Luke Quinn dreams of the day he can get his daughter back. First, he needs a place to live.
Like most homeless residents of the Gold Coast, the 36-year-old has been moved on by the local council. He estimates that’s happened up to eight times in the six years he’s slept rough.
These days, he keeps on the move, hiding out of public view to avoid the rangers. He said they often strike without warning, seizing an entire tent to take to the tip.
“There’s no attempt at helping people better their situation. The light at the tunnel’s end is not pointed out, you know?” Quinn said.
Sign up for the Breaking News Australia emailThe Gold Coast, like Brisbane and Moreton Bay, north of the city, continues to expand what it calls its “enforcement-led” homelessness policy. Other councils, like Ipswich and Logan, have maintained a welfare approach.
For a year and a half, the state government has refused to endorse one approach over another. But that could soon change.
A recent meeting of Gold Coast councillors heard the state’s transport department had approached the Gold Coast council to negotiate an agreement for council rangers to expand their patrols to clear homeless people from state-owned land.
Advocates say the move is tantamount to endorsing the hardline approach and would deny homeless people one of the last refuges from rangers. Even worse, it could lock many of the most vulnerable into an endless cycle of punishment.
St John’s Crisis Centre’s general manager, Dianne Kozik, said the service had encouraged some of its homeless clients to move on to state land, such as the beachfront.
Often, it’s the only place they can stay close to services without being moved on regularly. She said the state government agreement would deny them one more refuge, asking: “Where does the human go?”
Council staff told councillors they were negotiating a “100% cost recovery model” and that the state would subsidise the entire cost of expanding the program.
“This is strictly a compliance conversation, so it’s not a conversation about outreach or welfare services or housing pathways … (it’s about) ensuring compliance with illegal camping and any other breaches of local law in those areas,” the council’s public safety compliance manager, Matthew Werner, said.
A spokesperson for the Department of Transport and Main Roads said it had started negotiating the agreement “following a high volume of complaints relating to anti-social behaviour and illegal camping at a number of sites across the Gold Coast”.
“Any individuals identified as experiencing homelessness have been offered support services with relevant state government agencies and specialist homelessness services,” they said.
But homelessness academic Cameron Parsell said the state government’s recent changes meant that was no longer true – not every homeless person was eligible for housing assistance.
‘Clear systems failure’
The Liberal National party government has repeatedly tightened up eligibility requirements for housing assistance to the homeless.
Under its most controversial change, a tenant breached for bad behaviour three times in a year is banned from long-term social housing and state funding for temporary accommodation in hotels or motels.
By March, the policy had seen 84 public housing tenants evicted, 495 issued a warning and 34 banned from returning for two years, according to a recent response to a question in parliament.
Cameron Parsell, a professor of social sciences at the University of Queensland, studied a similar three-strikes policy implemented under Campbell Newman’s government.
He found the policy had led to the evictions of people for the very reasons they were eligible for assistance – drug use, mental illness, trauma, or long-term homelessness. The government had predicted precisely those problems, but instead of solving them, had punished the individual, he said.
“That is a real clear systems failure, and now there’s just an additional layer in terms of the intervention into public spaces when people are evicted,” he said.
People made homeless by the policy are already getting evicted from parks. In February, 19 people were moved on from Brisbane’s Musgrave Park with the aid of bobcats.
Only nine were eligible for social housing, while “the remaining individuals were ineligible for temporary accommodation for various reasons, including previous eviction from temporary or supported accommodation, ineligibility for social housing, had refused offers of other accommodation types or had declined to engage with services”, according to a second parliamentary response, and “three people had previously been evicted from social housing”.
Parsell said those people were caught in a “paradox or loop”, with no alternative to endless move on orders.
“They are ineligible to live indoors and banned from living outdoors,” he said.
“It’s a monstrous catch-22, and it doesn’t exist by accident.
“[It’s] predicated on … the government judging that their behaviour is the wrong way to live, and if you’re not going to improve yourself, we’re going to enact policies to make you improve”.
Kozic said the government needed to tell homeless services how to deal with people who were moved on but were ineligible for assistance.
“There needs [to be] an alternative, and I’d like to know what it is,” she said.
“There’s no responsibility taken. They’re not just numbers, they’re actually humans, and they have a right to live somewhere”.
The minister for housing, Sam O’Connor, was contacted for comment.
There are 58,927 people on Queensland’s social housing waiting list.
