end, hopefully, we realise there’s not too much difference between us and them, ideally translating this insight into changes in our day-to-day lives.
The personalities on Filthy Rich and Homeless act as a bridge between our comfortable lives as we watch the show from the warmth of our homes and the homeless people we pass every day on the streets of our cities.
There’s Skye Leckie, a fundraiser and socialite who has raised millions of dollars for charities, yet believes that anyone can do well if they work hard enough. There’s Daddo, an actor and media personality who lost everything in the global financial crisis, who nevertheless believes that a solid work ethic equals success. There’s also Alex Greenwich, independent member of the NSW parliament, writer Benjamin Law, and Instagram personality Alli Simpson.
The show starts in a harbourside warehouse in Sydney where the five participants are told to hand over their jewellery, wallets and phones. Immediately, they start to feel more vulnerable. Daddo feels weird without his reading glasses, Leckie without her phone, while Greenwich misses his wedding ring.
They are then given clothes that are functional rather than flashy. Says Greenwich: “I feel slowly we are losing our shields, and the clothes were another loss for me.”
Leckie is already feeling shaky and she hasn’t even left the warehouse: “It’s hour by hour now. I’m not in control.”
As they depart for various destinations around the city, lugging cheap stripy bags, the participants look genuinely frightened about what is ahead for them.
Some fare better than others. Law, for example, is able to charm his way into a posh dental clinic on the North Shore and get a toothbrush kit. The camera crew visit him while he has decamped to a spot with a harbour view, and is reading a book while wrapped in his sleeping bag. Social researcher and homelessness expert Dr Catherine Robinson gives him a dose of reality, telling him he “probably has a sense of entitlement” that allows him to think that if he asks for something (like the toothbrush kit) he will be given it.
“If you’re in a position that has brought you into rough sleeping, imagine what you would have had to go through in your life to have lost every option. So you’re not thinking, ‘I’ll go into that fancy looking dentist and ask for toothbrush and toothpaste’.”
The show is certainly empathic, but what’s missing in the first episode, and what I hope to see in the later episodes, is an examination of why there is such an increase in homelessness. A show like this, if it is to be really balanced, requires examination of the structural problems in our society – such as income inequality and housing affordability, as well as domestic violence – that are the root causes of homelessness, not simply the personal experience. And while it has definitely encouraged me to give more money to beggars, I’d like to know what the government plans to do to reduce these structural problems that give rise to a more unequal society.
After all, where is the consolation in all this for actual homeless people? What has changed for them? Now the contestants have left the show, and the streets, and are back in their homes, sleeping in their own beds. They’ll have their social networks and shoes that fit and a fridge full of food, friends to call and a phone to call them on.
Still, the show is tremendously illuminating regarding not only the big personal issues that come with being homeless – personal safety, malnutrition, ill health – but the small insults, too. Being judged by others. Not being able to find a public toilet that’s open at night. The humiliation of asking for money. It’s the paradox of being both too invisible and too seen.
TV like this is ambitious. It needs to be entertaining but it also aspires to do some good. The real test will be if enough people watch and are changed by the experience.
As a viewer, I fell apart not at the cruelty, but at the kindness. Skye Leckie is at the train station, she’s begging and she’s not getting very far. How the hell is she going to find money for food, I wondered? Then a woman comes past and gives her an apple, an orange, a hot coffee, some coins and a $50 note.
Leckie broke down weeping at the act of kindness. It not only meant the difference between whether she would eat or not, but it shifted her worldview. And it shifted mine.
• Filthy Rich and Homeless is showing over three nights from 14–16 August on SBS at 8.30pm
