At 03:22 PM 7/09/00 -0700, James wrote:
>You were a little quick on the trigger Damien! Check the stats.
>Per the Australian government: ~150k out of 20M people are currently
>classified as homeless by the Australian government. Note that this is
>worse than it used to be; the number of homeless were marked at about half
>that number a decade earlier.
I wondered about definitions. Here's some interesting material on that, at
an insane url:
http://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/ABS%40.nsf/dddcf05472f88677ca2568b5007b8615/3
7a673d098768d3bca2568a90013636c!OpenDocument
>A landmark research report released today by the Australian Bureau of
Statistics estimates that on 6 August
>1996 there were 105,304 homeless people in Australia.
>The report by Dr. Chris Chamberlain, Head of Sociology at Monash
University, analysed data from the 1996
>Census, from Supported Accommodation Assistance Programs (SAAP) throughout
Australia and academic
>research.
...>The definition of homelessness used in the study goes beyond those
people without a roof of any sort. Of those
>defined as homeless on census night, nearly half (48,500) were staying
temporarily with other households;
>one-fifth (20,600) were in improvised dwellings, tents or sleeping out.
Another 22 per cent (23,300) were staying
>in boarding houses on either a short-term or long-term basis. Finally
another 12 per cent (12,900) were staying
>in accommodation funded under the SAAP, such as hostels, refuges, night
shelters and other types of
>emergency accommodation.
...
The situation in individual States and Territories was as follows:
NSW 29,608
VIC 17,840
SA 6,837
TAS 2,014
WA 12,252
Qld 25,649
NT 9,900
ACT 1,200
This is quite revealing. The two populous States with big cities are NSW
and VIC, yet sparsely settled WA and Qld have nearly as many `homeless'. I
suspect this is because those are the States with the largest number of
aborigines living in some approximation of their traditional lifestyle -
much more unhappily, of course, since they don't go hunting and gathering,
but neither do they much like living in western houses, even when these are
provided. Queensland is also a benign place to hang out if you're young, on
the dole, doing some weed, surfing on the glorious beaches... and therefore
homeless. Not quite what I had in mind.
Two other considerations: I wonder if some of what would notmally be the
`homeless' in the USA are disguised as part of the immense jail population
which seems to be replacing dismantled social service and mental
institutions - 2 megahumans - 25% of the global prison population,
according to one site, which notes:
>About 1.3 million of the current jail population have been imprisoned for
non-violent crimes, usually drug offences.
>The annual bill for their incarceration is almost $26bn - about 50% more
than the government's entire spending
>on welfare and social security programmes.
And the rise in homeless in Oz has been attributed to the conservative
govt's growing crackdown on dole benefits, and closures of services.
Damien Broderick
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