Olympic plan targets homeless
By Sean Healy
The NSW government plans to get homeless people off Sydney's streets during the September Olympic Games. Dossiers are being drawn up on individual homeless people and unused government buildings are being readied as temporary accommodation sites. The government has even left open the possibility of bussing the homeless to accommodation as far away as Newcastle and Wollongong.
The plans, first revealed by the Sun-Herald on January 16, coincide with the introduction of new Sydney City Council "rangers", assigned to Circular Quay and other high-profile tourist areas, who will have sweeping powers to move homeless people on. They will be able to use "reasonable force" against any person deemed a "nuisance or annoyance".
City officials implemented similar measures in Atlanta, before the 1996 Olympic Games there. Homeless people were rounded up and bussed more than 300 kilometres away and homeless rights groups documented 9000 arrests of homeless people between May 1995 and May 1996 for loitering and begging, four times greater than in earlier years.
The NSW government has painted its plan as a simply an increase in emergency accommodation. The Department of Community Services will triple the number of its own beds to 200, will pay for extra rooms in hostels and boarding houses and will make them available to the homeless. Several Department of Health properties, including disused hospitals and nurses' quarters, are also being considered as temporary accommodation.
Labor Premier Bob Carr has denied anything sinister in the operation: "The government is working to make sure that support services meet demand. This is nothing whatsoever to do with the Olympics."
Carr ruled out bussing people away against their will and said his government was preparing a "homelessness protocol" to govern both police operations during the games and the city council's new powers.
But neither welfare service providers nor homeless people are convinced.
Not convinced
"It's good that the premier has made a commitment not to forcibly move people", NSW Council of Social Services director Gary Moore told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly. "But we'll only know how real that commitment is when we see the details. We'd need to know, where are these hotels and hostels located, where are these surplus government properties and who is going to police this protocol."
Shelter NSW's policy and liaison officer, Will Roden, is also wary of the government's claims. He told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, "The danger of harassment is real and not only from the police or the councils. Many of the areas where the street homeless sleep, Belmore Park for example, are being turned into 24-hour live sites during the Olympics — people will simply be displaced, forced out."
Shelter NSW has called on the government to appoint a homelessness ombudsman to police the protocol and liaise with welfare services. This proposal, warmly supported by other welfare services, has been met with silence by the government and the Sydney Olympic Games Organising Committee.
The games may even create greater levels of homelessness. "There's a major problem for those in boarding houses and other temporary accommodation", Moore revealed. "It's not yet wholesale but there have been more examples which have reached us of boarding house owners evicting their tenants and turning their places into backpackers' accommodation."
Moore and Roden are also critical of the temporary nature of the government's plan, putting the homeless in short-term accommodation during the Olympics and then putting them back on the streets when it is all over. "This is really short-term stuff", Moore said. "There are 30,000 homeless people in Sydney, the number is growing every year and the government has no long-term solution. If a temporary increase in emergency accommodation is its only response, then that's simply unacceptable."
Roden points to a double standard: "The planning for the games has been underway since 1993. They've recognised officially that homelessness was going to be an issue but, unlike every other aspect of the games preparation, we've only seen any action very recently and that's been inadequate."
Roden is also concerned about what happens after the Olympics. "Where the political will to deal with this issue will come from, once the Games are out the way, I don't know", he said. "There needs to be extra funding for homeless services at state and federal level, but the political will just isn't there."
Homeless services are chronically overstretched. Emergency accommodation and "transitional" accommodation (for longer than six weeks) are always full. Roden estimates that for every one person assisted by an emergency housing service, one is turned away.
Cosmetic
Terry Bartholomew, a lecturer in forensic psychology at Deakin University's Melbourne campus and an expert in the field of homelessness, is even more scathing. He believes federal and state governments' policies on homelessness are largely "cosmetic".
"The national trend is to focus on emergency accommodation, getting people off the streets in the short-term, for between one day and six weeks", he told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly. "But emergency services are always full and so they use improper options to do so. They hire permanent rooms at backpackers, for instance, and then claim that placing young homeless people there for a few nights is a 'successful outcome'. And that pulls the numbers down.
"But they give little priority to transitional accommodation, there's just not enough of that, and there are two-year waiting lists for long-term public housing. This means that people just keep re-presenting for help each week."
Bartholomew also criticises the way the government collects its figures. "The government's figures are always low, they use the one which presents best. That may sound cynical, but it does seem to be the case."
In December, federal and state governments were embarrassed by new Australian Bureau of Statistics figures which showed that, on census night in 1996, 105,000 people were homeless. This compared with the figure provided by a $100,000 consultants' report of 45,000 homeless.
"It comes back to their definition", Bartholomew argues. "If you're put up for a month in a hostel, is that a successful outcome? No, you're still homeless. State and federal governments are trying to sweep the whole issue under the carpet and blame it on each other."
While Bartholomew doesn't believe that Sydney's more repressive approach to the homeless is a national trend, yet, he does point to the policies of cities like New York in the United States. "They've deliberately moved homeless people away from the tourist areas so that they can create a picture of their city which is actually an illusion."