Mission Australia has called on the Turnbull government to commit to halving homelessness in the next decade as it released a report naming domestic and family violence as the number one driver of homelessness.
The charity wants state and federal governments to commit to halve youth homelessness by 2020 and overall homelessness by 2025, and to reduce the number of lower income Australians living in severe rental stress.
Mission Australia chief executive Catherine Yeomans used the launch of its 2015 homelessness policy on Monday to urge the government to endorse the targets.
The report notes that keeping someone in their home is much more effective than responding to their increased needs once they become homeless.
“Domestic and Family Violence (DFV) is the number one reason people seek help from a homeless service, particularly women and children,” the report says.
“Efforts to reduce DFV need to be drastically expanded including high quality education in schools, broader public awareness, law and policing reforms, perpetrator programs and significant boosts to gender equality.”
Yeomans told Guardian Australia years of government inconsistency had contributed to increased homelessness, which she expected to be confirmed in the next census.
“Over the past few years the focus and funding and continuity of funding hasn’t been there,” she said.
“There are 105,000 Australians homeless on any given night ... we’re going to have a new census come out in 2016 and we are worried those homeless numbers are going to go out, we think it will increase, not decrease.”
The report says more than 450,000 low-income households live in rental stress, and in 2013–14 an estimated 254,000 Australians were supported by specialist homelessness services.
“When we look at the number of people sleeping rough on the streets, it’s certainly not going down, what we know is that people sleeping rough on streets represent 6% of the population,” Yeomans said.
“Then there’s the so called ‘hidden homeless’ – families are the fastest growing group [among those not sleeping rough]. The reasons for this are housing affordability – people talk about housing affordability as people not being able to afford to purchase their first home, but actually what we see is it playing out in rental stress, and people being quickly tipped into experiencing homelessness.”
The homeless policy 2015 called for a “zero tolerance” approach to people becoming homeless when leaving state care such as hospitals, drug and alcohol units, correction centres, detention centres and mental health institutions, as well as young people in the out-of-home care system.
“Supports need to be provided to people well before they exit institutions, and governments should be held accountable for these outcomes over the medium term,” the report said.
It calls for the funding of 200,000 new social homes by 2015 and a further 4,200 Indigenous-owned and controlled homes.
Yeomans said she had not yet sought meetings with Malcolm Turnbull or the new treasurer, Scott Morrison, but she was encouraged by their general comments on homelessness.
